Franchise Digital Marketing

As a franchise system, your digital marketing, SEO and website needs are much different than other types of companies. Your digital approach needs to take into account the fact that you have independently owned stores/businesses as part of your organization, which creates a number of unique digital opportunities to capitalize on and challenges to overcome.

Having worked with a wide variety of franchise organizations, we have experience in maximizing those opportunities while addressing common obstacles. Our team of digital experts will review your current performance, competitors and industry dynamics in order to design a winning digital strategy that is custom-tailored to the needs of your franchise.

One of the most powerful tools franchise systems have is their ability to be “authentically local” on social media. Most franchise systems include a combination of nationally managed and locally managed social properties, which provides amazing brand visibility through a network of hyper-local social pages. Although there are many great benefits with this approach, it can be daunting to maintain a consistent brand presence and customer service approach across all of the company’s national and local social properties.

Our team has extensive experience developing and managing multi-faceted social media management strategies for franchise systems. We employ a combination of technology, best-practice processes and training to provide support to your local social properties while maintaining a consistent brand voice across the network.

Franchise systems have the unique ability to pursue company-wide promotions and highly targeted localized campaigns at the same time. This is because most franchise systems include a national ad fund which enables the head office to run campaigns that benefit the entire company, while also empowering franchisees to advertise in their local markets to grow their businesses.

This business model introduces an opportunity to create a multi-layered social media advertising program that operates at both the national (or regional) level and local level in order to greatly increase campaign effectiveness. Our team will work with you to design an overall campaign strategy that fully leverages the strengths of your franchise in order to deliver maximum value to your franchisees and the organization overall. Our team will build, deploy and manage the program on your behalf, using social media best practices and technology to achieve economies of scale and superior advertising results.

Creating an effective influencer marketing campaign is often a challenge for franchise organizations, as it can be time consuming and expensive to create and manage a pool of influencers that equitably covers the company’s network. Most influencer marketing strategies are “top down” in nature, which runs counter to the local strength that franchise companies naturally have through their network of franchisees.

We flip the influencer marketing model on its head by using advanced data mining to find local “micro-influencers” in your markets that align with your brand values and company objectives. Instead of trying to find two or three influencers to cover your entire network, we instead engage dozens of influencers across your geographies to achieve local impact and deliver measurable results. Our team manages every step of the process including strategy, talent discovery, campaign management, and measurement.

With the right strategy, franchise systems are able to create a very strong search profile in order to out-rank competitors for key terms. Franchise organizations are inherently local in nature, which enables them to create a search presence that is relevant to people in the areas where the company has locations. Through this local relevancy, franchises have the ability to create a dominant search presence within their communities to out-rank competitors for highly valuable search terms.

Our team of search, technical and content specialists will research, design, implement and manage a SEO strategy that is completely customized to your franchise system. We will provide advice on the optimal website structure, content strategy, structured data approach, keyword strategy, competitive approach and other factors. Once the new strategy is implemented, we will monitor the results and make ongoing improvements to keep you one step ahead of your competitors.

Search advertising is a critical sales driver for most companies; however, many franchise systems suffer from subpar results due to a disjointed approach. We find that many franchise companies run multiple search campaigns nationally and locally at the same time, which can create market confusion and increase the cost of advertising. Google and Bing work on an auction model – meaning that companies bid on search terms to buy them. In the case of franchise systems, if the company has many franchisees all pursuing the same terms, then they are bidding up the price for those terms and costing themselves money. The result: an underperforming campaign that costs too much.

Having seen this issue many times through our experience with franchise systems, we have developed processes and technology to address it. Through our approach, franchise companies are able to run both national and local search campaigns, including campaigns which are owned and funded by your franchisees. Our search team will create, implement and manage a customized search advertising program that is designed to work for your franchise system. Through our approach you will see better results for a lower cost, which will drive additional value for your franchisees and your company overall.

Digital display advertising represents an excellent opportunity to achieve large, targeted reach for a low cost. Display advertising is an effective way to grow brand awareness with new audiences while also staying top-of-mind with existing customers.

Our talented team will work with you to develop, implement and manage a campaign aimed at achieving your business objectives, including custom creative, interest targeting, geographic targeting and other factors. We will also integrate the display campaign with other platforms such as social media and search in order to create a robust retargeting approach in order to further increase online sales, leads or other objectives.

High-quality, relevant content is critical to the success of any digital strategy. For franchise systems this is particularly important, as local franchisees are competing head-on with local companies for attention in their markets. Many franchise systems fail to recognize the importance of ensuring their website, social media and advertising copy is locally relevant, which enables local competitors to out-rank and out-maneuver them with a better “ground game”.

Through our extensive experience with franchise systems, we have developed processes and technology to localize content across websites, social media posts and digital advertising at scale. This means that you are able to have the best of both worlds: on-brand, well-written and designed content that is also locally relevant. With our proprietary local content program, your franchise is able to out-rank competitors locally on search, improve social media results and create search advertising campaigns, that deliver better results at a lower cost.

A company’s website is the core element of its digital approach. A well-designed and built website is crucial to the success of any search, social, content marketing, ecommerce or other strategy. The user experience, speed and functionality of a company’s website can make the difference between earning a new customer or missing an opportunity.

Our cross-functional design, development, search and content teams have in-depth experience building custom websites for franchise systems. We will design and develop a site that is built to your exact specifications, including design, content and functionality. Our team is experienced in creating custom ecommerce and lead-generation sites, and can integrate with your CRM, POS or other systems. Your website is your digital storefront, so we will make sure that it reflects the look and personality of your business, in addition to working well across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

Mobile apps enable brands to create an immersive, mobile-specific experience with unique features and functionality. A dedicated mobile experience differentiates the company from its competitors, increases user stickiness and provides in-depth data on customer behavior which can be used to further improve the company’s products and services. When effectively executed, a mobile app can create a deeper relationship with customers which in turn increases sales.

Our design and technical teams will work with you to design and develop a custom mobile app aimed at delighting your customers and achieving your business objectives. Mobile apps can include a wide variety of functionality including ecommerce, loyalty programs, booking/appointments and geo-location, among others. We will integrate your app with your back end systems such as your website, analytics, CRM and POS to ensure everything works smoothly for both your customers and your internal teams.