How to Approach Online Franchise Marketing
Franchise marketing in general can be a pretty tricky proposition. How much money, time, and effort should you devote to franchise marketing? How much should you research the marketing plans of other franchises? How much of what they have done is applicable to your franchise? What is the geographic region that your marketing should cover? And how much should you focus on marketing your franchise online? For the purposes of this post, franchise marketing will refer to the marketing of your franchise location to the end consumer of your product or service. This is not to be confused with marketing the franchise opportunity so candidates can evaluate your business and look to purchase a franchise and become a franchisee. That being said, lets get back to the matter at hand. It’s difficult to know the answers to the questions above because the answers to all these questions will depend on the type of franchise you have, who your customers are and where they are located. But with respect to the last question, online marketing is crucial to the success of your franchise. This article will look at the some of the ways you can approach online franchise marketing.
Your Franchisee Website Your franchise website is good starting place to examine approaches to franchise marketing. As stated above, it is imperative that your franchise marketing strategy relies heavily on its online presence, and that begins with your website. Many franchisors have a single page dedicated to each franchise location. This may be a cost effective strategy to start with, or a strategy that can be useful if the company’s brand is very well known. It is cost effective because it doesn’t take much to manage a single page dedicated per location. The content is limited and easy to update and website maintenance can be done system wide fairly easily. It is good for larger brands because they are already well known and people will often search by brand name. There is no need to have a more robust local presence because they already have brand equity and awareness in the local market. Some franchisors, especially service based brands, or new brands that are not well known, may find it beneficial to build out a more robust micro-site for each location. This helps in having more content that can be customized for the local market and that can help with Search Engine Optimization for more generic keywords that are not brand specific.