The year 2022 is rapidly coming to an end. For many franchisors and franchisees across the UK, it was characterised by a post-pandemic rebound resulting in more opportunities for growth. Dozens of new franchisees were onboarded. Many franchisors sought to expand their businesses.
But one thing that has been a constant in franchising throughout the year is franchise marketing. Irrespective of investment amount, industry type, niche, market size or any other metric, marketing is a staple of any franchising business and its importance cannot be underestimated.
With the end of 2022 quickly approaching, savvy franchisors will be asking themselves what new franchise marketing trends they should anticipate for 2023 in order to be best prepared and positioned in their respective industry. We explore these in more detail below.
Table of contents:
What shapes franchise marketing nowadays?
Unlike traditional businesses, franchises operate on two levels when it comes to their franchise marketing efforts.
On the one hand, there is the operational aspect of marketing, which focuses on attracting customers (B2C or business-to-consumer).
On the other, there is franchise development, focused on attracting prospective franchisees (B2B or business-to-business).
Marketing on two fronts can be tough work but is not impossible if the basics are followed. These basics include:
- providing a strong offering in terms of your product or service;
- having a consistent brand presence across multiple channels;
- ensuring you provide dedicated customer support;
- relationship building;
- and understanding of the primary marketing processes that are followed in the customer/prospective franchisee acquisition journey.
Interdependence of factors
Both operational and franchise development marketing must be viewed as two parts of the same coin and not as silos in isolation from one another.
A successful franchisor will attract more clients. This leads to a successful business model that the franchisee wishes to be involved in. Acquiring a new franchisee leads to the franchisor’s growth and expansion. This in turn stimulates the process again and results in a self-perpetuating cycle of growth. This is why simultaneous marketing is essential.
However, there are a few considerations to keep in mind when it comes to this.
Firstly, an overall marketing strategy must be created. Such a strategy should take into account current best practices and anticipated future trends.
With regard to operational marketing efforts, a franchisor must be aware of their purpose. Yes, it’s easy to say that one wants to acquire new customers. But there is customer retention and the all-important brand awareness that must be implemented at the same time.
Franchise development marketing
As for franchise development marketing, this will involve the franchisor positioning themselves as leaders in their industry. Some of the key factors for doing this effectively include placing a strong emphasis on a strong and consistent brand, establishing trust and credibility and showing deep industry knowledge and experience.
Of course, knowing this in theory and implementing the knowledge in practice are two different things. And based on our research, we identified some common marketing challenges that professionals in the franchising industry face. These include, but are not limited to:
- Failing to align marketing and sales efforts
- Not developing a marketing strategy as per the outlets and brand’s requirements
- Lack of brand consistency across the branches
- Failing to automate or use technology appropriately
In addition to these, franchisors also stumble in the actual marketing strategy development process. Why? Because they:
- Don’t utilise different channels to their advantage
- Skip on personalised marketing
- Don’t focus on customer experience
- Don’t differentiate their audiences
As such, when poor preparation meets implementation, the results are less than optimal. To find out more about these challenges, why they occur and how they can be circumvented, download our detailed report that unveils these topics in more detail.
Franchise digital marketing trends in 2023
With 2023 fast approaching, the new year is the perfect opportunity to reflect on your current franchise digital marketing strategy and make efforts to improve it. Having covered some of the most pertinent franchise marketing challenges, there is good news.
These challenges are not insurmountable and can be overcome. It will take a strategic vision and concerted efforts. But the results will be worth it.
If at this point, you’re asking yourself how to create effective digital marketing for franchises, it’s worth considering some of the most prominent and highly anticipated digital marketing trends for franchising over the coming year. Although discussed separately, each trend outlined below is most effective when implemented alongside the rest.
Knowing what to expect in marketing in 2023 can help you create a much more focused and highly effective strategy. This will ensure that your marketing budget is fully optimised and result in targets and key performance indicators that are both met and exceeded.
1. Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Google is by far the world’s most used search engine. It covers billions of queries per day. We are all familiar with the structure of a Google search page. The top results are those that Google deems most relevant based on a consideration of over 200 factors combined.
Ranking at the top of a Google search results page is critical for any business, franchising included. But getting and remaining there is a challenge. Although Google makes around 500 to 600 changes to its search algorithm every year, with most of these being minor, many of these updates require constant vigilance over your web presence.
Google seeks to be as helpful to users as possible. This is why your online presence needs to be fully optimised for this search engine. How can you do this in 2023? Here are a few suggestions and predictions for your success:
- Focus on improving your users’ experience
- Publish fresh, high-quality content
- Strive to achieve featured snippet status
- Avail of the power of video
- Ensure your site has an SSL certificate to address user safety concerns
- Optimise for voice search and mobile devices
- Ensure you offer expertise, are authoritative and trustworthy
Organic SEO
Organic SEO for Franchises – Get Your Brand Listed on the First Page in Google
2. Personalised ads
With an ever-growing and increasingly discerning audience, your paid advertising campaigns in 2023 will need some optimisation, too. But what does this mean in reality?
There is a combination of factors you need to consider starting with the fact that paid advertising is becoming increasingly automated. Algorithms and machine learning are at the back ends of advertising platforms and their effective use means you can optimise your targeting and get the most out of your marketing budget.
Other related and anticipated developments with regard to paid ads next year include:
- Increased focus on smart bidding
- Advertising on social media platforms that your audience is using
- Layer keyword and demographic targeting with Google Ads
- Making the most of the metrics and reporting tools offered by the Ads Data Hub
- Incorporating video into your ad content
- Catering to voice and video searches
- Take advantage of collaborative filtering and remarketing
- Synchronise and align your PPC efforts with SEO
- Look at alternative forums and platforms to advertise – Bing is quickly becoming a giant in the advertising space while forums like Quora are as well.
Google Ads
Google Ads for Franchises – Benefit From Highly Visible Adverts that Convert
3. Email marketing
Perhaps one of the most important resources in a marketer’s toolkit is their email marketing strategy. Most marketers in the industry agree that email is possibly the most cost-efficient and effective way to reach your audience. But with customers and prospective franchisees being bombarded with emails from so many different sources, your emails really need to stand out from the crowd. A couple of ways to achieve this include:
- Not relying on open rates as your key metric
- Personalising your emails to better cater to your target audience’s needs
- Making emails interactive through CTAs, rollover effects, videos, etc.
- Utilising user-generated content to boost the social proof of your offering
- Incorporating automation and artificial intelligence to help you analyse multiple data points
- Optimising your email layout for mobile consumption
- Taking privacy regulations seriously and not infringing on consumers’ rights to choose.
Email Marketing for Franchises
Approximately 4.26 billion people used email in 2022 alone. E- email marketing remains a vital tool that helps you stay in contact with recipients on a regular basis. Unsure of what it is?
4. Local marketing for various branches
Local search marketing comes up under the spotlight for 2023 as well. It is well known that most consumer search queries on search engines such as Google are local. This means a search for brick-and-mortar businesses in their location.
With this in mind, and the fact that franchisors oversee multiple franchisee locations at the same time, it is critical not to ignore the power of local search marketing for your franchise’s success. It takes relatively little effort, is inexpensive, allows for the management of multiple locations through a single master account and it is highly effective in driving foot traffic to your physical location.
So, how can you make the most of what local search marketing offers? Here are some suggestions based on local search trends:
- Make sure every franchisee has their own local business listing on Google My Business
- Manage multiple listings through a single master account
- Ensure consistency and accuracy of critical information such as business name, address and telephone number
- Be sure that there is congruence between your local business listing and your website
- Don’t leave online reviews unattended or unanswered
- Focus on the user experience: fast website loading times, easy navigation, etc.
- Optimise your offering for mobile searches
- Don’t forget to factor in searches that involve voice
- Present fresh, unique and relevant text and video content.
Local Marketing
Local Marketing for Franchises – Give Your Franchisees a Helping Hand
5. Social media marketing
Social media reaches a majority of the world’s population. As such, it has incredible reach and potential. This has not only been measured by its past success as it’s expected to continue gaining momentum over the coming year.
With this in mind, when franchisors use social media as part of their cohesive marketing strategy in 2023, they need to consider:
- The target audience, tone of voice and ultimate aim of each platform (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn etc.) should be carefully considered and the marketing message catered appropriately
- Live streaming, video and valuable content will make great inroads in 2023
- Franchisors should be prepared to use automation to better manage their franchisees’ multiple social media channels to save on time and resources
- It’s also worth considering that e-commerce and live shopping will become facts of life as consumers seek a more personalised and efficient shopping experience
- Personalisation of content will be key.
Social Media Ads for Franchises
There are approximately 4.8 billion social media users around the world – that’s roughly 50% of the world’s population!
6. Branding
It was already mentioned that a brand is one of an organisation’s most valuable intangible assets. And to ensure that franchisors continue to have strong brands that are top of mind for their customers and prospective franchisees, several trends related to branding in 2023 should be acknowledged and responded to:
- Ensuring that your logo is adaptable across multiple channels, platforms, sizes, content types and more
- Branding your visual content for a greater sense of cohesion
- Using relevant hashtags so that your content is more easily discoverable
- Joining online communities and participating as an industry authority with authenticity
- Focusing on having a more “human” brand personality and tone of voice as opposed to using industry jargon that can deter audience engagement
- Taking advantage of customer-driven branding
- Engaging in sustainable and eco-friendly branding initiatives.
Create a Memorable Brand Identity
At a time when so many franchisors are attempting to find new franchisees, professional standard business branding services are more vital than ever.
7. Marketing automation
The final trend for franchise marketing in 2023 that we’ll focus on is marketing automation. Undeniably, it touches on all of the above trends and weaves them together into a cohesive whole.
Customers and prospective franchisees want a unified experience irrespective of whether they are searching for your offering on the web, through your social media channels, on mobile devices, via email or anywhere else.
This is where omnichannel marketing automation tools can help. In addition, having a CRM system in place can help you keep track of data, analyse it more effectively and take steps to remedy and refine your offering.
Also worth bearing in mind for 2023 is:
- More opportunities to conduct deeper data analysis
- Personalisation of your offering, tailor-made to the intended audience possibly through conversational marketing
- Catering and not ignoring the rise of mobile searches and mobile usage
- Automating your email and social media campaigns
- Incorporating the useful features of chatbots
- Not being afraid to implement AI and machine learning in your marketing efforts as a way of helping and not hindering the implementation of your strategy
- Generating high-quality user data accompanied by in-depth dissection and analysis.
Franchise Software – Bespoke Systems Designed for You
Franchise software can make life easier for both you and your franchisees – let Franchise Fame help you identify the custom systems that best suit you.
Wrapping up
Marketing is not a static activity that is repeated over and over again. It involves a process of continuously monitoring, measuring, testing and refining. Franchise marketing involves this, in addition to another factor that adds an element of complexity: franchisors must market to both their customers and their prospective franchisees.
With two distinctly different audiences, they have a tough job ahead of them as they refine their marketing strategy to reach each one effectively. However, an integrated or omnichannel approach that’s followed and which is supported by the right technological tools can ensure that you not only save time and resources but also optimise your offering and increase the returns from your marketing budget.
Downloaded our detailed report on the common marketing challenges that professionals in the franchising industry face to help you plan your franchise development for the next year!
