Franchise digital marketing is a bit different than digital marketing for a single business. When you have multiple locations, you need to make sure your digital marketing strategy is cohesive.
All of your marketing materials, wording, and guidelines need to apply to every location. And it’s important that all franchisees understand how to market their place effectively within the guidelines set.
Follow these tips to ensure your franchise digital marketing strategy is robust and easy to follow.
5 Simple Franchise Digital Marketing Tips
1 – Set Clear Brand Guidelines
For all of your franchisees to keep your company’s branding cohesive, you need to set clear, detailed brand guidelines as part of your franchise digital marketing strategy.
So how do you effectively do that?
Keep your company’s branding cohesive by setting clear brand guidelines.
Some things to consider when creating your brand guidelines include your company’s:
- Brand image guidelines, including what type of images can be used, what kind of pictures to avoid, what colors to use and avoid, proper use of the company logo, and how and when to use company taglines.
- Brand voice guidelines, including words to use and avoid, tone of voice, messaging guidelines, and point of view.
- Guidelines for advertising and marketing materials, including the type of ads franchisees, can use and when they can use them.
- Approval processes for franchisee ads and marketing campaigns.
- Social media guidelines, including the type of things franchisees can share via social media and a list of things to avoid.
Use social media wisely.
2 – Set Clear Social Media Guidelines
As a franchise owner, you’re responsible for creating and maintaining social media pages for the leading brand.
However, your franchisees might want to have social media pages for their locations. This is fine if handled correctly.
You should consider how you want franchisees to display their business name on social media.
Typically, franchise owners use the company name, and franchisees use the company name, plus their location, store number, or a combination of the two.
This simple variation tells the public that they’re interacting with a nearby location instead of the parent company.
Franchisees should list the address and phone number on their social media pages.
It’s also vital for franchisees to list the location’s address and phone number on their social media pages. You may also want to consider whether or not they should use a variation of your company logo instead of the main one.
For example, instead of the primary company logo, you might have franchisees use the company logo with their store number added to the bottom of the image.
Set Specific Guidelines for Franchisees to Follow When Advertising Locally
Local advertising is essential for your franchisees. They need to be able to address the local market while staying in line with your company’s brand guidelines.
Because of this, it’s important to give franchisees a little bit of wiggle room on the type of ads they can utilize and the types of promotions they can offer.
For example, maybe you could allow them to hold family-friendly events at their discretion as long as all of the marketing materials follow a specific set of guidelines and are approved before they are used.
Local advertising is important for your franchisees.
It’s also important that your franchisees understand how to use local SEO for marketing their location online. This way, the site appears in the Google business listing when someone is searching for a nearby location.
For example, if you owned a pizza franchise, you would want your local franchises to appear in search listings when someone typed “pizza locations near me” into a search engine.
To be sure your franchisees understand how to make this happen, consider holding a training session, either live or online, to teach franchisees more about the benefits of local SEO and SEO for Google in general, why it’s important to their success, and how to use local SEO in their digital marketing campaigns.
Give your franchisees a bit of wiggle room on the type of ads and promotions they can offer.
Create Branded Assets for Franchisees to Use
A good way to make sure all of your company’s images and logos are cohesive between different locations is to create various branded assets for your franchisees to use in their digital marketing campaigns.
You should at least have different versions of your company logo available, including one grey-scale image, along with guidelines detailing your content distribution dos and don’ts for using the logo images provided.
You should also consider giving franchisees access to your visual brand guidelines, including the hex codes for your brand colors and the fonts specifications your company uses.
Give franchisees access to your visual brand guidelines.
This way all of your colors, fonts, and logos are the same regardless of the company’s physical location.
In addition to making it easy for franchisees to use the correct colors, images, and fonts in their marketing materials, you should also consider creating pre-designed email and ad templates. Remember, franchisees aren’t normally marketing experts, so any pre-designed materials you supply makes their job easier and benefits your company.
Remember, franchisees aren’t normally marketing experts, so any pre-designed materials you supply makes their job easier and benefits your company.
Consider Including a Co-Op Marketing Budget for Franchise Digital Marketing
Marketing can be costly, and because of that, not all franchisees choose to market their location on a regular basis. But marketing your franchisees does benefit the company as a whole too. So you should consider footing the bill for some of your franchisee’s marketing efforts.
Of course, you’ll want to have guidelines for them to follow when applying for reimbursement on their marketing campaigns and you should have all the ads and marketing materials pre-approved before paying a portion of the costs.
Get the Best in Franchise Digital Marketing with the Experts at EWR Digital
Franchise digital marketing has a lot of moving parts, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. As long as you have clear guidelines in place for franchisees to follow, franchise digital marketing is simple.
Ready to get started with a marketing strategy that actually works? Set up a 15-minute call with one of our marketing experts at EWR Digital. Simply click this link.
5 Tips to Make Franchise Digital Marketing Simple | EWR Digital – Houston, TX