on users’ interests and needs. Loyal customers will see content ranging from design and household tips to décor suggestions for specific spaces and trendy color combinations. The house painting brand uses “edutainment” to introduce itself to potential new customers with service offerings that educate in an “attentiongrabbing manner,” says Kinney. Her team uses video and movie and television parodies, color transformations, animated gifs, and blog articles with tie-ins to holidays and pop culture events. Connect with your marketing Costa Vida Fresh Mexican Grill used all of its social media platforms to successfully cross-promote last November’s launch of a new mobile online ordering and reward program aimed at the brand’s Millennial and Gen X customer base. The fast casual chain employs Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+ in its social media plan and tweaks its messages based on the particular strengths and attributes of each medium, says Ashley Moody, Costa Vida’s director of marketing. Twitter, for instance, highlights the brand in the moment, Instagram gives followers a personal behind-the-scenes look, and giveaways and promotions suit the Facebook forum and lead customers back to the Costa Vida blog where readers can learn about holiday entertaining hacks or “10 Signs Your Soul Mate Is Actually a Burrito.” Engaging and relevant content is the goal to a winning social media strategy, says Moody. “If it is centered too much around the brand, it gets boring,” she says. “You have to change it up.” Connect with your franchisees Social media marketing is also making it easier for brands and their franchisees to present a united front with a consistent, yet locally customized message. When CruiseOne rolled out a yearlong automated social program at no cost to franchisees in 2015, more than 320 franchisees enrolled in the first 10 days. The program blends a flexible mix of inspirational quotes, exclusive offers, and general travel tidbits based on research about how its customers and franchisees use social media. “What we heard is that franchisees wanted to have more time to actually sell the products we offer, and not necessar-
Want To Be More Social?
Try these tips from Valerie Kinney, CertaPro’s vice president of marketing: • Deliver value-added content that will resonate with the individuals you want to reach. Don’t interrupt the community experience they want to have on social media, be part of it. • Pay to play. Allocate funds to promote your content and have it reach the individuals in your target demographic. • Build on what is working. Evaluate your metrics and base your future strategies on them. ■ ily become expert marketers overnight,” says Reed. “We needed to help support them and make sure it was simple and easy enough to execute on, and also understand the customers we wanted to target.” CruiseOne’s social strategy has been accompanied by franchisee education on the importance of interacting with customers to optimize and supplement a cohesive message, but in a warm and engaging way. “You have to make sure your personality comes through and to personalize your messages, not just continuously put out offers or saturate someone’s newsfeed, or they are going to eventually unsubscribe and not want to follow your brand,” says Ashley Moody
Reed. “Humanizing the brand and making sure your content is relatable with your customers was key in educating them.” And while more brands are providing social media programs and support to their franchisees, it’s important for them to remember it takes time for a busy franchisee to get up to speed on how to use it all most effectively. Measuring the success of a social media strategy can be tricky. Reed considers engagement, reach, and ultimate exposure. “You can have thousands and thousands of followers or fans, but if they aren’t engaged with your brand it means they may not be seeing your stuff. Just liking a page is not enough,” she says. “Platforms will suppress consumers from seeing your content if they haven’t engaged with your brand, so we have to be mindful and respectful of that and consider what we can do to keep those folks engaged.” Social integration No matter how well a franchisor uses social media marketing, it can’t be done in a silo, says Kinney. Social media delivers the most powerful punch when integrated with a franchise brand’s overall marketing strategy, she says. The brand’s recent television campaign, for instance, reminds viewers to rely on the home painting brand at every stage of life, from first home to first child to family milestones. The company’s “We Do Painting. You Do Life” theme is featured prominently throughout the brand’s social media channels using humorous and emotion-tugging posts. Online content marketing, for example, is another opportunity to deliver more detailed, consistent messaging that complements traditional marketing avenues, such as direct mail, mass media, and promotions. “Everything needs to work together to reach the right person at the right time with the right message,” says Kinney. “In the majority of scenarios, it is a supporting channel that tells a deeper story of what consumers are seeing about our brand in traditional marketing.” After some high-flying years as the next “new new thing,” social media’s future for franchise marketers is expected to keep on growing and become more sophisticated—as part of a comprehensive, integrated marketing program. ■ Franchiseupdate I S S U E I I , 2016
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