Crush Your Franchises Localized Marketing Efforts With SOCi
Crush Your Franchises Localized Marketing Efforts With SOCi
There are approximately 790,000 franchises in the United States. There are also over one billion searches that contain the phrase “near me” every month. As a franchise, what are you doing to ensure your brand stands out at both the franchisor (national) and franchisee (local) levels? Franchises face the unique challenge of marketing to both national and local audiences. Before moving forward, let’s define what a franchisor and franchisee are.- The franchisor is the national brand that established a licensed business model.
- The franchisee is the local business owner that operates their franchise location(s) using the franchisor's business model, including its marketing materials.
Critical Components of Franchise Marketing
If you’re not already familiar, localized marketing is the process of creating and implementing a marketing strategy that is distributed at the local level. For franchises, this requires franchisors and franchisees to cohesively work together to create a localized marketing strategy and deploy these tactics at the local level across all locations. Now, let’s get into the three main areas of localized marketing: local search, local social, and reputation management, and explain how your franchise can build a strong strategy for each.Local Search
Many franchisors worry about their national brand, which is essential, but your local franchisee locations are just as crucial. Without local customers, your franchise can’t maintain success. That’s where local search and SEO come into play. An emphasis on local SEO can help franchisees be more visible in local search results on Google and other search engines. The best way to improve your local SEO rankings is by optimizing your local listings and local pages. Local Listings Local listings are an online mention of a business on local directories like Google, Bing, Yelp, Foursquare, and others. Local listings often include basic information like your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). From a local SEO perspective, each franchisee must have its local listings claimed and updated with accurate business information. It’s difficult for your franchisees to have their locations rank on the search engine results page (SERP) or in local packs without updated and accurate local listings. Once you’ve claimed and updated all franchisee locations, you can begin to optimize them by adding in other helpful business information, such as links to social media profiles, additional business information, photos, and more. Jersey Mike’s Subs, a franchise, does a great job of this. For a more in-depth guide to claiming and adjusting your local listings, read our blog on optimizing your local listings. Local Pages Local pages are another way to improve local search visibility and drive more business for your franchisees. A local page is a specific web page for each franchisee location. Typically, local pages are published from your website, giving you complete control over what you post to them. When creating local pages, they should include similar information to what is found in your local listings. You can also optimize your local pages by:- Incorporating keywords
- Including high-quality images
- Adding alt text or tags to images
- Creating clean URL structures
- Ensuring meta description is enticing and contains relevant keywords
- Having multiple calls to action (CTAs) to increase lead conversion
- Showcasing user-generated content (UGC) such as reviews or customer testimonials
Local Social
Social media is often a challenge for franchises. Finding a balance between promoting the national brand and individual franchisee locations is no easy task. When it comes to social media, your franchise must have both a national and local presence. Each franchisee should have a local social profile on the most relevant social platforms, like Facebook. Research from SOCi found that localized content receives 12x the engagement as non-localized content, emphasizing the need for local social profiles. While your franchisees may share some content about the national brand, local content is a must. When planning content at the local level, franchisees can share various types of content, including:- Special promotions or discounts that are happening at their location.
- Positive customer reviews from local consumers.
- Pictures of live or virtual events happening at local stores.
- Current events that are happening in their local area.
- Ways the franchisee is giving back to the local community.