Papa John's Needs a Better Online Ingredient!

If you have watched your television over the past few months, you have seen Papa John's Founder John Schnatter delivering his pizza's all over the country. In Papa John's latest press stunt they were in Chicago setting a world record for the world's highest pizza delivery at more than 1,300 feet. Schnatter planned on delivering more than 100 slices of pizza to the ledge at the Skydeck Chicago.

This is truly a great promotion. They have blended radio appearances, press releases, a well crafted television campaign, @PJsidekicks tweet their upcoming locations, and a great story that is on every Papa John's Box Top.

Papa John's is out and about, but they are missing a key online marketing ingredient... LOCAL MARKETING! Papa John's set up is similar to many existing companies that look for expanded growth in the food industry. They have corporate owned locations and franchised locations all across the country. When you try to take a national product and spread it across corporate budgets and then down to the franchise level some pieces get lost.

Today more than ever the complexities of the local space can also play a large role in how a company manages listings across all of their stores. Let's start off with the first piece.

Papa John's corporate headquarters is located in Louisville Kentucky. If you search for pizza delivery in Google you will see that Papa John's is nowhere to be found in the Google One Box. You can find Boombozz Pizza and their big rival Pizza Hut. Before @PJSidekicks writes another tweet they should jump onto Google and claim their free listing. Miriam Ellis posted a great article on "How to Claim Your Google Maps Listing". Adding your listing to Google Maps isn't that complex, especially utilizing a data file or bulk uploads. The complexity comes when the listing has already been claimed.

Franchisee's take pride in their stores and want to spread the word. Aside from Google having a "claim your listing" so does every other online directory out there. A franchisee might claim a listing on Yelp, Merchantcircle.com, Yellowpages.com, superpages.com and a slew of other locally driven sites. This adds to the complexity and the confusion of the brand. If a franchisee accidently adds a listing that says Papa John Pizza, or Papa John's of Maryland LLC. and then you multiply this mistake by hundreds of owners then you have a local oil spill to clean up! Papa John's needs to implement a top down system to ensure each franchisee is providing the correct corporate branding or let the franchisor take control.

In Papa John's case you can find

1. Keyword insertion and messaging are extremely important - of the over 3,000 listings for Papa John's only about one third are populated with keyword information. If someone is searching for a thin crust or specialty pizza Papa John's might not be found in the local directories.
2. Hours of operation, parking and credit cards accepted should all be listed direct from the Franchisee or the corporation. Too often Google is crawling a third party provider site and displaying wrong information.
3. Last on the list is tying the search campaign into their current promotional "papasroadtrip.com" campaign. At the time of writing this article I searched for keywords like "papa's camaro contest" and "papasroadtrip.com". They are displaying top organically, but it wouldn't hurt them to bid on promotional terms for extra emphasis on the campaign.

It doesn't look like Papa John Schnatter has made it to Baltimore but, if and when he does, he is more than welcome to visit my home and I'll do a little local marketing for a Papa's Thin Crust Hawaiian Pizza. Better online ingredients makes a better online search experience.