A successful social media campaign for local franchises hinges on a great social media strategy and with that comes challenges on a local level. When you own a local franchise and you get into social media marketing and need to build a social media strategy, you also own a challenge few other businesses have to navigate. Multi-location brands have to speak to their local audience from a framework explicitly built for a multi-location audience which can alienate the local community and not speak to the local culture…it can be a bit too general and generic and you may not have the national corporate budget to market on a local level.
Marketing efforts in the form of a digital marketing strategy for local franchises like local businesses must achieve a few things in synergy–fall in line with the directives of the franchisor, convey the right brand messages, implement clear brand guidelines of the franchise business model to your local team, drive local website visitors, and show your regulars you see and hear them.
So how can you stay on brand, have a budget for a social media strategy that drives business, keep brand consistency, maintain social media marketing goals, keep the corporate office happy yet still have an authentic message on social media without a national budget?
Why Social Media?
Fact: social media video receives just as many views as TV.
Would your company market to customers on TV without an approach? Of course not. Social media is no different.
But here are seven more notable reasons.
7 Reasons Franchise Businesses Need a Local Targeted Social Media Franchise Marketing Strategy
In this day and age, the most successful local franchises maintain traditional marketing channels and their own local social media channels. If you want to compete, your marketing efforts must prioritize social media strategy on a local level. Let’s see why.
1) Customer Service
If you have customer service worth selling, put it on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook and sell it. Customers spend on average 147 minutes a day on social media according to Statista and meeting them there when they need you most when they need the customer service department, will win you local customers and empower you to build positive sentiment with your local community.
- You can respond to local customer complaints a lot quicker than the franchisor while showcasing your personalized service skills.
- You can use it to persuade potential customers to visit your establishment, providing directions and links to sites they need to know in the palm of their hand.
- You can improve your local brand reputation by giving the locals a positive, consistent, and entertaining social media experience.
What About Negative Comments?
It happens to every business. The risk of a negative review online is high. About half of all consumer complaints occur on social media. However, if you handle it well, about half of consumers share a positive response and more than 33% recommend the business to friends.
2) Market Insights
Just as customers learn about you online, you can learn about them. Pay attention to your social media analytics and it will reveal insight into your messaging strategy.
3) Earn Trust Locally
According to a report by Nerdwallet, 81% of shoppers research online before making a purchase, including social media pages.
Post positive feedback, testimonials, and engage with your audience directly to build trust. The more they see you as a person, as someone they follow online, the more likely they are to trust you.
4) Boost Brand Awareness
You can also tap into new customers if you harness local hashtags and geotags. If, for example, you participate in local events, you can build an engaged community around your local franchise through social media posts with local content. If you have expertise in something relevant to your brand, show it off on social media using targeted hashtags. Can you offer tips and advice that locals could use? There are social media posts for that!
5) Promote Your Products & Local Events
Social media marketing lets you share important news about new releases, promote local events and sales, product stories, testimonials, reviews, and more.
If you have a last-minute sale or local special, you can promote it on your social media platforms. You can use social media engagement tactics like contests and giveaways to build excitement in the local community for a new release or opening.
Here are a few more ways you can put the product in your franchise above the rest with social media strategy:
- Influencers: Build a social media marketing strategy with a local celeb.
- Deals and promo codes: They can be specific to your location.
- Targeted ads: Analyze your audience and keywords, let creative have at it and then press publish.
- Promote local events: Local events are a great way to integrate with the community, grade school sports games, high school events, fundraisers, local colleges, charities, and community events are where your target market lives. When you understand your local audience like family it is easy for your marketing team to develop a digital marketing strategy that speaks to them.
- Content marketing: Content marketing efforts in the form of a blog have hyper-local reach in search results, even an established brand that speaks to a national audience can still have a local voice in a content form that can be marketed and shared on social media.
6) Job Recruitment
A positive social media experience can promote positive employee experiences and culture can help attract the best talent to you. In fact, a marketing strategy that focuses on job recruitment is one of the main reasons to be on LinkedIn. Point your digital marketing dollars there and your marketing team is sure to return qualified candidates.
7) Align your marketing team with corporate franchise goals
In order to understand how to effectively market on a local level, you need to understand the metrics and data with local-based analytics to improve your social media performance. This comes with challenges with corporate oversight. Always align your local team with the corporate team with your location-based analytics. With this data, franchisees can gain a deeper knowledge of their local market and align corporate teams. Data-based decisions are the gears that turn brands so invest in a social media management tool to gauge the metrics that count the most, engagement, clicks, growth, and views to effectively adjust, increase local impact, and leverage social media content better.
So how can you make it work for you? There are several guide points for you to base your strategy around…
Guide to Social Media Strategy for Local Franchise Marketing
A Franchise social media marketing strategy has its own unique concerns and considerations. Follow the points below when you’re building out your plan.
Create Detailed Policies and Brand Guidelines
Unlike independent businesses which can do as they please, franchise owners need to know the parent brand guidelines before they can go about designing local franchise marketing efforts. Enforcing required corporate policies as a franchisor will help franchisees avoid any infringements of corporate policies, preserve expectations for suitable use of their social media accounts, and prevent any legal issues that could arise as a result in the form of a social media crisis.
In reality, this can make things easier since there should be an existing guideline to help get you started. All you have to do is chart a course in between the guard rails.
Make sure the dos and don’ts of brand guidelines and your specific franchise are thoroughly considered and clearly communicated. You may think a meeting or email covers it but you should really create a source of truth in an easy-to-access document and file, which employees involved in social media management can use.
For example, if you hold local events, you’ll need to let your social media management partner know which images are approved. Having an approved social media marketing file makes it easy to find.
Here’s a cheat sheet of what to cover:
How you can use your logo
Which colors and fonts make the most sense–this is important to consider especially in college sports, where colors carry a lot of meaning.
Brand approved local images.
Design and copy templates.
Voice, tone, mission, vision, and values documents.
To manage social media messaging, create a few pre-approved templates. They should be standard enough to please the brand but flexible enough to suit your needs on a local level.
A social media management tool like Sprout or Hootsuite can help by creating a layer of approval before any posts go live.
Set Clear Goals
Without an objective, social media is a book with no plot.
Defining a few smart, measurable and realistic goals puts the goalposts in eyesight. They give you something to work toward and results that make sense.
Start by brainstorming goals and objectives. Get everything out there and then rank them for if they are attainable, smart, doable, and think about a timeline to see results.
You only want to pick 2 or 3 goals at a time. Three or less…
Focuses your messaging
Increases chances of success
Improves content quality
Set too many goals and you never very far on any of them. The same thing goes for too many social media accounts. It’s understandable to want to be the best on every channel, but if your social media strategy doesn’t have the budget, it’s better to set clear, achievable goals on just a few social media platforms rather than finance a vague social media presence on all of them.
Early on goals include growing follower counts, boosting engagement, driving traffic but as your social media presence grows, you can add things like offer redemption and membership sign-ups. Once you feel like you have your marketing strategy running smoothly, try another social media account.
Design Your Messaging
Your messaging is the engine driving your three core pillars. It’s the value you provide. There are a few ways to go about it from a franchise marketing standpoint.
The brand vision and mission lead everything – they’re steering the ship. To stand out, a franchise has to define an important role on the boat for itself that keeps the captain on course.
Now consider the unique elements about your franchise that support that overall message. There are many ways to organize messaging but four elements stand out.
Vision:
If the overall message is that we improve lives, tell us the story of how you live up to that promise. Make an inspiring video. Come up with funny gifs and memes. Partner with local influencers who share your philosophies.
Utility:
If you are an expert in something, think of how it can provide utility to your followers. Things like tutorials, guides, and how-tos. What is your product’s utility?
Rebuttal:
Audit possible negative responses and workshop avenues for resolution. Get the brand to approve. You may not run every play by the book, but at least you’ll have a library of ideas to get you started and have a North Star.
Action:
Always think about the conversion funnel and don’t turn it into a strainer by putting so many CTAs the viewer has no idea what they should do and bounce. Be bold. What do you want the person to do? Create content that gets them there and use one CTA.
Consider a Super Budget
A great way for franchise locations to fund their social media marketing is by combining budgets as centralized asset management instead of competing with individual franchisees for their local audiences. A social media marketing super budget from multi-franchise locations that lets each of them benefit equally. Local franchisees may not have the budget of their corporate leadership and can be left on their own to pay for their own marketing team and social media presence, in addition, a corporate social media strategy might add growth to individual franchise locations effectively.
Social media super budget: When the franchisor doesn’t have an umbrella budget for its local franchise marketing, regional groups can team up to pool resources to give the group of franchises its own regional flare.
As all franchise owners know, you want every other business with your name on it to look good, whether it’s down the street or in another state.
When each franchise is an island, it creates a challenge to your social media presence when you are under the umbrella of a company’s guidelines and want to differentiate your own business from other franchises nationally . Pooling budgets from multiple locations in a given county or radius you can create a super budget for all the locations. So instead of one location paying for social media marketing for hyper-local content, a super budget is created for a more macro social media marketing campaign that adds more return on ad spend and cheaper budgets.
Local franchises that take advantage of a super budget create excellent buzz around their brand regionally, lifting up each location.
Get to Know Your Audience
This can be tough for a franchise business. Brands often have information painted in broad strokes. Local franchises need more nuance in their research.
Pay attention to your audience. Survey them directly. Ask which social media platforms they’re on, who they follow, what kind of content they like most. You can also wing it by auditing your own followers and looking for trends in the content they respond to, who they follow, what else they like, what they post, and more.
Choose Your Channels
One way of reaching your goals is making sure you publish on the right apps.
You’ll always hear that each channel has its strengths and weaknesses. TikTok, for instance, is more viral, Instagram is more polished, LinkedIn is more business.
But it’s really about knowing where your audience is. If they’re on Twitter, explore the best way you can take advantage of that social media platform. Building a dream team to build out your content and get the posts seen.
How many social channels should you operate?
Here’s what to consider:
Matching workload to the bandwidth of the team
Not spreading your content too thin
Post frequency
Even though it can be tempting to do it all, just having the lights on doesn’t produce any social media marketing magic. The content needs to be purposeful and provide value to the viewer, whether it’s entertainment, education, or inspiration.
You’re a franchise so you don’t have to do it all. Let the brand take care of most of it. Pick one or two you can master and start there.
Create a Social Media Management Structure
A social media management system ensures your content gets made, approved, and published on time. You spend so much time and energy on making content, don’t drop the ball just as you’re getting ready to throw it. Make sure you have a social media management plan.
Most importantly, make sure you clearly assign the process of review and approvals that takes into account all needs for the content. Who approves of the creative? Who approves the caption? Does the brand need to see certain posts before they go live?
Make sure there’s a process that ensures best practices for your business are being followed.
Use a Social Media Management Tool
All the tools in the world are of no use unless you have the right tool that gives your the essential metrics you need for a local social media campaign. A social media management tool like Sprout or Hootsuite helps you with content creation distribution, schedule, promotion and analyze your social media content.
If you’re publishing on several digital platforms, one of these tools can help keep your content organized and flowing.
You don’t need metrics to let you know if your content is working, you can see the likes and comments, but metrics can show you trends over time. This deeper analysis can help you spend your money to reach your target audience more wisely. It helps you measure success.
The wrap-up
Franchise social media campaigns can be tricky which is why a lot of business owners work with social media marketing partners to help. Your social media accounts are one of the most important links you have with your local community, local consumers, and your target market. They’re where people in our local market go for online reviews, and if your local team is more prepared than your corporate team to provide a positive social media experience, the investment will end up paying for itself and impressing the big guys up in corporate.