Managing Local Marketing Across All Your Franchise Locations

To ensure the success of all your locations, you need to give each of them a bit of local love. Where this once meant ads on local TV and radio channels, even local marketing has now migrated to the web.

To ensure that your franchise locations are getting plenty of love in all their locations put these tips into practice:

1. Add SMS marketing to the mix.

Text message marketing is not used by too many franchises, which means that you can stand out from the competition by using this highly effective marketing channel. According to Forbes, nine out of ten texts are read within three minutes of the time that they are sent. Mobile click through rates can be three to five times as high as other channels. By creating campaigns for each of your local markets, you can reach people when they are out and about and possibly spur an impromptu visit to one of your stores.

2. Use local targeting in pay per click ads.

Paid ad services on Google, Facebook and other platforms give you a great deal of geographic control in your ads. By focusing tightly, you can avoid wasting money on clicks that are not from people likely or able to visit your stores.

Create separate campaigns for each area with locally optimized text. These ads will feel more personal to your prospects and make them more likely to read and click through.

3. Track local marketing for each location.

Creating separate local campaigns also makes it easier to track which ads are working well and which ones are not hitting the spot. By comparing areas and seeing which works best in each place, you can hone your ads and significantly improve your return on your PPC marketing dollar.

4. Create Google My Business pages for each location.

Google tends to go to its own data first when it is answering search engine queries. Create a page with up to date information for each physical location you have. Ask happy customers to leave reviews on Google+, as these reviews are often what shows up at the top of the results when someone searches for your business.

5. Compare share of voice and market penetration between your locations.

Your share of voice is the portion of traffic your site gets compared to the total available web traffic. By comparing each of your locations to one another, you can see where you are currently rocking it and where you can use a little bit more love. This can also help you direct your spending, so that you can put every marketing dollar where it can do the most good.

6. Keep it consistent.

Marketing look and feel should be consistent across all of your locations even when you produce marketing materials for each individual spot. After all, the benefit of a franchise is having a successful pattern that you can repeat. Work with franchisees to ensure that any marketing efforts they are doing are consistent with what you want for the brand as a whole. The franchising handbook and guidelines should give an idea of what is permitted and what is not to preserve the integrity of the brand.

7. Delegate what you can.

It may make more sense for individual franchisees to be responsible for some individual location marketing while you balance it out by digital marketing the franchise as a whole. If clear guidelines are in place and you feel that local digital marketing can be handled well by the people responsible for individual locations, this can significantly cut down on what you need to do to keep things in motion.

Marketing a multi-location franchise can often feel like you are spinning half a dozen plates. There are a lot of individual areas to keep track of. When you keep them all revolving smoothly, every location in the organization can benefit.

 

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