Your franchise marketing strategy wouldn’t be complete without local marketing for franchises. And there are several reasons for this. Firstly, your franchisees operate at community levels, really getting to know their customers and communities. This means that if you target your local marketing strategy for franchises, your franchise business will reap the rewards.
There’s a lot to be said about local marketing for franchises. But perhaps the most important thing is the spill-over effects it can have on the overall franchise network. To find out more about real, concrete ways to solidify your local marketing offering, take a look below.
Table of contents:
Benefits of having a local marketing strategy
The importance of local marketing cannot be overstated. Here are just some reasons why it is so essential:
- You’re targeting a specific audience
- It’s time and cost-efficient
- It offers full sales potential
- Enables you to localise ads and monitor traffic
- Ensures brand consistency
- Helps you understand your customer’s journey better
- Enables you to study your competition, and
- Helps franchise business build greater authority
If you’d like a more in-depth look at these benefits and how they pan out in practice, take a look at our thorough guide on the importance of local marketing.
How to develop a local marketing strategy
Marketing is a very wide space for manoeuvring. And your local digital marketing strategy should be part and parcel of the whole. Your franchisees will greatly benefit from it and so will your wider franchise business. You can reap the rewards in terms of both brand consistency and boosted sales. What’s not to like about it? But before you get started, you need a clear strategy. Below are some ideas you could use when creating yours.
1. Discover your target audience
First things first. Do you know who you’re targeting your products or services to? Do you have an ideal buyer persona? If you answered “no” or “unsure” to either of these questions, then taking the time to do this should be your first and most fundamental step.
There’s a saying that’s been heard in many circles: “if you try to sell to everyone, you’re really selling to no one”. And the same is true for every franchise business.
This is why you need to conduct surveys, interviews, questionnaires and a multitude of other ways to find out your ideal customer’s demographics, psychographics, pain points, consumption habits and more. Knowing who you’re targeting is the first step on your journey.
2. Understand your customers’ journey
The customer journey loosely refers to the process through which your customers get to know your brand and eventually choose you as their product or service provider. In marketing, this concept is generally depicted through the fictitious “sales funnel”. This funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. The funnel is also divided into several sections or parts of the journey.
Firstly, it starts with building awareness. The second step is discovery (where your prospective customers actively start seeking out more information about your business). Next is the evaluation phase, followed by intent, purchase and it all culminates in the final step: loyalty.
Mapping your customer journey is another important step in the local marketing process and strategy. Why? Because you need to know how your customers come to know your brand to determine which marketing channels were successful so that you can replicate this success again and again in the future.
3. Take a closer look at your competition
Many franchisors spend a lot of time and resources fine-tuning their national and international marketing strategies. But what about doing so on the local level for multiple franchisees on the ground?
If you’ve neglected this step, it’s time to consider studying which businesses your franchisees are competing against on the local level. Here, you’ll wish to study their competitive advantage, target market, marketing methods and other critical points to help you position your franchise more strategically.
4. It’s time to build authority
Google loves websites (and by extension, businesses) that are authoritative. The reason behind this is that the search engine seeks to add as much value to its users as possible.
Your brand’s online presence needs to be cohesive and holistic at every turn. This means catering to your customers’ needs better, being viewed as more trustworthy and reliable than competitors and generally having greater authority over others in the industry.
Yes, this takes time to build, but there are ways you can go about doing so. Here are a couple of ways you could do this:
- Double-check that your website is mobile-friendly and that it has a great design for optimal UX.
- Use CRO-optimised landing pages for every campaign and for every business location.
- Update your title tags and meta descriptions.
- Localise and SEO-optimise your website.
- Claim your local Google Business listings on third-party websites and directories.
- Invest in local SEO to optimise for local search.
- Encourage local reviews from your local customers.
- Localise your paid advertising through Google Ads.
- Continue to fill your sales funnel with remarketing.
- Create localised content.
- Use localised email marketing to your advantage.
- Use video to illustrate your local content and capture your audience’s attention and interest.
- Get local on social media and leverage it to your advantage by optimising your pages.
- Join relevant local groups and use local hashtags.
- Do outreach and link-building.
- Leverage your e-commerce activity and presence.
- Integrate CRM tools in your systems and processes for greater efficiency.
- Don’t hesitate to use your PR aimed at local media outlets.
- Get active in your community: sponsor or host events, start a scholarship, partner with local businesses or get involved with offline activations.
- Consider using direct mail campaigns.
- Use user-generated content.
Local marketing ideas
And while all of the above may sound overwhelming, you shouldn’t panic. These are just strategies to help your franchise business optimise its marketing efforts. But as the finale to this article, we’ll also share a few local marketing strategy ideas, which you can implement right away.
Let’s start with suggestion boxes. These are great ways of getting customer feedback and encouraging loyalty.
Also, don’t hesitate to use local sidewalk signs. These can be fun and creative and really make you stand out from the crowd.
Meanwhile in the online space, why not hold a social media contest to boost engagement?
And lastly, consider distributing local print marketing materials throughout your community so that you remain top of mind when they next need your product or service.
Final remarks
Building your local marketing strategy doesn’t have to be overwhelming or cumbersome. With the right talent at your disposal, you really can take your franchise business to the next level and beyond.
Of course, at Franchise Fame we’re more than happy to help hear out your needs and assist you with your local marketing. We have a broad palette of marketing services in our portfolio with great emphasis on local marketing.
So, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with us and we’ll get right back to you so that you can finally achieve the “franchise fame” you’ve always strived for.
Local Marketing
Local Marketing for Franchises – Give Your Franchisees a Helping Hand
