After three years of working with large and small franchise units I’ve conclude there is a simple formula for successful online marketing for franchisees. The formula may be simple but its implementation is somewhat involved. Read on:
1. Tailor Your Campaigns to Each Franchisee. To properly implement an online marketing campaign for your franchisees you need a) a landing page for each product or service, b) hundreds, perhaps thousands of properly researched search terms, and c) dozens of ads that are designed to tie these terms to a specific landing page. This needs to be done for each franchisee fifty, one hundred, or a thousand times. I’ve often seen a 50% improvement in performance just by tailoring a campaign.
2. Show the Ads Only in Areas that the Franchisee Can Serve. Franchisees often lose money on online advertising. The main culprit– paying to show an ad outside of the service area. Considerable time and money can be lost when a franchisee is forced to interface with prospects they have little to no chance of converting to customers. All this increases the Franchisee’s Customer Acquisition Costs which may lead to an erroneous conclusion that online marketing does not work.
3. Route the Prospect to the Web Page of Franchisee in their Area. Just as the campaign needs to be specific to the franchisee—the page the prospect is sent to must be specific to the franchisee. When a prospect arrives at your site from the organic or “free” listings, it’s okay to send them to your home page that contains your “Store Locator” tool. Prospects who click on paid search ads tend to be more impatient. Here’s where using a combination of the search engine’s local targeting options and a localized landing page can really lift conversions.
4. Manage each Individual Franchisee’s Campaign. In addition to setting up franchisee level campaigns, changes to bids, ad copy, landing pages, offers and keywords should occur at the local level. Why? Here’s where online is no different than offline. Offers, prices, products, services etc that sell really well in New York City may not resonate with consumers in Boise. In addition the competition for customers may vary greatly from one market to the next. This is hard work, but if you really want to see stellar campaign results, it’s a must do.
5. Separate Out Selling Franchises From Securing Business for the Franchisee. Franchisors want to sell more franchisees, which is a good thing. Franchisees want more customers, which is also a good thing. Although both are good, they are very different. A direct response campaign should have a singular focus. Promoting too many things at once only distracts and confuses the prospective customer. If the keyword that brought the prospect to your site is “Math Help,” the page they land on should be all about proving how you’re the best option for helping them with math and nothing else. I’ve even seen a case where a franchise was driving all search traffic to the main page of the site, which in addition to selling franchises, also encouraged visitors to enter complaints about a franchisee! Remember, your competition is only one click of the Back Button away.
Nothing that I’ve stated above is rocket science. But if you have more than a handful of franchisees in your system, it can be a daunting task. Your choice is to either staff up or hire a qualified agency to run your campaigns. In either case, if you follow these rules your franchisees will get more customers from the Internet.
Steve Thompson is co-founder and Managing Director at siteEDGE agency. Steve has extensive experience in structuring; managing and optimizing online marketing campaigns for small and large (+500 units) franchise systems as well as large companies with a regional or local focus. To contact Steve, email him at Steve dot Thompson at siteEDGE agency dot com.