Majority of franchisors have a national advertising fund that’s funded by their franchisees. This fund is used for offline and online marketing campaigns as well as planning research and development branding strategies that would benefit everyone involved. In some instances, however, this might not be enough. As a franchisor, you should also encourage your franchisees to conduct local advertising, advises a top franchise development consultant in the area. Local advertising efforts would benefit your organization as a whole, from increased search rankings in Google to more leads, brand consistency, increased local sales, and increased foot traffic. Below are practical steps you could take to make certain that your franchisees make the most of their local advertising opportunities.
Make a Short List of Preferred Local Vendors
Scrutinize potential vendors to make certain that they understand and share the values of your franchise. Having strong relations with certain vendors would help ensure that any local advertising campaigns would be in line with the standards of your brand and that everyone would operate under the same goals and expectations.
Media Buying by Region
Consider requiring franchisees in the same region to work with each other for local media buying so that their resources would be used as efficiently as possible, which would, in turn, increase their marketing opportunities. For example, let’s say that you have 20 franchisees in a particular region and that each of them contributes $500 for their regional marketing fund. They could use the pooled money to seek opportunities on different platforms like local social and digital ads, television ads, music streaming services, among many others.
Establish Guidelines that are Channel-Specific
If your franchisees manage their local marketing, it’s best that they are trained on the specific recommendations and guidelines for every channel you use across your organization. For example, these guidelines should ideally include working, design, and a schedule of posting. The guidelines must likewise address the differences between different social platforms like the kind of posts that would fare better on Twitter than on Facebook, as well as the type of images that would do better on Snapchat than on Instagram. Having specific guidelines would help your franchisees feel more confident of their local advertising efforts.
Localize All Social Media and Pay-per-Click Ads
Supplementing your national marketing campaign with local PPC and social media ads could be an efficient way to better target the local market. Encourage your franchisees to utilize content that you’ve provided or approved for brand promotion with content they made related to local deals and events. By allowing them to create and implement their franchise-approved marketing campaigns, they could feel more in control of local marketing, while ensuring brand consistency.
Put simply your, and your franchisees would greatly benefit from creating complementary marketing campaigns. With set guidelines and help from preferred vendors, the efforts of your franchisees could make a significant different in attracting local target customers and engaging franchisees. Taking the above mentioned steps could aid both local and corporate franchisees and result in more successful and effective marketing campaigns.