Traditionally, franchises under £10,000 are known as low cost franchises, and are typically companies who don’t have large overheads such as business premises.

Marketing a franchise can be difficult. With numerous cooks in the kitchen, brand visibility starts to slip and there’s a noticeable lack in cohesively working to generate leads and gather data.

It is possible for low cost franchises to transform into high value franchises. Setting clear goals for the business enables an effective marketing strategy to be created, establishing direction for employees and customers.

But, if this is your first time creating a marketing strategy, we have a few tips on where to place your focus first.

Brand awareness and consistency

As mentioned above, there is a trend amongst low cost franchises to not need a physical business location. Therefore, it is absolutely key for these franchises to make themselves visible, both online and wherever possible through mainstream media platforms and printed marketing.

The best way to do this is with strong branding. If you’re not an expert in this area, work with a branding agency who will be able to nail this on the head for you and provide you with any and all assets needs to ensure your branding is consistent across various platforms.

Without brand consistency, it’s near impossible for users and customers to recognise you from one thing to the next. McDonalds is an exceptional example of this, using the curved golden arches and scarlet red for near enough all their advertisement and promotion, distinguishes them from all other fast food chains and comforts customers with familiarity. 

Local marketing

Whether you’re a regional, national or international franchise, it’s best practice to take interest in the local market and community that surrounds you. In hindsight, researching the brand’s heritage will help to understand why the company was started in the first place and what problems it was expected to solve, unveiling who you would choose to target with your strategy. On top of this, the closest to home results will be clear in the impact your strategy has on the local market, use this to your advantage and identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses.

Research like this should help form the basis of your marketing strategy. Including who’s best to target, how best to target that market, and which campaigns will connect most with the target market and be engaged with on the chosen platforms.

Share informative, insightful and engaging content

For any company working towards being number one for their industry, the top traffic source to be number one for is organic. By organic, we mean the natural listings in the SERPs which don’t require any bidding or payment to get there, just pure deserving matter.

With the way the industry is changing, one thing that has come to light is that companies should be sharing any and all information that a user may want to see in order to make a definite decision.

Whether this is by sharing thoughtful and insightful content on your blog, having a section on your website dedicated to how-to guides, or linking to other relevant, informative pages from your product pages that may help a user in making their decision.

If you’re frequently active on your social media accounts, then uploading engaging and asked for content on your website provides you with a continuous influx of posts to share on your feed. This is the kind of social media content to draw followers back to the website, and from there, all content should be working together to help the user convert confidently.

Utilise all platforms that are beneficial to your business

When establishing a marketing strategy for your franchise, it’s extremely easy to get heads down in the avenue of marketing. Be that the website, search engine optimisation, or traditional forms of media marketing such as TV or radio adverts.

However, depending on what your end goal is, there are various routes to experiment with in achieving this.

1.      Email newsletters

The reasons for using email marketing will vary from business to business, but the most popular reasons globally are as follows:

o   If the only time a user communicates with a brand is when they reach out, it quickly becomes a one-way relationship with very little trust. Hearing from a business – this doesn’t have to be every week but once in a while – helps to reassure customers in your products and services, building credibility for your brand.

o   Offering an incentive is often a sure way to get many users to convert on your website, but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they’ll return without the incentive. However, newsletter subscribers are already invested in the business for one reason or another, offering an incentive to these users can provide the extra nudge they needed to make a decision that they’ll continue going forward.

o   An email newsletter is the perfect platform to experiment. The impermanence of email newsletters is attractive to marketers as they can trial without upsetting the website or offending social media followers. If it is found that email subscribers were perceptibly responsive to a certain email newsletter, then this can be rolled out on other platforms where appropriate.

o   For many industries, the last few years have shown a considerable shift in the number of mobile users compared to desktop users on their website. Therefore, with over two thirds of people opening their emails on their mobile, email newsletters enable you to connect directly with mobile users and encourage them to visit your website.

2.      Social media

It is expected for businesses to be visible on social media nowadays and is considered odd when a business isn’t active on social media. However, that doesn’t mean you should set up an account on every social media platform there is and post the same content to each one.

For example, if your franchise is a restaurant, you’ll find Instagram to be the most engaging platform. With users searching for restaurants locally and looking at images to decide if this is the cuisine they fancy. With that in mind, you wouldn’t want to waste your time on Linked In, where the main market is other businesses.

3.      Paid ads

Whilst the top spot in the organic SERPs is where most businesses want to be, the journey to get there can be quite slow. In the meantime, using paid ads can bring a significant amount of traffic to your website whilst this progresses in the background.

Again, the type of paid ads that you should be using will depend on which platform users predominantly use to search for your industry.

Using the example above, if you are a restaurant looking to increase brand awareness through paid ads, using paid Instagram or Facebook ads would be the best route. Whereas, a company like TaxAssist Accounts who are best to catch potential customers when they’re searching for their service, would be better off to use Google paid ads.

As expressed, it’s unfeasible to plan a marketing strategy without knowing what the marketing strategy will be working to achieve. Once a realistic goal has been decided, from there you can mould your marketing strategy to target the correct audience in the best way. Ideally using some of the tips above, your low-cost franchise can grow from strength to strength.

This article was brought to you by https://www.franchisesupermarket.co.uk/.