Marketing for a franchise can be hard work; not only do you have the standard budgetary and performance pressures that come with a marketing role, but you also likely endure scrutiny from franchisees who don’t see the value in the marketing tactics you recommend.
Between running centralized marketing campaigns, giving franchisees extra marketing advice and working to ensure the brand remains consistent and undiluted, you’ve certainly got your hands full.
To help you and your franchisees hit the ground running in 2016, we’ve summarized some marketing best practices of 2015:
Facebook: Use mobile tools & targeted ads.
A recent FranConnect survey of more than 4,000 franchise CEOs and marketing professionals found that Facebook was clearly the most effective social media channel, with 70.8 percent of participants naming it. LinkedIn was a distant second at 6.3 percent, and although many franchisors favor it for sales and recruitment, it doesn’t do the job of finding and targeting customers in the B2C environment franchisees require.
Educate franchisees on Facebook’s advertising tools to more effectively market in their local area. Facebook will soon roll out a new ad targeting option for brick-and-mortar stores (think: individual franchises) based on foot traffic around the store. According to Marketing Dive, marketers will be able to use this information to create localized ad campaigns for near real-time ad targeting purposes. In other words, using Facebook, you can serve ads to people who are nearby your store’s location.
Fail to plan: Plan to fail.
Having a plan is essential for marketing success, for both you and your franchisees. Yet, many franchisees report that they don’t have a local marketing plan beyond what corporate requires for national campaigns. Even if local marketing is the responsibility of franchisees, providing a detailed plan for them to follow not only will aid their success, but also help ensure they stay on brand. Resources like marketing plans also can help reassure franchisees that the money they put into marketing is helping them grow their individual franchise.
Measure your ROI – then improve it.
It’s hard to know where you need to improve unless you’re tracking performance. After you’ve implemented a marketing campaign, track the results at a national level, and give individual franchisees a system or template for measuring and reporting their local success. This will help show franchisees where their money is going and the benefit of mandatory marketing funds.
On a local level, helping franchisees track their own ROI can help you find areas where they need to make improvements and to provide guidance and advice on improving their marketing initiatives and their business.
Providing high-performing marketing strategies for your franchise is essential as a franchise marketer. Because franchisees and franchisors often differ in their opinions on marketing, it’s essential for franchisors to provide recommendations based on research, plans to help scale implementation and procedures for reporting successes.
