5 Winning Strategies To Market Your Franchise Business

For a business to grow, it needs to build relationships with its customers. Whether you want to open a franchise or already have one, relationships with customers do not begin the moment they walk through your doors for the first time.

Typically, these relationships begin at the brand level, when marketing campaigns inform people about your products and services. However, even if people become aware of your brand, there is still a lot of work to be done before they convert to actual sales.

But don't worry! Our franchise SEO experts will share five winning strategies for effectively marketing your franchise business in this post.

Let's begin!

1. Manage Your Local Listings

The local listing ecosystem is a massive network of search engines, data aggregators, local directories, applications, social networks, and other websites.

Each of these properties constantly sends and receives business data to other parts of the ecosystem. This means that even if you send updated location data to one site, it may be overwritten by data from another local platform. Once false information is out there, it can be very difficult to correct it!

The best way to manage local listings is to ensure that as many sites as possible always have the most up-to-date and consistent location information. But this can take time and cost money for franchisees.

Our franchise SEO experts recommend working with search marketing agencies like Digital Resource. We can help with this because we have the systems and publisher connections to spread your information far and wide.

2. Create Optimized Local Landing Pages

Making landing pages for each location is crucial to give people all the information they need about a franchise. This landing page should have everything a customer needs to know to get in touch with the company.

Local landing pages should also have unique copy for searchers to read. This helps the franchise location stand out and dominate search results.

RELATED: How to Create a Well-Designed Landing Page That Converts

To show how landing pages can help with local search in a more concrete way, let's look at a printing franchise as an example. Let's say you own a printing franchise location in a market where a small business owner searches for, "where can I print business cards?"  

The paid ads will likely be at the top of the search results page, followed by the local map results and then the organic results.

The home page for your printing franchise location will most likely rank high in organic results. But that business owner isn't trying to figure out what kind of service he requires.  

He wants to know where he can go to make it happen. Local landing pages direct him to the information he needs to have his cards printed.

3. Consider Paid Search Advertising

Paid search advertising isn't just for big-budget national brands. There are plenty of opportunities and benefits for franchisees to get involved. 

WordLead says that paid ads redirect 65% of traffic. Only 35% of people click on the organic results. Paid ads work better after a customer has decided to buy something.  

Franchisees must be very specific and deliberate if they want to compete for paid search ad spots. Consider the following three options when considering paid search advertising:

• Use geo-targeting to show your ads to people in your market only.
• Use a long-tail approach to keywords. The number of searches for these terms is lower, but they have stronger intent.
• Include location extensions, like your address, phone number, and hours of operation to give searchers more ways to find out about you.

Remember that paid search advertising is not free, so you must make the most of your investment.

4. Invest In Social Media Marketing

If you want to know what social media marketing has to do with marketing your franchise business, go to Google and search for a brand name in your city. On the first page of results, there will almost certainly be several links to social media pages.

Aside from showing up in search results, here are three reasons to keep and invest in marketing your local social profiles:

• People often use social media to find local businesses. When there are pages for both the brand and the location, the local pages receive 85% of all consumer engagement.
• Social media platforms are a big part of what keeps the local ecosystem going. This means that even if customers aren't finding your business through a franchisee's location profile, it's still critical to ensure that your business's information is correct throughout the local area.
• Most social media sites let advertisers reach people based on their location, age, gender, interests, and what they've done in the past. For example, on Facebook, you can choose from a wide range of ad types, run lead generation campaigns that let users fill out forms right on the platform, and track offline conversions by people who have seen your ads.

Using social media for marketing does more than just bring more people to a site and spread the word about it. It gives your franchise a personality that people can talk to and connect with more deeply.

5. Experiment With Localized Blogging

The most effective way to consistently provide search engines with new content is through regular blog posts. Blogging can help you answer specific questions raised by potential customers, which can help you improve your search ranking for long-tail keywords.

However, maintaining a blog requires a significant time commitment: time that franchise owners typically do not have available to them. You can get around this problem by working with a content marketing agency that will manage blogging efforts on your behalf.

Invest In Franchise Marketing

Now that you know how to market your franchise business, you can decide which methods to use and get to work.

Whether you plan to use a few or all of these strategies, keep your branding and marketing consistent.

At Digital Resource, we can assist you in reaching the top of search engine results. Our franchise SEO experts will be on hand to convert a large number of potential customers into leads.

Contact us today for a free consultation.