Franchising is all about consistency, but consistency is a two-way street.
While franchisors must create a profitable brand and business model that can be easily replicated, franchisees must help maintain brand reputation in order for it to retain its value.
Few things are worse for franchisors than franchisees who damage public perception of their brand. Yet protecting against this is increasingly difficult in today’s digital world.
Forty-two percent of franchise professionals no longer feel traditional marketing channels, including advertising, direct marketing and public relations, are worth the investment.
The question now is: How do can franchisors and franchisees work together to create a single cohesive marketing strategy?
To answer that question we worked with six leading organizations, in a variety of marketing fields, to teach you everything you need to know to help your franchise marketing. From social to email and A/B testing, this guide will cover everything all strategies from the lens of a franchise business model.
Top 3 Franchise Marketing Trends You Should Watch in 2022
1. We live in a “near me” world
Consumers today live in a “near me” search world, where almost anything they want is available from a nearby business. That’s why “near me” searches are up 900% in recent years. For a multi-location business, understanding “near me” search behavior is critical for providing locally relevant content and campaigns that drive greater engagement and sales.
Moreover, the “near me” search is no longer just about finding a place. It’s now about finding a specific thing, in a specific area, and in a specific period of time. If people are searching for something near them, that’s a pretty strong signal of intent and a not-to-miss opportunity for a brand to win a customer.
2. Franchise digital marketing effectiveness increased in 2021
New consumer behaviors such as online shopping booms, shifts in brand loyalty, and in-home consumption mean that media options that worked in the past are no longer as effective as in previous years. So where have marketers been investing?
With so many people working from home or being laid off, out-of-home advertising such as billboards and radio ads dropped suddenly; print advertising also fell .
Meanwhile, in-home media usage went up. TV viewership has climbed, but digital consumption has increased even more: use of social platforms and streaming services has risen almost everywhere. Seeing that, marketers have adapted to consumers, which means prioritizing digital activities.
In general, marketers have been reducing their budgets for traditional advertising while increasing expenditures on digital marketing. In 2021, CMOs said that their digital budgets grew by 14.3%, relative to the past 12 months.
3. Location-based ads are blooming
Just about 2 years ago, the majority of franchise-focused marketing utilized a top-down approach: brands sprayed TV, radio, and outdoor advertising into the market and waited for the strength of the brand’s campaign to reach the local level and impact sales onsite. However, the reality is 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. But there isn’t an easy way to personalize offers at scale. And this is where location-based campaigns on paid social can change the game.
Location-based advertising or geofencing is a must for small locations that are focused on a precise region or district. This tactic allows you to create a “fence” based on coordinates. You can choose its radius and determine the distance around your store where users would get your messages. For instance, you could target people who are walking near a restaurant during lunch hours.
The Three Pillars of Franchise Marketing
Franchise marketing may sound easy, but it’s actually difficult in practice, both at the corporate level and for individual franchisees. It’s a complex, three-fold game with multiple interconnected levels needed to succeed: brand marketing, franchise development, and local marketing.
The day-to-day challenge of multi-location marketing is maintaining brand consistency while providing flexibility to reach individual local goals. Let’s zoom in on each area and outline the tactics that will impact your bottom line.
Brand Marketing
Goal: Promote franchise nationally to drive more brand awareness
When it comes to a franchise’s assets, brand recognition is one of the most important in its arsenal. It is crucial not only to develop a great recognizable brand but also to enforce all of your franchisees’ adherence to it.
Once developed, it’s good to keep brand assets in one place and share them with all franchisees and your corporate team.
Franchise Development
Goal: Attract and engage franchisee prospects to convert them into buying new franchise units
Before franchisees get customers, the franchise must attract franchisees. Even though everything has changed since Covid struck, the motivations for buying a franchise haven’t changed.
People who buy franchises want to make money. That means you need to assure them your franchise concept will provide them the return they’re looking for. They want to lower the risk of owning a business. So the next step is to convince them that owning your franchise carries a low chance of fiasco.
They don’t want to be failures. To prevent their feeling isolated, develop a positive and supportive company culture – an environment that potential franchisees will want to be a part of.
Local Marketing
Goal: Market to end-consumers to get them to buy products/services from franchisees
The near-total shutdown of travel and other pandemic restrictions has made local neighborhoods much more important. Many community social-media pages and forums have been created to connect people with local volunteers and mutual-aid groups. As McKinsey’s ethnographic research shows, supporting familiar, local businesses has become vital to many Americans, driven in part by greater confidence in their quality and safety.
As a result, franchises have a chance to benefit from a growing sense of localism by providing a more granular presence at scale. However, franchise local marketing can be tough because it requires ongoing collaboration between franchisees and franchisors. It’s a delicate balancing act of preserving a brand’s reputation while allowing franchisees to customize their strategies.
To reap the benefits, franchisors need to build out a local marketing strategy that includes branding guidelines, a clear infrastructure, training and support programs, and an effective roadmap for working with marketing channels.
Social Media Marketing Tips for Franchisors
The key for franchisors is to strike the right balance between protecting their brands while empowering franchisees to engage with customers and share relevant content.
Though it may make sense to give individual franchisees permission to build their own social presence, we’ve all seen situations where poor social media experiences snowball and the entire brand suffers.
If a customer receives just one poor social experience from one of your franchisees, that person is 50% more likely to boycott your brand entirely.
Create Detailed Policies
A detailed social media policy will help franchisors avoid issues before they’re created. Detailed social policies are good for:
- Setting expectations for appropriate and inappropriate behavior online
- Guiding franchisees on social media strategy
- Protecting the franchisor from legal issues given a social media crises
Create Customizable Templates
One of the biggest issues we see at Sprout Social is that individual locations want to share content relevant to their brand, but the brands don’t necessarily want to give them permission to share whatever they like.
If the franchisor creates templates that can be customized by the franchisee, those social posts created from the templates will be franchisor-approved and more relevant by location.
One way to do this is with a joint media library. Asset libraries allow franchisors to create a digital repository of pre-approved content that can then be shared to the franchisees.
Franchisees can either directly share those pieces of content or leverage image editors to make small tweaks that resonate with their specific audience.
Use Approval-Based Message Flows
Leverage social media tools that require final approval before sending a message to your social networks so nothing unsavory is posted. This is key as bad customer service is one of the key reasons a customer would call you out on social.
Social Media Marketing Tips for Franchisees
One reason franchisors keep all of their marketing budget at the corporate level is that they may not fully trust the franchisees to know how to market their location. It’s can be a fair point as not all franchise investors have a significant marketing background.
Keep these tips in mind once you get access to a budget to start marketing on social.
Maintain Your Presence
If you’d like to create your own social profiles then you need to ensure they are kept up to date with relevant content. Going to a company website only to find the most recent post is from years ago can be a major turnoff for your potential customers.
Post the Right Content
Make sure you’re creating content that your audience engages with. If you’re not sure where to start, check out this chart below with brand actions on social that prompt consumers to purchase.
Note that just because offering promotions helps doesn’t mean that’s all you should share. Brand-building lifestyle content, customer stories and company news all help to build affinity with your audiences.
Share creative and content assets from corporate.
Another huge need in the world of franchise email marketing? Maintaining your brand identity and creating a seamless customer experience. So be sure to find an ESP (email service provider) that allows you to share creative assets—like logos, images, and templates—with one, 50, or all of your sub-accounts to ensure a consistent experience across the board. Bonus points if the ESP lets you lock down certain parts of the design to give you total control over what end users can and can’t edit, making it easy for them to stay true to your brand.
Keep an eye on local and global analytics.
It’s not necessarily a must, but it’s definitely a nice-to-have: A homepage dashboard allows you to see what’s happening across all sub-accounts and drill into individual sends with ease. The at-a-glance view of most recent activity and results lets you quickly identify which teams are nailing it and uncover the ones that could use a little help.
Social Media KPIs for Franchises
Before you dive right into creating a social media presence it’s importance to decide what will constitute success. This will help you decide whether your marketing efforts are worth the time.
Here are a few ideas for KPIs to get you started!
- Response Rate: The number of responses, represented as a percentage, to messages that were identified as appearing to warrant a response. Your response rate can further be broken down by the day of the week or hour of the day to see when you’re most and least responsive.
- Average Response Time: The average amount of time it took for you to respond to messages within the specified date range. Data from a recent Sprout Social Index shows that the average response time for brands in the retail industry is 11.3 hours.
- Engagement: Total number of times a user interacted with a Tweet. The interactions include clicks anywhere on the Tweet, retweets, replies, follows, likes, links, cards, hashtags, embedded media, username or profile photo.
- Follower Count: The total number of Twitter followers on the last day of the reporting period.
- Organic Impressions: Number of times a user was served your Tweets in their timelines or search results on Twitter. Total does not include paid Tweets.
Still not sure where to start when creating goals and KPIs? Try basing your goals off of our recent data on the biggest goals for social marketers.
Takeaways
The franchising boom is on the horizon, so now is the best time to invest in digital marketing to make your franchise more attractive to investors, franchisees, and customers. The first step on your roadmap should be crafting a clear marketing strategy and a plan for its smooth execution.
Franchise marketing stands on three pillars, which are brand marketing, franchise development, and local marketing. Each pillar aims for different results and can be executed through distinct channels. Corporate tactics can be executed within HQ, while local marketing implies contributions from both franchisors and franchisees. In short, the best franchise marketing combo is brand-directed, locally perfected.
To easily manage your digital marketing across your locations, look for an all-in-one platform that can save you tons of time and effort.
