Many franchises have established brand awareness already. However, the difference between average and excellent marketing performance is a solid franchise digital marketing strategy.
For example, a holistic digital marketing strategy ensures an individual franchise gains customers online and offline without compromising the standards of the main brand. For this reason, franchisors and franchisees can benefit hugely from harnessing the full power of a franchise marketing strategy that works.
Today, we’ll help you create a digital marketing plan that’s a game-changer for franchises. We’ll dive deeper into the best forms of marketing, their benefits, and the best practices in franchise marketing. That way, you’ll have what it takes to boost brand awareness and drive sales in a franchise.
What Is a Franchise Digital Marketing Strategy?
It’s a plan that franchisors and franchisees can use to boost their marketing efforts and thrive in the industry. It’s a part of multi-location marketing because it increases brand awareness and drives local sales for a business with dispersed geographical locations. A franchise digital marketing strategy entails tactics like pay-per-click advertising and paid social advertising, among others.
The Best Forms of Franchise Marketing
Here are the best types of franchise marketing to help take your business to the next level.
Email Marketing
With technology growing and evolving, you have many ways to reach out to your audience. Of all those ways, email marketing reigns supreme.
Statistics say that in 2020 alone, the number of global email users was 4 billion and will skyrocket to 4.6 billion by 2025, translating to email marketing as one of the best ways to launch your campaign.
Another research study found that for every dollar you spend, successful email marketing yields $38. Email marketing is affordable for businesses, and it is a valuable technique for franchise digital marketing strategy.
Here’s a quick overview of how to leverage email marketing.
- Build an email list from your website using a lead magnet, like a coupon, in exchange for prospects’ email addresses.
- Invest in an Email Service Provider (ESP), a software that helps businesses manage their email list and automate marketing campaigns.
- Define your goals. Do you want to drive sales or increase brand awareness? Do you want to boost customer engagement or nurture leads? Knowing your marketing goals helps you streamline your campaign accordingly.
- Reach out to your prospects with personalized content depending on their position in the sales funnel and location.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC marketing is a form of paid advertising in digital marketing. PPC is sometimes used interchangeably with SEM or search engine marketing. SEM is the overall strategy to increase your search visibility, usually through paid advertising. PPC is a component of search engine marketing.
However, PPC and SEM are not the same as SEO or search engine optimization. SEO focuses solely on increasing your non-paid organic search.
PPC advertising allows you to place ads on search engines or third-party websites and pay a fee for each click. Google is the largest platform for PPC advertising, with ad revenue of USD 209.5 billion in 2021 alone.
As a part of a franchise digital marketing strategy, PPC advertising comes with many benefits, including:
- PPC ads are highly targeted. For example, you get to choose the keywords you want your ad to rank for in local searches. As a result, your franchise will appear on search results of specific people likely to buy your products and services.
- These ads are easy to monitor, especially if you’re using Google. That’s because the search engine giant provides free analytics tools.
PPC Campaign Basics
There are four basic steps to get started with a PPC campaign:
- Create a small budget to test whether PPC ads work for your business before going big.
- Define your campaign goals: what do you expect from PPC advertising?
- Identify a suitable type of PPC campaign and research the keywords that best describe your franchise(s)—you can base your keywords on local SEO for the best results.
- Create keyword-focused content and launch the campaign.
If you want ads that consistently convert, there is much more to consider than these four steps.
The ways that people search constantly change, so Google continuously makes changes to Google Ads.
For example, Google has announced that it will stop using expanded text ads. The change, which will take effect on June 30, 2022, means you won’t be able to create expanded text ads and will need to create responsive search ads instead.
It’s hard to keep up with changes, let alone stay ahead. Goodway’s PPC experts can stay ahead of changes for you.
Paid Social Media Marketing
This technique leverages powerful platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to achieve branding goals. However, social media marketing isn’t just about creating a business account and publishing content when you feel like it. Instead, it requires a working strategy inspired by measurable goals. For example, you can:
- Generate leads and increase your sales pipeline with paid Facebook ads
- Increase your brand’s awareness via engaging Instagram ads
- Showcase new product launches and drive traffic to your store with localized targeting on paid social platforms.
In addition to having a strong organic social presence (engaging with your community, answering questions, et cetera), franchise businesses need to have a paid social presence.
Website Content Marketing
Sharing valuable content on your site helps you attract, engage, and convert potential customers into loyal fans of your business. It’s a way to educate your audience using helpful content and increase your online presence through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Let’s say you’re a multi-location company selling batteries and related supplies. You can create content like “5 Best Lithium Battery Uses” or “A Must-Have Battery Buying Guide.” Just ensure each content on your site focuses on driving the results you desire.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is one of the most efficient ways to advertise, significantly more so than traditional ad buys. Instead of buying various ads with multiple publishers, programmatic allows you to run multiple creative pieces across multiple publishers all at once.
Today’s programmatic is much more advanced than years past – and goes beyond just banner ads and real-time buying. You can control budget by location, and tailor your campaigns to your specific franchise’s marketing needs.
Why Should Franchises Invest in Digital Marketing?
Creating a franchise digital marketing strategy is a no-brainer because of the following reasons:
- Local marketing with digital helps you target prospects interested in your products and services. That way, you achieve brand goals at the minimum cost because of focusing only on people that are most likely to buy from you.
- Digital promotions are measurable. With powerful social and web analytics tools, you can monitor campaigns to identify what’s working and what doesn’t in different stages of a buyer’s journey.
- Digital marketing makes it easy to compete with industry giants. Before the digital era, it was difficult for small businesses to compete with more prominent brands since traditional marketing demands a lot of expensive resources. But now, technology has made things easy.
Can Franchises Market Themselves Independently?
After the franchisor approves your strategy, you can do your own local marketing as a franchisee. After all, most franchisors offer guidelines you must follow to start marketing your franchise.
However, marketing is a lot of work for many businesses. You have to tap into your prospects’ pain points, create a solid plan, and identify the right platform to launch your company.
The good news is that working together with a franchise digital marketing expert solves your marketing problems. You get the time to focus on other core business activities as Goodway skillfully handles your marketing needs.
Top 3 Tips for Building an Effective Franchise Marketing Strategy
Here are the best practices when marketing a franchise.
- Be consistent in your marketing. A franchise is a part of a unified brand, so ensure your marketing tactics don’t hurt the general brand.
- Focus on local search engine optimization to attract customers around the area you operate.
- Use positive reviews on your website as testimonials to appeal to a new audience. Online reviews are solid proof that your business delivers high-quality products and services.
Launch a Franchise Marketing Campaign that Works
Franchise marketing has two main objectives:
- Improving the bottom line for your specific locations, while maintaining compliance of the larger national brand
- Increasing your visibility within specific, hyperlocal locations
The only way to achieve this is through the franchisor and franchisee sending consistent messages to the audience, especially if the unified brand is a multi-location business. For this reason, make sure you follow central brand rules when creating a franchise marketing campaign.
If creating a working marketing strategy seems like a lot of work, contact Goodway Group to handle all your marketing efforts.