With over 700,000 franchise establishments in the U.S., it’s clear that franchises are a big part of the nation’s economy. However, many franchisees struggle with balancing how to differentiate their own business from other franchises, while meeting all the guidelines provided by their corporate umbrella.
This is where local social media marketing comes into play. The role of social media marketing has progressed in importance quickly over the years and even more so in the last few months. Today, half of the total global population (3.8 billion users) uses social media, a 9.2% increase to the year prior. In this new normal, consumers are spending increasingly more time online and as a result, CMOs are allocating more of their budget into social media marketing.
Franchise owners looking to improve marketing ROI need to enhance their social media marketing strategy. Social media can be leveraged to tell each franchise’s unique story while boosting customer acquisition and retention. In addition, franchisees can further penetrate their local market by targeting local customers with localized social media accounts. When implemented correctly, franchisees can look forward to measurable results such as lead generation, brand education, and sales.
How Do Franchises Manage Social Media?
Build a seamless communication channel between franchisees and franchisors.
Create localized content and provide customer support, to reach local consumers and increase social media engagement.
Use data-driven analytics and metrics as the fundamental basis for the franchise location’s social media strategy.
The Challenge for Franchises
Social media marketing can get tricky for franchises at times. Franchisors, the owners of each franchise, have different needs in comparison to franchisees, the owners of the single location. Challenges such as maintaining brand control while adhering to brand standards can quickly arise when aligning the goals between franchisors and franchisees. Executing a local social marketing strategy gets complex when your franchise brand has hundreds of locations across the country or throughout the world.
What Problems do Franchisees Face?
Creating a localized social media presence
Sticking to larger brand guidelines
Address social media feedback in a timely manner
What Problems do Franchisors Face?
Brand inconsistencies
Mismanaged local social media profiles
The lack of an engaging social presence
Implementing a workflow system can help franchisors, franchisees, and their teams create a unified social media strategy that meets all the goals of every party involved. Workflows help franchisors easily communicate priorities and give franchisees a simple way to assign tasks to their teams. Without the smooth system that a workflow provides, franchise locations can take too long to engage with customers and create content at scale.
Increasing Brand Loyalty and Awareness
One of the largest benefits of a strong social media presence are the increased revenue streams and word of mouth referrals that come along with it. 52% of Americans who follow brands on social media are more loyal to it. By harnessing the power of their location and region, franchises can create brand loyal advocates out of their community with a localized social presence. A localized social presence already aligns with how a franchise functions. After all, franchises have a strong impact in their local community. 90% of franchise generated income stays in the local community – so why not let a franchisee take advantage of this to capture 70% of brand engagement that happens at the local level?
A social media management tool gives franchisees the ability to maximize their localized presence while eliminating the lack of bandwidth to manage social media. With a social media management tool on their side, they get the power to streamline their social media presence and create, monitor, and publish content at scale.
What’s even more important is that it gives franchisees and their teams the power to own their social media customer support strategy. Customers expect customer support and service through social media. 76% of people who message a business on social media do so for customer service or support. Unfortunately, 49% of customers never end up receiving a response to their social media complaint.
This disconnect between customers and a brand’s social media can lead to a loss in customers and a negative reputation. Franchise locations who can provide a positive customer experience on social media can look forward to an overwhelming majority of customers likely to spread the word about your brand. Nowadays, a social media management tool is necessary for franchisees to meet the needs of their local customers. Finding a tool that helps you create content at scale, find trending content, and address all social media feedback will pay off with customer acquisition and brand awareness.
Powering Social Engagement with Data-Driven Analytics
No matter how creative or responsive your team is when it comes to social media, data-driven analytics are critical to refine and monitor the success of your social media strategy. A recent study found that more than half of marketers plan on creating data-driven decisions in the future.
Aligning your corporate team and franchise goals with location-based analytics can help your brand improve your social media performance efficiently. Franchisors need at-a-glance metrics into each location’s social media performance. Franchisees can dive deeper into analytics such as engagement metrics, post-click breakdowns, and growth count to identify their local impact.
Viewing these key metrics and data is critical to the success of a location’s social media presence. Franchisees can leverage data for social content creation with the insights of what content resonates with their audience and measure the post performance at the end. Franchisors on the other hand can quickly decipher which areas of their social media strategy a branch can improve on at a glance. When your brand’s decisions are data-driven, it can boost your brand’s social media reputation and performance tremendously – ultimately generating more brand awareness and conversions.
Franchise locations can be set up for social media success when they leverage a social media management tool and follow these steps to tell their own local story. Creating a strong social media presence is a fundamental aspect of a brand’s reputation and goes a long way in maximizing ROI, brand awareness, and brand loyalty.
Our Social Suite gives your brand all the tools and analytics to ensure your brand’s social media strategy for each location is positioned for success. Business Evaluation’s Social Suite includes a workflow system to address these unique challenges faced by franchises. With alerts and reporting accessible for multi-location brands in one dashboard, you can save a large amount of time and resources. These features are easy to scale on a budget as you continue to add franchise locations, with our unlimited user licenses.
Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google Posts, your team can easily monitor all social media accounts easily in one area and give you deeper insights at a glance. Managing your local social campaigns at scale can be done effortlessly within our dashboard. Bulk publishing and publishing groups across all providers, regions, and locations help marketing teams, franchisees, and franchisors have complete visibility. Social Suite users can also make sure to never miss a beat when it comes to replying back to feedback from fans.
Schedule a free demo to learn about how your enterprise brand’s social media strategy can be taken to the next level with our Social Media Tracking Platform.
