Franchises tend to be an attractive choice to many small business entrepreneurs. They can be an excellent way to grow faster and scale your income without building an infrastructure from scratch or independently. But, one of the main disadvantages of working with established brands is that you don’t often have much control over marketing practices or strategies. Or, it can be harder to align with the brand’s promotional guidelines because of a lack of understanding. Whatever the case, brands communicate their business and marketing goals while supporting you with training, staffing, technical know-how, etc. At the local level, you must ensure that you execute campaigns that comply with your brand. It can involve multiple steps.
Online location page targeting
Maintaining cohesiveness with the location pages and listings is critical. You need a landing page specific to your location to aid your SEO efforts. It will also help your customers find you hassle-free. They don’t have to go to a generic locator page and run one more search to discover you.
Content marketing
It’s not easy to work out content strategies at a franchise level. But if you hire an experienced franchise digital marketing agency, you can rely on their skills and knowledge. They will take care of website pages, brochures, and more to help local customers learn about your business. You can also depend on them to promote curated content across different platforms to increase your local business’s name and recognition beyond the brand you associate with, without violating their required standards.
Paid advertising
Localized advertising is far more effective than non-localized for a franchise business model. For example, if you’re looking to run a marketing campaign, you want to ensure that your ads feature and get placed only in locations where potential customers are likely to purchase from your brand. If you try to advertise in places where those potential customers aren’t available, you may be hurting your chances of gaining the exposure and growth you were hoping to achieve. It is also a waste of money.
Reputation management
While there are perks of opening a franchise business, managing your identity online is the downside. In this digital age, savvy customers like to share their experiences – good or bad. And if it’s a disgruntled customer, you can anticipate the kind of outpouring they will have. Now, the challenge is franchise brands have their presence across thousands of locations. How do you know where a customer is talking about your specific store? Of course, monitoring tools are there. But it’s a daily work almost. Also, it requires a knack and skill in identifying the reviews relevant to you. So, your best bet in this matter can be your local digital agency. They will have a resource dedicating their time to these activities to ensure your brand’s reputation remains intact. They can also encourage people to leave positive feedback.
It is a lot of work to make your franchise business stand out among the sea of competitors and scale up steadily and continuously. Because you already have other areas to look after, you can delegate this part to a trusted agency to manage.
