Having a solid franchise marketing strategy is essential for any franchise business that wants to grow. Modern franchise marketing strategies use digital marketing campaigns as a more sustainable, scalable, and powerful form of marketing.
In this article, we’ll show you 7 of our favorite digital marketing strategies that will improve your Franchise’s marketing.
Dial in your customer persona
If your digital marketing campaigns are failing, a good place to start is always with your customer persona. If this isn’t right, then even the world’s best ads won’t convert. Often we have an assumption about a customer persona, and then we never go back and reassess that assumption.
Take stock of your best customers, and their similarities. What (online) messaging appeals to them? What are their main pain points that your product or service solves? What’s the best channel to communicate about that with them?
Depending on the platform your using for your marketing campaigns, you might also be able to develop greater insight into your customer persona by reviewing the data, analytics, and demographic info of the campaigns.
Don’t be surprised if you find that your target market is different when you go from the offline marketing to digital marketing world.
Make your PPC ads pop
Paid ads (including paid search, social ads, etc.) are central to the marketing strategy of most franchises. Two important ingredients for a successful franchise ad campaign are your targeting, and a hook (a compelling value proposition).
If you can get your ads to show to the right people and with the right kind of messaging…you are most of the way towards a winning campaign.
Best-practices for franchise pay-per-click (PPC) ads include:
- Leverage local keywords to target your ads to specific locations
- Identify the hook that best gets new people in your door
- Test out creating dedicated landing pages for specific keywords, target audiences, or locations
- Systematically test different advertising platforms to see what works best (Google Adwords, Facebook ads, Linkedin ads, etc.)
- Regularly review, analyze, optimize, and iterate your ad campaigns
- A/B test different copy
Incorporate storytelling into your digital marketing
People emotionally relate more with stories than to analytical information. They remember info from stories better as well – a Stanford study showed 63% of people remembered stories, while only 5% could remember a single statistic.
Incorporate stories into your digital marketing by highlighting the people behind your brand. The people that work there. The stories of customers that trust you. In fact, an easy way to do this is to ask your best customers to tell you their story, and then create a general form of the story that would be appealing to everyone in your target market.
Showing the human side of your business instills trust in your customers and can help you establish and develop meaningful relationships with them.
Use multiple marketing channels
It’s rare that a viable marketing strategy uses only one marketing channel. Most successful franchise businesses have experimented with many different channels, with ongoing investment in several channels that have proven to work over time.
You might find that for your particular business, SEO work particularly well. Or maybe LinkedIn is extremely effective for you. Most likely, your ideal marketing strategy will be a combination of campaigns, such as social media ads + Google ad words + email newsletters.
First, focus on finding the first marketing channel that works consistently. Then from that baseline, you can test the waters with other marketing channels and review the results to see what is worth exploring further. Over time, you will have developed and verified a multi-channel marketing approach for your franchise business.
Take customer feedback seriously
Another way to build trust with your customers is to make them feel heard. When you actively solicit feedback, your customers will appreciate it, and it will help you better serve them.
Ways to start soliciting feedback:
- Ask for feedback in your email marketing
- Add a feedback form to your website
- Solicit feedback on social media
- Share testimonials and feedback with your other customers
- Create a poll to gather feedback (for example, about a new feature or product)
Use local SEO techniques
SEO is important for basically every business hoping to find customers via digital marketing. But there’s a difference between the SEO strategies that are appropriate for an online business with no physical location, versus the SEO strategies that work at the local level for a franchise, due to the importance of finding customers from a specific geographical area.
This is where local SEO strategies come in. Local SEO will help get your business website in front of your target customers from your particular area.
Some simple steps to get you started:
- Make sure each of your locations has a verified, accurate, and optimized Google Business Profile.
- Check each local directory listing has the most accurate and updated information about your business
- Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly
- Add a sitemap
- Work on getting more customer reviews
- Using local keywords in the copywriting on your website and landing pages
Try using geofences to trigger mobile alerts in specific locations
One of the more recent local digital marketing techniques is called Geofencing. Basically, a geofence uses GPS tracking on mobile devices to automatically trigger mobile alerts when the person enters or exits a specific location or area.
While this type of campaign can be costly (as well as possibly coming off a bit creepy to some) it is nevertheless a fantastic tool for hyper-targeting your ads. For example, imagine if you could ping customers when they are visiting a competitor’s location with your own ads, offers, notifications, etc. Any interesting new tactic you can check out, in any case.
Here are specific starting steps for core franchise marketing channels
Getting started with Local SEO for franchises:
- Do keyword research
- Set up a clear site structure
- Create content that has keywords about your location
- Get the content shared and linked to by external websites
- Make sure your business contact details are listed and consistent across the main directories (eg google business)
Getting started with PPC for franchises:
- Do keyword research
- Invest in copywriting and design quality of your ads
- Create and optimize your landing pages for PPC (consider setting up dedicated landing pages)
- Review and optimize your campaigns over time
Getting started with Content marketing for franchises:
- Identify the types of content most impactful in your industry / target market
- Do keyword research for new content
- Maintain a consistent publication schedule of whichever types of content you use
- Use lots of graphics and visual media in your content
- Promote your content on social media
Getting started with Social media for franchises:
- Update your business info on social media pages
- Use Canva or a graphic designer to ad great visuals to your posts
- Encourage dialogue with and between your customers
- Use analytics tools to measure social media marketing results
- Social media tools can also help show you what your competitors are doing that’s working on social
Getting started with Email marketing for franchises:
- Pick up a solid email marketing tool (Mailchimp, Activecampaign, etc)
- Personalize email content (at least with name and such, or even customizing full sections of your email template for each recipient category)
- Establish and apply consistent brand style guidelines
- Add clear call to action to every email
- Regularly review email analytics
- Test and optimize different types of campaigns
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Schedule a free call to discuss marketing opportunities with our team here. You can also learn more about our Franchise Marketing services.
