How to Devise a Digital Marketing Plan for a Franchise

It is 2016. The internet is kind of important now and it’s not going away anytime soon. This statement is not controversial in the least; anybody who would deny the importance of the internet is clearly insane. And yet still, many businesses and franchises move ahead with marketing plans that are straight out of 1994. To properly and effectively market your franchise you need to devise a specialized digital marketing plan. But what is the best way to do this? Well, read on and discover how to devise a digital marketing plan for your franchise!

Franchise Marketing Plans

Franchise marketing plans have been around just about as long as franchises have, but digital marketing is still a relatively recent development, and what’s more, it is always changing. The truth is, a successful digital marketing plan is so much more involved and intricate than just transferring an offline plan to digital media. There are a great many factors to consider. Such as:

Website Design and Development

Today, the first time most people come in contact with your franchise is when they visit your website. Your website is the first thing most potential customers will see, so you have got to impress them. But a good website is so much more than flashy and crisp graphics. You have to consider functionality, content, and even little things like font choice can be crucial. And that’s just how your website will appear on laptops and desktops, to say nothing of your mobile presence, which today, is just as, if not even more, important than a landing page. A well-thought out mobile marketing strategy is a key part of any modern day franchise marketing plan, as is mobile application development.  A word of warning before you allow all your franchisees to go rampant on social media is to have a social media marketing policy.  This will serve as a set of guidelines for the franchisees to ensure everyone is consistent with their brand messaging on social media.

Optimization

Another key component of a digital franchise marketing plan has to do with optimizing your content. Both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) are great tools that, when used correctly, get the maximum amount of attention for your franchise. SEO utilises keywords to increase your business’s visibility in search engines. SMO will get your franchise noticed on social media, help you engage with customers, and heighten your brand awareness.  Often multi-unit franchises will face the challenge of having unique content for each of their locations.  If investment can’t be made to customize all local content, then at the very minimum correct canonical tags need to be placed on duplicate content at the franchisee sites to ensure Google doesn’t penalize multiple submissions of the same page.

Online Reputation Management

When crafting a digital franchise marketing plan you have to consider your online reputation. How to establish one? How to maintain a positive association?And how to deal with any problems that may arise? Online reputation management is all about measuring, monitoring, tracking, and creating constructive conversations about your brand, largely through social media. It can be difficult to stay on top of at times, but you need a good online reputation management strategy if your digital franchise marketing plan is to succeed.  There are many tools available to listen and the sophisticated franchisors are going one step further and using an online review generation and management system to help increase review on the social sites such as Yelp, Google My Business and others.  These reviews help with local search optimization and can also be brought back into a franchisee’s site and displayed using API feeds for better visitor experience and validation.

And more

These points are only some of the pillars needed to construct a great digital franchise marketing strategy. How can you stay on top of all this? This is a simple buy vs build decision.  Either you spend the man hours doing it yourself, or you can engage with a franchise marketing agency that can help manage the digital marketing for your franchises.  Contact ClickTecs today to see how we have helped numerous franchises with their digital marketing plans at the franchisor and franchisee levels.