With the advent of the internet and countless digital platforms, many enterprises and multi location businesses are investing in digital marketing and advertising campaigns to maintain consistent growth.
As any franchise owner knows, operating a successful enterprise business is one thing – but being able to duplicate the brand success across demographics is another challenge entirely.
As the franchising landscape gets more competitive day by day, enterprise business owners need to develop coherent franchise marketing tactics to effectively convey a unified brand message across locations and connect with their target audience.
With franchise marketing, however, everything from lead generation and content marketing to social media marketing and reputation management are more complicated than marketing a single-premise store.
When developing digital marketing strategies for franchises, there needs to be a balan
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, 360digitalz’s Director of Operations
Fragmented digital marketing strategies for franchises could result in misaligned priorities, mixed brand messages and an inaccurate audience-targeting approach. Together, these increase enterprise marketing costs without producing profitable results across entities.
So, how do you achieve and maintain brand consistency across your franchise network? Optimize your franchise digital marketing strategy and gain control of your market.
This franchise marketing guide explores the major challenges in franchise digital marketing and the best practices to help you structure coherent digital marketing strategies for franchises that propel maximum brand growth.
s your website stuck on the second, third or fourth page of search engine results pages (SERPs) despite your on-page SEO efforts? Your website user experience may be the problem.
Google has made its mission clear to make information universally accessible and provide online users with a high-quality on-page experience. And for a while now, Google has been using several search engine ranking signals, such as click-through rate (CTR), dwell time and bounce rate, to better rank web pages.
If page visitors land on your website and are not satisfied with their page experience, they will bounce away and Google might consider it an indication that your web page does not deliver value to online users, making it difficult to rank higher in search results.
After reaching peak traffic and searches from mobile devices, Google made website user experience even more important. In May 2020, Google announced a new Google update that will combine Core Web Vitals and previous UX-related search signals to provide a clear picture of a page’s user experience and determine issues that hinder online users from accessing a wealth of quality information on the web.
Google has identified six core ranking signals that will be part of this update:
Franchise marketing or enterprise marketing is the practice of using various marketing tactics, including commercial advertising, digital marketing, radio advertising and public relations, to raise brand awareness, maintain brand equity and drive revenue across franchisees.
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.
While traditional public relations and marketing methods may 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:
As long as your franchise has an online presence, your target audience will find you. But, more importantly, a trusted franchise marketing agency can help you connect with the right market segments and increase your profit margins as you expand your business.
o 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.
As enterprise businesses continue to expand, maintaining brand compliance and ensuring successful implementation of franchise marketing strategy across affiliates also become more challenging. Tim Clarke, Rize Reviews’ senior reputation manager, said that, inevitably, some businesses might not be on board with adopting an enterprise marketing strategy – more people involved always leads to more challenges.
To combat these challenges, the first step is creating a definitive enterprise marketing guide that tackles each franchise marketing hurdle and outlines the best practices in developing and launching a franchise marketing strategy.
User experience is a human-first approach to responsive web design that focuses on a user’s full interaction with a company, product or service. Put simply, user experience is an all-encompassing term that deals with user behavior and feeling when using a website or application.
User experience Google best practices promote improving the quality of user interaction with your website to create a rich web experience and assist page visitors with their online needs. You can achieve this by mastering what is user experience, understanding your target audience and optimizing your user experience design (UED).
According to Gibson, challenges can occur 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 franchisees. Some marketers, however, are not fully committed to implementing a local franchise digital marketing strategy. Additionally, some franchisees tend to depend solely on the enterprise business to handle their franchise marketing campaign.
Digital marketing for franchises requires the cooperation of all entities to achieve success. “It seems like it should be ‘cookie-cutter,’ but each location is often very different in its strategies, promos offered, even services offered,” said Lauren Holland, 360digitalz’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.
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.
Changes in digital marketing for franchises are often met with resistance from within the organization. As such, communication, alignment and collaboration are vital to avoid business fragmentation.
Start small and break down the silo mentality by:
If you’re unsure where or how to begin your enterprise marketing strategy development, a reputable franchise marketing agency could help you determine your marketing pain points and design a cohesive enterprise marketing guide that your franchisees can follow.
There’s a fine line between giving your franchisees creative freedom and ensuring brand consistency in your enterprise marketing strategy and collateral.
“When managing a franchise, you want to represent the company brand yet have unique content that sets you apart from the corporate pages,” said Alyssa Tear, 360digitalz’s organic social media senior manager.
Tear noted that it could be challenging when the franchisor does not have or provide unique content outside of what the corporate is posting. If a franchise location posts the same content as the corporate pages, there’s no reason for prospects to follow both the enterprise and local accounts.
Have a clear brand and content policy to ensure a consistent brand image and avoid confusing your target audience.
More importantly, don’t forget to localize your inbound marketing and outbound marketing strategies to allow a level of personalization of their franchise digital marketing approach. Establish a clear franchise marketing strategy guideline that each franchisee should follow while creating custom campaigns for each location.
A robust inbound marketing strategy and outbound marketing strategy are essential in attracting customers and potential franchisees and convincing them to take your desired action.
Implementing unfounded 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.
Do your market research and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to determine marketing opportunities and structure a tailored franchise marketing plan that is worth your investment.
With so many locations to keep track of, getting contact lists and monitoring the campaign success of each franchisee 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.
nvest 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 a franchise marketing agency to determine the best tools you can use to remain on top of your campaign progress across demographics.
Lead nurturing, or the process of developing and reinforcing customer relationships, is critical at every stage of the sales funnel. Without a solid lead nurturing process, it is difficult to build trust and convince prospects to make a purchase. For the franchisor, this could also mean a significant decrease in recruiting new franchisees.
Enterprise businesses that do not prioritize building customer relationships fail to move prospects down the sales funnel, build brand advocacy, optimize future campaigns and generate a return on investment (ROI).
Create your customer persona and get to know your target audience by launching targeted marketing strategies that promote brand communication and engagement.
Some tips:
Also, keep in mind the importance of location targeting when launching franchise advertising campaigns. Be sure your approach is appropriate for the service area or customer radius for that particular location. Advertising outside of a service area can affect the quality of the campaign, reduce conversions and waste your budget.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to achieve 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.
Review your overall brand strategy and lay out a concrete plan to encourage franchise loyalty and achieve your sales goals.
Your brand’s inbound marketing strategy 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.
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.
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.
Another key to achieving local search success is optimizing your Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business). Listing your different locations on Google allows you to verify your franchisees’ existence and authenticity and get targeted exposure. More importantly, Google Business Profile optimization increases your chances of ranking in Google’s coveted Local 3-Pack – the top three results that appear on local Search after the Google Ads and before the organic search results.
When it comes to social media marketing, enterprise business owners are faced with an important question: Should you maintain one social media page for your entire enterprise business or launch franchise social media marketing campaigns for each specific location?
Although broad marketing campaigns build your brand equity, localized social media marketing efforts sustain your brand, improve your franchise strategy efficiency and deliver profitable results. Organic social media marketing connects your business with targeted audience segments that are more receptive to your messaging.
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.
Targeted franchise advertising efforts create a better online experience for your prospects by making it easier 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.
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.
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.
Communicate your brand value, address customer needs and establish your thought-leadership brand with SEO-optimized content that resonates with your local market. Different content marketing materials, such as blog posts, white papers and infographics, facilitate the decision-making process of your prospects and allow them to make informed choices.
The more targeted your content marketing strategy, the higher your chances of nurturing franchise leads and driving conversions.
Conversion rate optimization centers on improving your website elements to provide the best possible brand experience. From your CTAs and form fields to your content and web 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.
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.
Video marketing is a popular brand strategy that businesses of all types and sizes use to communicate their brand message. High-quality video content drives website traffic and conversions. Additionally, optimized video placement and video type enhance the user’s browsing experience.
Digital marketing for franchises doesn’t stop at converting customers. As an enterprise business owner, you must actively engage with your target audience to boost your retention rate and successfully build a community of brand advocates.
Customer retention programs strengthen your word-of-mouth marketing efforts, reduce customer churn rate and generate a better bottom line.
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.
SMS marketing is a key component of an effective outbound marketing strategy. It facilitates seamless customer communications, motivates customers to connect your brand and increases feedback and reviews.
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.
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 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.
Customer reviews have a big 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.
Maintaining brand consistency demands continuous efforts 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.
“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.
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.
Since the enterprise digital marketing campaign’s launch in 2020, our franchise marketing agency has generated record-high results for the company:
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:
The main goal was to build strong brand equity for the whole enterprise business and generate 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 big growth in the coming years.
Now that most businesses and organizations operate in the digital marketplace, enterprise digital marketing is the best way forward. Successful franchises invest in a long-proven franchise marketing strategy to scale online growth and drive more conversions.
Franchise marketing, like other brand marketing systems, however, is complex and intricate. And according to Tear, it requires a strong balance of the corporate brand image and each location’s unique brand voice.
Understanding the allowances for individual expressions of the franchisee in relation to the parent company is critical to improving the quality of your campaigns and generating valuable conversions. More importantly, there is no templated marketing approach for each location. You need a specific franchise marketing strategy based on each entity’s budget, service offerings, seasonality and level of competition to get the most value from your partnerships and enterprise digital marketing investment.
Build a strategic enterprise marketing management system and catapult your business’s digital success!
360digitalz Internet Marketing Agency works closely with your enterprise business and franchisees to set a consistent approach across all digital marketing efforts. Schedule a consultation with us to learn more about our franchise marketing services.
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