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Defining Franchise Marketing
Navigating the Challenges of Franchise Marketing
The Creativals Enterprise Sales Growth Formula:
- Attract New Business – Organic Strategy
- Attract New Business – Paid Channels
- Convert Leads into Customers
- Interact with Customers
- Manage Your Brand
Case Study: Creativals' Commitment to Page Experience
Digital Marketing for Franchises: Your Complete Guide by Creativals
With the rise of the internet and countless digital platforms, businesses of all sizes, including multi-location enterprises and franchises, are investing heavily in digital marketing and advertising campaigns to drive consistent growth.
Maintaining consistent brand identity and performance across multiple locations is a unique challenge for franchise businesses.
As the competitive landscape evolves, franchise owners need to develop a cohesive digital marketing strategy to effectively convey a unified brand message and connect with their target audience.
In This Guide
Attract New Business – Organic Strategy
Attract New Business – Paid Channels
Convert Leads Into Customers
Interact With Customers
Manage Your Brand
Franchise marketing, however, is far more complex than marketing a single-location store. Everything from lead generation and content marketing to social media marketing and reputation management requires a strategic and coordinated approach.
Enterprise Sales Growth Formula
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving success in business marketing. As an enterprise business owner, you need to develop a robust franchise strategy tailored to various local areas and multiple levels of your sales funnel to grow your business.
Marketing strategy development is the first and most crucial step in franchise marketing. With the right enterprise sales growth formula, you can solidify your brand presence in this competitive landscape and enter new markets to grow your enterprise business.
Key Components of Successful Franchise Marketing: A Creativals Perspective
Attract New Business - Organic Strategy
Your brand’s inbound marketing and franchise lead generation tactics are critical in attracting qualified franchise leads.
Organic inbound marketing strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing, allow you to maintain a robust digital presence and generate a steady stream of franchise leads across demographics.
Franchise SEO
Digital marketing success requires hard work upfront to drive long-term gains, beginning with your franchise SEO strategy. A data-driven SEO tactic allows you to experiment with various search optimization tactics and determine which strategies will work best for your corporate account and which methods could be duplicated across the franchisees.
Expand Your Service Locations with a Standard SEO Practice
- Maintain One Enterprise SEO Website
- Follow Google’s Best Practices
- Perform Regular Website Audits
- Prioritize Mobile Optimization
Local SEO
To ensure each franchisee stands out in the local market, it is not enough that your main website ranks high on your target search terms. You need to double down on your local SEO efforts to boost your local visibility, drive targeted customers to your franchise locations and increase your sales revenue.
Improve Your Local SEO Strategy
- Build Out Location Pages
- Localize Keyword Targeting Approach
- Design Custom Landing Pages
- Enable Geolocation
Google Business Profile Optimization
A crucial aspect of local search success is optimizing your Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business). Listing your different franchise locations on Google verifies their existence and authenticity, increasing your chances of ranking in the coveted “Local 3-Pack” – the top three results that appear on local search after Google Ads.
Optimize Your Google Business Profile Listing
- Claim and Verify Your Google Business Profile Listings
- Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
- Follow Google Best Practices
- Maintain a Positive Online Reputation
- Keep Track of Your GMB Performance
- Leverage Google Business Profile Features
Organic Social Media Marketing
When it comes to social media marketing, enterprise business owners face a critical decision: Should you maintain one social media page for your entire enterprise or launch franchise-specific social media campaigns for each location?
While broad franchise marketing strategies build brand equity, localized social media marketing sustains your brand, improves your franchise strategy efficiency, and delivers profitable results. Organic social media marketing connects your business with targeted audience segments that are more receptive to your messaging.
Boost Your Social Media Marketing Results
- Create a Clear Branding Guideline
- Ensure Quick Response Time to Messages and Comments
- Post Consistently on All Profiles
- Utilize a Mix of Promotional, Lifestyle, and Valuable Content
- Localize Social Media Marketing Content
Attract New Business - Paid Channels
Franchise advertising offers a faster way to grow your franchise leads across locations. Location-specific advertising campaigns not only increase your brand reach but also boost your conversion value and revenue.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Paid franchise advertising efforts create a better online experience for your prospects by making it easier for them to find the location of your business that is most convenient for them. Additionally, PPC advertising provides your brand with instant online visibility and insightful results that you can use to boost the performance of each location.
Generate Profitable PPC Results
- Perform Specific Competitor Research for Each Location
- Use a Specific Geo List
- Be Specific About Service Offerings
- Apply General Findings Between Locations
- Use the Right Ad Types and Formats
- Launch Location-Specific Advertising Campaigns
- Leverage the Right Tools
- Build Out Unique Landing Pages
- Track Campaign Performance
- Develop Separate Cost Per Click (CPC) and Budget Recommendations
Paid Social Media Advertising
Paid social media is one of the simplest ways to get your message in front of qualified franchise leads, improve local brand awareness, drive targeted website traffic and get more appointment bookings, store visits, page post engagements or sales for a particular location.
Enhance Your Paid Social Media Campaigns
- Define Your Franchise Advertising Goals and Budget
- Localize Your Advertising Message
- Perform A/B Tests
- Optimize Ad Format and Location Targeting
- Measure Campaign Success for Each Location
Convert Leads Into Customers
Once you have generated franchise leads, the next step is to convert those leads into paying customers. It’s crucial to implement the right marketing strategy in this phase to create a profitable sales funnel and drive maximum conversions.
Ineffective conversion tactics result in higher bounce rates, missed sales opportunities and wasted money and effort.
Content Writing
Creativals believes in crafting compelling content that resonates with your target audience and establishes your brand as a thought leader in your industry. We use SEO-optimized content, such as blog posts, white papers, and infographics, to address customer needs and guide prospects through the decision-making process.
Develop Content That Effectively Converts Leads into Customers
- Research Your Audience
- Write for Different Buyer Personas
- Localize Your Content Topics
- Use Geo-Specific Keywords
- Create Engaging, Informative, and Relevant Content
- Use Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization centers on improving your website elements to provide the best possible brand experience. From CTAs and form fields to your content and design, you must ensure all site elements are designed and optimized with SEO best practices and your target audience in mind to scale your enterprise business. Performing conversion rate optimization leads to a significant increase in your bottom line.
Increase Your Conversion Value
- Run Regular CRO Audits
- Optimize Website Structure
- Prioritize Page Experience
- Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
- Use Clear CTAs
- Track Campaign Metrics
Web Design & Development
One of the biggest challenges in designing and managing a website for multi-location businesses is how to get each location’s unique information to your prospects as efficiently as possible. To convert more website visitors into paying customers, build out location pages and optimize your navigation so website visitors and search bots can easily navigate your site.
Maximize Your Website Conversions
- Optimize for the Google Page Experience Update
- Make Your Website ADA Compliant
- Use Location-Based URLs (Ensure Each Location Page Has Complete NAP Information – name, address, and phone number)
- Maintain Brand Consistency
- Build Multi-Location Landing Pages
- Design Your Navigation Structure for Growth
- Publish Geographically-Targeted Content
Video Production
Video marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to communicate their brand message and connect with their audience. High-quality video content drives website traffic and conversions. Additionally, optimized video placement and diverse video formats enhance the user’s browsing experience.
Convince Prospects to Take Action Using Videos
- Keep the Overarching Design Elements of the Brand
- Communicate Your Brand Messages or Core Values
- Continuously Explore New Ways to Deliver Your Message
- Add Clickable Links
- Customize Your Thumbnails
- Make Your Video Concise and Entertaining
Interact With Customers
Digital marketing for franchisees doesn’t stop at converting customers. As an enterprise business owner, you must actively engage with your target audience to boost brand retention rates and successfully build a community of brand advocates.
Customer retention programs strengthen your word-of-mouth marketing efforts, reduce customer churn rates, and generate a better bottom line
Social Media Management
Leverage social media channels to boost your local SEO efforts and help customers get to know your unique locations. Active social media management allows you to provide customers with an easier and more convenient way to access your brand resources and raise their concerns.
Strengthen Your Social Media Presence
- Regularly Post Relevant, Localized Content
- Engage With Followers Across Social Media Channels
- Maintain Brand Consistency
- Monitor All Your Social Media Accounts
- Leverage Various Content Types (i.e., Videos, Images, Texts, etc.)
- Create Consistent Handles
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is an essential component of an effective outbound marketing strategy. It facilitates seamless customer communications, motivates customers to connect with your brand and increases feedback and reviews
Nurture Healthy Client Relationships Through SMS Marketing
- Use Automation Software
- Build Your Contact List
- Route Messages to Appropriate Account Managers
- Send Personalized Mass Messages
- Request Online Reviews
Email Marketing
Use email marketing to reach customers in real-time, communicate in-depth, relevant information and launch personalized campaigns. Incorporating email campaigns in your ongoing marketing strategy is also an excellent way to collect feedback, launch surveys and timely campaigns and generate traffic to your website.
Improve Your Email Campaign Performance
- Perform Campaign Audits
- Automate Drip Campaigns
- Manage Your Email List
- Build Local Landing Pages
- Create Template Designs
- Use Clear, Engaging CTAs
- Test Email Marketing Campaigns
- Track Analytics
Manage Your Brand
Ongoing brand management is critical to ensure all franchise digital marketing efforts align with your enterprise business’s branding. Strategic brand management tactics include handling both noticeable and intangible aspects of the business, including brand message, marketing materials and brand offerings, to create and reinforce strong brand identity.
Social Media Management
Social media platforms offer lucrative opportunities to grow your enterprise business and connect your brand with targeted communities. By maintaining a robust social media management strategy, you ensure your social media pages stay top of mind with prospects and customers.
“When developing digital marketing strategies for franchises, there needs to be a balance between the marketing efforts for the parent company (franchisor) and the visibility of individual locations (franchisees). If individual locations do not have a robust brand strategy that aligns with the enterprise marketing plan, franchisees will not be visible in the markets they serve.”
- Jimi Gibson, Director of Operations at Creativals
Fragmented digital marketing strategies for franchises can lead to misaligned priorities, mixed brand messages, and inaccurate audience targeting. These inconsistencies increase enterprise marketing costs without guaranteeing profitable results across all locations.
So, how can you achieve and maintain brand consistency across your franchise network? Creativals’ comprehensive guide explores the major challenges in franchise digital marketing and provides best practices to help you structure coherent strategies that drive maximum brand growth and deliver exceptional results.
What is Franchise Marketing?
Franchise marketing, or enterprise marketing, is the practice of using various marketing tactics, including commercial advertising, digital marketing, radio advertising, and digital PR, to raise brand awareness, maintain brand equity and drive revenue across franchises.
With the growth of technology and the increasing number of consumers and stakeholders relying on digital platforms to gather information and find local businesses, the majority of multi-location businesses have shifted their focus to digital marketing and franchise advertising to strengthen their enterprise marketing system and support franchise development.
Does your enterprise business follow a detailed, data-driven franchise marketing guide to drive your enterprise business’s online marketing efforts? Learn the ropes of online marketing for franchises to reach interested franchise leads and achieve your enterprise marketing management goals.
Quick Definition of Terms
Enterprise: A company or organization that consists of 250 or more employees working together to achieve a common goal. An enterprise business supports a growing network of affiliates, local marketers, and franchisees.
Franchise: A strategic partnership between a franchisor and franchisee, wherein the franchisee gains access to the franchisor’s business system in exchange for money or personal labor.
Franchisor: The parent company that sells the right to use its brand name and business system.
Franchisee: An entity that buys the right to sell the franchisor’s products or services under an existing business model and trademarks.
Franchising: A form of marketing and distribution in which the franchisor grants the franchisee the right to use its business system (i.e., branding, trademarks, etc.) in selling a product or service. Franchisees are bound to a partnership agreement with the franchisor for a defined period.
Why Does Enterprise Digital Marketing Matter?
While traditional marketing methods might bring in a trickle of deals for your enterprise business, enterprise digital marketing offers an easier way to facilitate enterprise marketing management, reach a global marketplace, and improve your local marketing efforts.
Online marketing for franchises allows you to:
- Become more accessible to your target audience
- Track the progress of your marketing efforts
- Leverage various digital platforms to achieve goals
- Generate targeted franchise leads
- Personalize audience experiences
- Increase brand awareness
- Create and maintain brand equity
- Implement strategic budgeting
- Launch franchise advertising campaigns faster
- Gather advanced campaign analytics
- Facilitate 24/7 local marketing
- Save time, money, and resources
As long as your franchise has an online presence, your target audience will find you. But, more importantly, a trusted franchise marketing agency like Creativals can help you connect with the right market segments and increase your profit margins as you expand your business.
Tackle Your Franchise Marketing Hurdles Head On and Ensure Your Brand's Continued Expansion
No matter the size of your enterprise business, a strong franchise lead generation and marketing strategy is key to build your customer base and drive sales and revenue.
Digital marketing for franchises, however, is not an easy task. The enterprise digital marketing realm is plagued with new and recurring challenges that, when left unresolved, can not only hinder your brand’s online growth but also damage your enterprise business’s reputation.
Franchise strategy success requires hands-on management and planning to overcome these marketing challenges. More importantly, you must effectively split your time and effort between executing an enterprise marketing plan and supporting individual franchisees to employ a winning brand strategy that expands your domestic market.
Franchise Marketing Challenges and Solutions: A Creativals Perspective
As enterprise businesses expand, maintaining brand compliance and ensuring the successful implementation of franchise marketing strategies across affiliates becomes a significant challenge. Often, different stakeholders within the franchise system have varying priorities and approaches to marketing, leading to inconsistencies and potential roadblocks.
To address these challenges, Creativals recommends creating a comprehensive enterprise marketing guide that tackles each franchise marketing hurdle head-on and outlines best practices for developing and launching a successful franchise marketing strategy.
6 Biggest Enterprise Marketing Hurdles and How To Overcome Them:
1
Lack of Understanding of Franchise Marketing Demands
According to Gibson, challenges can arise when the balance between leveraging the power of the franchisor and managing each location is not achieved.
Franchisors take the lead on developing and executing a marketing strategy to promote the entire brand and ensure consistent messaging and brand offers across franchises. Some marketers, however, are not fully committed to implementing a local franchise digital marketing strategy. Additionally, some franchisees tend to rely solely on the enterprise business to handle their franchise marketing campaigns.
SOLUTION
Digital marketing for franchises requires the cooperation of all entities to achieve success. “It seems like it should be cookie-cutter, but each franchise location is often very different in its strategies, promos offered, even services offered,” said Lauren Holland, Thrive’s PPC Manager.
Don’t try to be a jack of all trades. Use the power of digital marketing to educate existing and potential franchisees about the importance of developing local marketing strategies to provide a personalized brand experience and keep franchise leads warm throughout the process.
2
Incoherent Goals and Strategies
One of the most common problems franchises face is the lack of a unified goal and approach to franchise marketing. When a franchisor and its franchisees have different priorities and franchise lead generation and conversion tactics, this could lead to brand inconsistencies that result in poor market perception, franchise marketing plan inefficiencies and, worse, financial loss.
SOLUTION
Changes in the digital marketing landscape often meet with resistance within franchise organizations. To avoid fragmentation, communication, alignment, and collaboration are paramount.
Creativals recommends a phased approach:
Establish Shared Vision:
- Define a unified vision for the entire enterprise business.
- Set ambitious yet attainable goals that benefit the entire organization.
Develop a Standardized Marketing Guide:
- Create a comprehensive guide that clearly outlines the “must-haves” (brand guidelines, messaging) and “may-haves” (local adaptations) for all franchise marketing activities.
Leverage Collaboration Tools:
- Implement communication and project management tools to facilitate information sharing and collaboration between the franchisor and franchisees.
If you’re unsure where to begin, Creativals can help you identify your marketing pain points and develop a cohesive enterprise marketing guide that your franchisees can easily follow.
3
Creating Content With Consistency and Differentiators
There’s a fine line between empowering franchisees with creative freedom and ensuring brand consistency across your enterprise marketing strategy.
As Alyssa Tear, Creativals’ Organic Social Media Senior Manager, points out, “When managing a franchise, you want to represent the company brand while also creating unique content that sets you apart from the corporate pages.”
This becomes challenging when franchisors don’t provide unique content beyond corporate-level messaging. If a franchise location mirrors the corporate content, there’s little incentive for prospects to follow both accounts.
SOLUTION
- Developing a Clear Brand and Content Policy: This ensures a consistent brand image and avoids confusing your target audience.
- Prioritizing Localized Content: Encourage franchisees to incorporate local flavor and insights into their marketing efforts while maintaining brand consistency.
- Establishing a Clear Franchise Marketing Strategy Guideline: This document should outline the expectations for each franchisee when creating custom campaigns for their local location.
By following these guidelines, franchisees can create engaging, locally relevant content while upholding the overall brand identity and ensuring brand consistency across the entire franchise network.
4
Inappropriate Outbound and Inbound Marketing Strategy
A robust inbound and outbound marketing strategy is essential in attracting customers and potential franchisees and convincing them to take your desired action.
Implementing unfunded outbound marketing strategy and inbound marketing campaigns, however, could ruin your brand image and fail to target your desired consumers.
Unoptimized content marketing efforts reduce your brand’s local search visibility. Additionally, the lack of personalized customer outreach campaigns can make potential customers feel undervalued and drive them away.
Quick Definition of Terms
Inbound Marketing: A brand strategy that involves creating and distributing marketing materials that draw more people into your website.
Examples: webinars, video marketing, topical blogs, social media marketing.
Outbound Marketing: A marketing strategy centered on proactively reaching out to prospects to move them down the conversion funnel.
Examples: email marketing, direct mail, event sponsorships, public relations.
SOLUTION
Do your market research and conduct a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) to determine marketing opportunities and structure a tailored franchise marketing plan that is worth your investment.
5
Insufficient Data
With so many locations to keep track of, getting contact lists and monitoring the campaign success of each franchise can be a challenge. Insufficient data exposes franchises to the risk of spending their marketing budget on costly inbound marketing and outbound marketing campaigns that are ineffective for the enterprise business.
SOLUTION
Invest in advanced tracking and reporting tools that allow you to customize the metrics and show the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for each franchise advertising and marketing campaign. CallRail, for one, enables you to separate phone numbers per source and listen to calls to determine the lead quality.
Using the right tools, you can keep track of your campaign progress and gather advanced analytics to direct your franchise digital marketing efforts. Be sure to consult with franchise marketing agencies to determine the best tools you can use to remain on top of your campaign progress across demographics.
6
Lackluster Franchise Leads
Lead nurturing is a critical component of any successful sales funnel. Without a robust lead nurturing process, it becomes difficult to build trust and convince prospects to take the next step. For the franchisor, this could also translate into a significant decrease in recruiting new franchisees.
Enterprise businesses that neglect to prioritize building customer relationships fail to effectively move prospects down the sales funnel, build brand advocacy, optimize future campaigns, and generate a strong return on investment (ROI).
SOLUTION
Creativals recommends creating detailed customer personas to understand your target audience and launching targeted marketing strategies that promote brand communication and engagement.
Some key tips include:
- Optimizing Google My Business listings across all locations.
- Prioritizing reputation management.
- Developing a smart customer conversion and retention program.
- Providing exceptional customer service across all digital platforms.
- Maintaining active client communication across digital channels.
- Investing in local marketing efforts, such as content marketing and social media brand management.
Remember, location targeting is crucial when launching franchise advertising campaigns. Ensure your approach is tailored to the specific service area or customer radius for each location. Advertising outside of a service area can negatively impact campaign quality, reduce conversions, and waste your budget.
Build a Better Social Media Presence
- Audit Existing Social Media Strategy
- Keep Your Social Media Pages Active
- Engage With Followers
- Track and Analyze Campaign Metrics
- Use Social Media Management Tools
- Grow Social Reach
Reputation Management
Customer reviews have a significant influence on your brand’s reputation and online success. Through hands-on online reputation management, you gain control of your brand perception and increase the level of trust in your enterprise business.
Protect Your Brand Image With Proven Strategies
- Ensure All Listings Are Accurate and Up-to-Date
- Require All Locations To Ask for Reviews
- Leverage Reputation Management Software
- Develop an Active Review Response Tactic
- Report on Reviews by Market, Region and Location
- Schedule Campaigns by Location
Branding Consistency
Maintaining brand consistency demands continuous effort from all franchisees. From the tone of voice and graphic elements to the brand message, it is vital that franchisors establish clear guidelines to build brand authority, trust and loyalty
Maintain Brand Consistency Across Channels
- Create Clear Brand and Content Policies
- Communicate With All Entities
- Execute Consistent Messaging
- Create a Positive Image
- Use Caution When Rebranding
Foster Trust Among Your Target Audience
“Brand consistency across locations is maintained through close adherence to a corporate style guide and understanding the voice of the brand,” said Gibson.
Depending on the organization, these standards may be less defined. As such, it is crucial to understand that each business is at a different stage in its growth and history with digital marketing. Aim to understand the specific financial goals and timeframe desired to reach those goals.
How Digital Marketing Helped a Multi-Location Business Improve Its Brand Presence Across 22 Locations in the U.S.
A multi-location restoration and reconstruction firm serving more than 22 locations in the United States needed help in developing a clear-cut enterprise marketing plan that would bolster its brand awareness, drive more franchise leads and improve its local rankings across all target demographics.
For this client, a competitive market meant that hands-on enterprise marketing management was key to adapt successfully to the changing face of the business environment and take advantage of growth opportunities that the digital marketplace has to offer.
THE RESULTS:
Since the enterprise digital marketing campaign’s launch in 2020, our franchise marketing agency has generated record-high results for the company:
+93.5%
Organic Search Traffic (Year-Over-Year)
+295.7%
Top 5 Keyword Rankings
+207.4%
Monthly Traffic
+89.2%
Conversion Rate
-62.5%
Cost-Per-Conversion
+207.4%
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The Creativals Solution: Elevating Your Franchise Marketing
To meet the firm’s expectations and achieve its enterprise marketing goals, our franchise marketing agency formulated a franchise marketing plan focused on optimizing the firm’s local search performance through:
- Local SEO
- Google Business Profile optimization
- Local franchise advertising
- Social media paid advertising
- Reputation management
The main goal was to build strong brand equity for the entire enterprise business andgenerate profitable results across locations. With a greater focus on improving the company’s franchise marketing plan to target new locations and launch geo-specific advertising campaigns, this multi-location restoration and reconstruction firm is poised for significant growth in the coming years.
Develop an Impactful Brand That Resonates with Your Target Audience
In today’s digital world, online presence is paramount. Successful franchises invest in a robust franchise marketing strategy to scale online growth and drive conversions.
Franchise marketing, much like other brand marketing systems, is inherently complex. Striking the right balance between corporate brand identity and the unique voice of each location is key.
Understanding the allowances for individual expressions within the brand voice is critical to improving the quality of your campaigns and generating valuable conversions. It’s important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all template for franchise marketing. Each entity’s budget, service offerings, seasonality, and level of competition will dictate the most franchisees to establish a consistent approach across all digital marketing efforts.
Schedule a consultation with us to learn more about our franchise marketing services 1 and unleash your brand’s full potential.
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