The overall number of social media users throughout the world is always on the rise.
If you want to make an impact on your target audiences, you need to use these avenues to promote your business. But it takes much more than merely creating social media business accounts. This is especially true if you are a franchise.
You would have to promote all your branches to the respective local audiences while maintaining your overall brand identity. Also, you need to make your presence felt in a highly competitive landscape. Here are some tips for using social media marketing in your franchise business:
Go Local – We live in a world where the use of mobile devices is increasing phenomenally. Customers are always on the move and using their smartphones, tablets, and other devices to search for information about brands on social networks.
They read customer reviews and consume your content, and a large percentage of the searches are location-based. If you want to reach these customers, you need to use the local business ecosystems to your benefit by integrating your franchises’ branches.
Monitor Social Media – When it comes to listening to your customers and responding to them, it is crucial to have a centralised system. You need to monitor all your local social media activities across various platforms and address any potential problems as soon as you notice them. An experienced social media marketing company would be able to handle these aspects for you.
Build Better Buyer Personas – While an experienced marketing team can create comprehensive buyer personas, your franchisees would be able to make them much better nuanced. Since they deal with local customers every day, they know their habits, problems, intent, and worries much better. They would also be able to help you create localised content that engages your customers and drive more conversions for your franchise network.
Adapting To Various Channels – Since every social media network targets different audiences and has a specific purpose, you need to adjust your content marketing strategy specifically for the channels you use. For example, if your branding and product rely on high-quality images and visual content, you should focus your marketing efforts on Instagram.
Facebook is about expanding your brand presence and keeping customers engaged, as it is the largest social network today. If you want to share news and promote new content while communicating with other brands as well as your customers, Twitter is the platform you should be using.
Create Fresh Content – When it comes to promoting a franchise, there is a level of complexity which gets added to your existing social media marketing strategy. You need to ensure that the content you create resonates with and keeps your local audiences interested, on specific social networks. However, make sure that each franchise has original content that they can use.
As mentioned earlier, while maintaining the freshness and individuality of content for every single branch in your network, you also need to focus on establishing a recognisable and reliable brand that garners trust. In simple words, the local content that you create should not harm your franchise’s brand image.
Maintain Consistency in Branding – Consistency is the other factor to keep in view while creating any content for your social media marketing strategy. You can do this by establishing comprehensive social media guidelines.
These should have distinct rules at your franchisees need to follow and clear instructions regarding the type of content they need to focus on. When you use social media correctly, it helps you establish a unique personality and humanise your brand.
Use Analytics – Skilled social marketing professionals will help you set clear social media goals. They will also employ digital marketing analytics tools that will help you assess the performance of every single branch in the social media channels that you use. If you are a franchise dealing with multiple accounts in various locations, you would have to choose the metrics and tools very carefully.
While you focus on reaching local audiences, make sure that your company’s branding efforts remain untouched. If you want to know more, feel free to get in touch with us at The Franchise Institute. You can call us on 1300 855 435 or fill in this contact us form, and we’ll reply as soon as we can.
Thanks for reading, The Franchise Institute Team 1300 855 435
