Whether you’re a small fish running a franchise store, or a fisherman pulling strings across multiple regions, you have a part to play in franchise marketing.

This is the concept of increasing your brand awareness and customer retention across a franchise, using strategies involving social media, email, brand advocacy, SEO, and much more.

Depending on your role in the franchise, you’ll have a varying degree of influence on the marketing strategy. This may range from defining brand guidelines to providing your input on local trends.

No matter where you sit, Admosis is here to guide you through franchise marketing and how it can help each store to rake in more customers and more revenue.

Define Your Brand Guidelines

This is an important first step to ensure consistency across the wider business – a key tenet of a successful marketing campaign that won’t confuse a wider audience.

Make sure to document your brand’s tone of voice, content pillars, style guide, unique selling points, branding, and imagery.

These key pillars should be maintained across different regions, while local franchisees can tinker with them for a relatable, local feel.

These guidelines are the foundations of the strategy. Just like a new skyscraper, they cannot be changed once the campaign has begun, so take the time to get them right.

Social Media

One might think of social media as a golden bullet to marketing a franchise. Franchises are often multinational, after all. That’s a huge established audience that social media marketing can reach with ease, right? Well, almost.

Of course, social media is great at reaching a target audience, regardless of size (within reason). Content can be curated to attract all kinds of niches, plus analytics are relatively easy to gather on most platforms.

The issue with social media for franchise marketing is that it cannot be used as the sole channel for this purpose. This is because inbound message volumes are often too high to handle, and secondly, it’s difficult to manage who is in charge of content creation.

To this second point, corporate teams are often out of touch with local audiences, while local teams have less control of content creation and may misinterpret brand guidelines. This see-saw of control and content is a tough balance, making social media a tricky tactic in franchise marketing.

If you do opt for social media marketing, ask yourself how the workload will look between the franchisor and franchisee. Who will have more control and how will they complement each other’s input?

It should also be considered if your brand has enough of a following in each region to warrant a specific location-based profile, or if you’ll need to curate content that applies across regions.

Finally, to nail your franchise’s social media marketing, make sure to create content templates that can be edited by franchisees while staying within brand guidelines.

Email Marketing

According to leading email marketing platform, MailChimp, the average email open rate across industries in 2019 was 21.33%. Figuratively, that’s roughly one-in-five recipients who walked past your store and stopped to window shop.

Despite the outdated wrap that email sometimes receives, it still remains the most common activity on the internet. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly responding well to personalised marketing content.

It makes sense then that email remains a strong contender in your franchise marketing strategy.

As we’ve just hinted, personalised content is key to nailing this channel across franchises.

Similar to social media, your content should be templated according to the brand guidelines before being curated to each audience segment. These segments include not only their location, but also the products they’re interested in, their age, their job, and any other metric that’s relevant to your brand, product or service.

Once content has been rolled out, franchisors should monitor their analytics to understand what has worked in each segment and alter their next email accordingly.

Franchisees can also provide feedback to the corporate team so that all levels of the business understand what is and isn’t working in the campaign.

As with any activity in a marketing campaign, make sure these emails align with your marketing and business goals. The content should actively encourage the audience to satisfy these KPIs, whether it be more subscribers, more sales, or simply more web traffic.

Reviews

Brand advocacy can be a boon for your franchise marketing campaign, as you use an existing customer base to enhance your reputation.

Use the aforementioned channels to encourage reviews and trust that your product has been hitting the mark for existing customers.

The worst thing that can come from encouraging more reviews is that you receive some bad ones. However, these provide invaluable pieces of data that can help to improve your business – it’s a win-loss-win, of sorts.

A Trustpilot report found that two-thirds of customers are “often” or “very often” influenced by reviews during the buying process. Use this handy fact to encourage positive reviews and watch the brand reputation improve markedly.

Contact Admosis

We love hearing from franchisees and franchisors who want to take the next step for their business.

Whatever your marketing and business goals, our digital marketing expertise can take you from your current position to wherever you need to be.

Your goals are our goals, so get in touch and begin your franchise marketing journey today.