If you’re running a franchise, you know that franchise marketing can be both rewarding and challenging. Franchise businesses come with their unique set of problems, such as how to market to different locations, how to ensure consistency, and how to balance local marketing with national branding. This article will provide you with the strategies needed to master franchise focused marketing for multi-location success.
Develop a Strong Brand Strategy
As a franchise, your brand is your most valuable asset. It’s essential to have a strong brand strategy to create a sense of consistency across all your franchise locations. You need to establish a brand that resonates with your target audience. Determine your brand message, core values, and brand voice. Additionally, you need to invest in brand guidelines to ensure that your brand experience is consistent across all locations. With a consistent brand strategy, your customers can easily identify your franchise, regardless of location.
Embrace Local Marketing
While a franchise is a national brand, it’s essential to remember that each location has different needs and customers. To address this, you need to embrace local marketing. Tailor your marketing efforts to the specific needs of each location. Each franchise location has a different target audience and may serve a different purpose. Your local marketing strategy should involve understanding the customer, including their behaviour and buying patterns, and adapting to address them. Use local events, such as city festivals and social media pages, to better reach local customers.
Invest in Digital Marketing
In today’s digital era, digital marketing can be a great way to reach out to new customers and improve brand visibility. A digital marketing campaign can vary location by location, depending on customer behaviour and preferences. By having a website, you can educate your audience, grow your online presence, and build credibility. Ensure all options, such as online payment and ordering, are incorporated into your digital presence. By using social media, you can reach out to both existing and potential customers, generate buzz, increase engagement, and raise brand awareness. With a strong and consistent digital marketing campaign coupled with your localisation strategy, you can expand your franchise’s footprint.
Franchise empowered inhouse marketing teams
Although the headquarters of a franchise has an essential role to play in promoting and ensuring franchisor presence, it is always best to empower individual franchisees to take charge of promoting their franchise. Empowering franchisees with core marketing strategies and resources can greatly improve results. Consider creating an in-house franchise marketing team or dedicated personnel at each location. These teams are responsible for maintaining consistency, while also focusing on localisation. As a result, you effectively cover both ends of the spectrum, national branding and local focus.
Measure and Analyse Results
The last strategy towards mastering franchise-focused marketing is measuring and analysing results. As a franchise, you need to track your marketing campaigns’ effectiveness. It’s crucial to measure and track metrics like conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, foot traffic, and more. Use analytical tools to gather data and establish your KPIs and customer feedback mechanisms to identify insights to improve your campaign.
There’s an art to marketing franchises. To succeed, brands must master their franchise-focused marketing strategies. With a strong brand strategy, embracing local marketing, investing in digital marketing, empowering inhouse marketing teams and analysing results, you can build and grow a strong franchise brand while meeting the diverse needs of your customers and franchisees.