Small businesses like franchises generate over 60% of all jobs added each year in the country. By focusing on your franchise, you’re not only building your business but helping the country’s economy as well. However, you’ll need a strong franchise marketing strategy to set your business up for success.
With a strong strategy, you can attract more traffic to your franchise websites.
As you gain more web traffic, you can improve your brand awareness, gain new leads, and boost sales.
Ready to build your business? Get started with this guide on franchise marketing for your franchise websites!
What Is Franchise Marketing?
Many franchises struggle to handle their marketing across numerous franchise websites and channels. Different factors can impact a franchise’s marketing strategy, including:
- Geographic differences
- Budgeting
- Message ownership
Developing a thorough franchise marketing plan can ensure you’ve created a cohesive marketing plan. Otherwise, your marketing across each channel and platform will feel disconnected.
Overcoming the challenges of marketing new franchisees will help you build a nationally recognized brand. As a result, consumers will begin to realize your franchise has multiple locations. Then, you can boost your brand, engage customers, and continue building your business.
Franchise marketing requires franchisors to understand their existing franchisees. At the same time, you need to identify potential opportunities to expand your business.
Some franchisors copy their marketing strategies for one franchise to the next. However, this isn’t always effective. Each location has its own quirks.
Using data and resources can help you make informed decisions for improving your marketing strategies.
Then, you can unite your franchise websites while ensuring they each fall within the same brand.
Research & Goal-Setting
For overall business success, you need to develop a marketing strategy that focuses on your target audience.
First, complete a SWOT analysis. This thorough analysis will help you consider internal and external factors that impact your business. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats.
As you complete your SWOT analysis, consider your competitors as well. What marketing strategies are they using? What qualities of their website do you like and want to use on your own?
This step during your research should include your customers as well. Consider their interests, the problems they face each day, and their shopping behaviors. Understanding your customers will help you strengthen your franchise marketing strategy.
Next, you need to determine your goals. Then, you need to determine which metrics you’re using to measure your progress and success.
Make sure to establish SMART goals. These goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. By setting SMART goals, you’re more likely to accomplish them on a schedule.
For example, you can set a goal to improve website traffic by 10% in the first sales quarter for each franchise website.
Once you’ve determined your goals, set a budget.
The best way to set a budget is to determine your limits and priorities. You can’t copy what your competitors are doing or increase your budget. Instead, it’s important to allocate money where it can have the biggest impact.
Take a look at your goals. Where can you put your money that will help you accomplish these goals?
Lastly, determine how you’re measuring your success. This can include website visits, online sales, social media activity, or foot traffic. Specifying these metrics can help you determine your progress as a business.
Position Your Brand
Whether you have five franchise websites or 20, they’re all united under one main brand. Your success or failure as a business can largely depend on how people perceive your brand. Correctly strengthening your brand can help customers associate your entire franchise as credible and trustworthy.
In order to strengthen your brand, you need to create a consistent message.
Whether it’s on your franchise websites or social media, a consistent message will help you avoid confusing customers.
Your brand voice should remain consistent as well. For a consistent voice, determine the words and phrases you’ll use in your messaging. What emotions do you want to evoke in your messages?
Finally, make sure your brand and products are relatable to your target audience and the location they’re in.
Your brand will help you stand out from competitors. At the same time, it will unite each of your franchises under the same personality and message.
Create Valuable Content
Once your franchise websites are united under the same brand, start posting high-quality, informative content to your websites.
Unique content will help consumers learn more about your business. At the same time, you’ll build brand trust and loyalty. As a result, people will choose your business over your competitors.
Consider the problems your customers are facing each day. Then, create helpful content to show them how your business can offer a solution.
For example, try posting informative blog posts on your websites. Make sure to use keyword research to optimize your content using search engine optimization (SEO). That way, customers will have an easier time finding your websites online.
In fact, 80% of local mobile searches lead to a purchase.
You can also post valuable content on social media, including:
- Articles
- How-to guides
- Infographics
- Videos
- Tutorials
- Product reviews
With each form of content, make sure to help your customers.
Then, use a call-to-action to encourage these website visitors to contact you for more information.
Choose Your Channels
Once you have your content, consider your different promotion channels. Posting your content on multiple channels will help expand your reach. As a result, you’re allowing more people to interact with your brand.
As more people see and recall your brand, you’re also improving brand awareness and recognition.
Then, customers will remember your company the next time they need your product or service.
Here are a few different marketing channels you can use to expand your reach.
Shared Media
Shared media is an effective way to improve customer engagement with your brand.
These marketing channels can include shared media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), or social media marketing.
Social media marketing can help you engage with your customers online. Listen to their concerns. If they have questions, make sure to provide helpful answers.
That way, you’re showing followers and potential customers you’re there to help.
If you have multiple franchises, you can create different social media accounts for each location. However, it’s important to keep your brand consistent, even if the posts differ across each account. That way, customers will know the franchises are tied together.
Owned Media
You can also use your owned media, which includes your franchise websites, blogs, and videos.
Make sure to update your company blog regularly. Google looks for relevant, unique content when determining SEO page rankings. By gaining a higher ranking, you’ll position your website above the competition.
As a result, consumers will see your franchise websites listed on Google before one of your competitors.
You can also create videos or vlogs. Video marketing is a great way to keep customers engaged. It can also give customers a memorable face and voice to associate with your business.
Paid Media
You can also use paid media channels, such as paid advertising and commercials.
One type of paid advertising is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You can create PPC ads that will display on search engines like Google or pages like YouTube.
These ads will display based on consumer behaviors or the keywords they search for.
In fact, 45% of small businesses are already using PPC advertising. PPC advertising allows you to reach your target audience and remain top-of-mind. As a result, you’re expanding your reach and improving brand awareness.
Again, it’s important to remain consistent with your brand. You can create different PPC advertising campaigns for each location. When you do, you can target different locations and use location-specific language in each brand.
This form of personalization will make it easier for readers to connect with the ads.
Earned Media
Earned media, such as press releases and awards, can help expand your reach too.
Earned media can help you achieve massive distribution at once. People are also more likely to trust press releases from credible resources, which will benefit your credibility, too.
You can create different press releases per franchise or to cover your entire business.
Make sure to post a copy of your press release on your franchise website’s blog as well.
Analyze & Optimize
After posting your content, analyze how your franchise websites are performing. Determine what content and pages are getting the most visits. Where can you improve?
Use your goals and data metrics to track your progress.
Then, you can improve using this helpful data!
Building Up Your Brand: Creating a Marketing Strategy for Your Franchise Websites
Ready to build your brand? By creating a sound strategy for your franchise websites, you can expand your reach. At the same time, you’re uniting multiple franchises under one umbrella.
As a result, you’re strengthening your brand and attracting a loyal audience of customers.
Keep building your business with these tips!
Eager to expand your brand? Contact us today to get started!
