The franchising industry is on the rise with around 300 companies choosing to franchise every year. More than eight million people have secured jobs because of this industry. However, due to intense customer competition, it can be tough to expand the franchise.
To ensure that you distinguish yourself and make the most of your investment, developing a potent digital marketing strategy, which incorporates a robust franchise marketing plan, is necessary.
What is Franchise Marketing?
Franchise marketing refers to all the activities undertaken to grow your business and could involve digital marketing or public relations. The aim is to create more awareness for your brand and generate more revenue for your franchisees.
Operational Franchise Marketing
You and your franchisees engage in marketing activities with the goal of acquiring and retaining new customers.
Franchise Development Marketing
As the franchisor, franchise marketing is the activity you carry out to sell more franchise locations to potential franchisees and expand your franchise business. Although franchise marketing can be divided into categories, there may be some overlap as the ultimate objective remains the same – to grow your franchise business.
What are the Essential Elements of a Franchise Marketing Strategy?
To elevate your brand, it’s crucial to have a solid franchise marketing strategy. Your strategy plan should include several key factors.
Identify Your Customer
To create an effective franchise marketing plan, it is essential to understand your audience. Even if you have the best franchise out there, it won’t be successful without knowing your target buyer. Focusing on your audience is key to succeeding in franchise marketing, as it allows you to get the most value from your marketing investments. If you’re new to the world of franchising, you can gain valuable insights by identifying the target customers of similar franchises.
The objective is to gather ample information about your potential customers and then fine-tune that information to develop content that aligns well with the profiles of your ideal buyers.
Understanding Online Marketing Platforms
It is important for both franchisors and franchisees to become familiar with different digital marketing channels. These may include search engine and social media marketing. It is essential to identify which channels are most suitable for your brand, rather than trying to use all platforms without direction. When choosing your main marketing channel, consider your target audience and the type of product or service you offer.
Create a budget plan
To avoid overspending on marketing, it’s crucial to set a budget based on your available resources and end goals. With limited funds, it may not be possible to address everything at once. Hence, strategizing is essential. Make sure your marketing budget covers not only promotional materials and advertisements but also market research, product development, and public relations.
Be Consistent
To maintain branding consistency, it’s essential to use different strategies for different platforms. For instance, Twitter may use plain text while Facebook may use more videos. This applies to both franchisors and franchisees.
It is important to maintain consistency in your logos, colors, fonts, and tone. To achieve this, consider creating a brand manual that can be shared with everyone involved in the franchise to ensure that everyone is aligned.
Maintaining consistency in your brand will help establish a strong brand identity. This identity is crucial for improving brand and customer recognition and overall credibility.
How to develop a marketing plan for a franchise.
To ensure your franchise marketing plan benefits both you and your franchisees, it’s important to keep your business goals in mind. Follow below steps to create a successful marketing plan for your franchise.
Create Clear Brand Guidelines
To ensure the success of your franchise marketing plan, it is essential to establish clear and easily understandable brand guidelines. These guidelines should be included in your brand/franchise manual.
Your guidelines must have various sections that cover important aspects such as brand overview. This should give franchisees a clear understanding of the franchise’s brand identity. The section should also include the franchise’s history, vision, and values.
It is important to have a mission statement, appearance guidelines, and operational instructions in your brand guidelines. These are essential to ensuring consistency across all franchises. Without these, franchisees may not have access to everything that makes your brand unique.
Know Your Target Audience
To create a successful franchise marketing plan, it’s important to identify your target audience. You are likely to have customers with different demographics and personas, but it’s not effective to advertise to everyone, even if they are unlikely to be interested in your brand.
Remember, your marketing efforts don’t just target customers, but also entrepreneurs and professionals who want to start their own businesses. This means you may need to adjust your messaging depending on the specific audience you’re trying to reach.
Use Local SEO
It is important to include local marketing in your franchise’s overall marketing plan. To ensure success, provide your franchisees with the necessary resources and materials for local marketing.
To establish a franchise location on a local level, it is important to create a landing page and business listings specific to that locality. The web content and blogs should also be optimized to cater to the local audience. Although the franchise brand may be well-established, it is necessary to put in the effort to establish the individual location locally.
Improve the effectiveness of your marketing by personalizing and automating it
Personalized marketing can help capture the attention of potential customers and improve the user experience, which can ultimately affect your success. Personalization is appreciated by people as it makes them feel valued.
Automating your marketing efforts can simplify the process without sacrificing personalization. By delegating repetitive tasks, you can concentrate on your audience and deliver tailored content.
Share your Story
Impeccable storytelling is a highly effective marketing tool that can demonstrate your authenticity and transparency to your audience, thereby building brand awareness and customer trust. While offering competitive pricing is important, it shouldn’t be the sole factor driving customer choice.
You aim to have customers choose your business based on the reason behind what you do, which is your story. It is important to convey your story in a relatable way that allows customers to develop a connection with you.
Conclusion
As a franchisor, it is essential to develop and maintain an effective franchise marketing plan that will ensure the success of your brand. This involves creating clear brand guidelines, understanding your target audience, leveraging local SEO strategies, personalizing and automating marketing efforts, and conveying your story in a relatable way. With these tips in mind, you can create an effective franchise marketing strategy that will help differentiate yourself from competitors while building trust among customers.
