Social Media Marketing Tips For Franchises

One of the major selling points franchisors offer their prospective franchisees is a marketing budget which is used to market franchisees’ businesses locally. This budget and the associated marketing collateral or assets help a franchisee get on with what they do best and leave the marketing to the franchisor. This is why many franchisors have centralised or even outsourced marketing teams to curate, create and share content across multiple platforms.

Of course, social media is becoming a major go-to for many franchisors because of its extensive reach and popularity. In addition, marketing on social media can be much more affordable than using traditional marketing methods. For this reason, franchisors will be well-advised to follow the franchise social media tips outlined below to improve your chances of marketing success.

Franchise social media marketing tips

Social media for franchises today is not important. It is essential.

If you want your franchise business to:

• reach new customers,
• remain relevant,
• strengthen your brand,
• help with customer enquiries,
• address complaints,
• thank customers for their reviews and testimonials,
• spread the message about a sale, company news or an upcoming event,
• and overall maintain a good reputation online – social media is the place to be.

With this in mind, we offer seven tips below as you embark on creating your franchise’s social media marketing strategy. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Understand your franchise’s target audience

Every professional marketer will tell you that you need to define your buyer persona before you embark on any marketing campaign. If you’re not sure what a buyer persona is, think of it as a fictional representation of your target audience.

This persona will consider factors such as age, gender, cultural affiliation, income levels, interests, pain points and more of your ideal buyer. Why is this important? Because if you don’t know who you are marketing to, your efforts will be wasted.

There’s an often cited saying that goes like this: if you are trying to market to everyone, you are marketing to no one. And this is absolutely true.

Although we may think that everyone is our target audience, the truth is that you’re only catering to a specific group in a given market.

Knowing everything you possibly can about this group and their online habits can help you create a stronger social media strategy and overall campaign.

2. Choose the right social media platforms

Once you know who your target audience is, you need to figure out where they can be found on social media. Luckily, with the plethora of social media channels and platforms available, this won’t be too difficult.

For example, LinkedIn is a professional networking platform and it’s great for B2B connections. If your franchise business is in this line of work, then you want to be targeting LinkedIn and ensure that you put out relevant content from your brand. Other platforms include Facebook and Instagram.

The latter is great for image sharing and stunning visuals a.k.a. perfect for landscaping or gardening franchises because you can really showcase what you are offering. Of course, there is also Twitter, Reddit and TikTok. It’s just a matter of aligning your target audience with their preferences and then selecting the right social media platform for your aims.

3. Consistency is the key

So, you’ve got a target audience in mind, you’ve picked the relevant social media channels, and now it’s time to post your content. However, this is where the crux of your social media efforts comes into play.

The reason behind this is that the message that you send out – irrespective of whether you’re promoting a sale or announcing company news – needs to be wholly and completely consistent with your brand.

This means that you need pre-approved brand assets such as logos and visuals, the right colour hues that your business uses and basically a brand guideline to ensure that your content is consistent with your brand image and tone of voice.

Any deviations or watering down of any of this content will be detrimental to your brand. And it’s critical that you are completely consistent with every single social media post you upload.

It’s also critical that you have a posting schedule, which means posting regularly and at the same time every time. This will help your audience create expectations about what they can expect from your brand and when.

If you fail to be consistent both in terms of content presentation and your scheduling, your brand’s image will be negatively impacted. If you are still wondering how to maintain your brand consistency online, take a look at this compilation of case studies from the most famous franchise brands:

4. Don’t forget about your social media policy

It’s also a very good idea to have a social media policy in place. At this stage, you might be wondering why this is even necessary. And we’re here to give you the low down.

Developing a franchise social media policy is crucial for two main reasons:

1. You are creating rules and guidelines for how your brand will be portrayed in the social media space.
2. Your employees or the members in your social media team will be fully aware of how to handle customer complaints. To avoid negative online buzz, they should know what tone of voice they to use, what options they can offer a disgruntled customer, and how to appease the situation so that it doesn’t backfire on your business.

This practice applies whether you are managing social media at headquarters through an internal team or a digital agency or whether your franchisees are managing their own channels.

If the latter is the case, then a social media policy has never been more important because of the diversity of messaging that can come out.

Every franchisee needs to be on the same page when posting on social media and if this isn’t the case, then you’re dealing with the problem of brand dilution.

5. Create engaging and shareable content

Next up, we look at the actual type of content that you can and should be posting online. In essence, this content should be engaging and shareable.

If you create engaging content that is shareable, your existing followers will spread the word about your business within their own networks. This means greater reach for your brand and potentially more customers.

They say that social media marketing doesn’t have to be expensive, and it generally isn’t, but nothing spreads the word about your business better than word of mouth.

So, if you create content that your audience loves and they share this with others, you can think of this as a great way to expand your franchise business’ reach.

Of course, your content should always add value. Irrespective of whether it’s text-heavy, video, image-based or something else.

6. Leverage your social media advertising

So far, we’ve spoken about social media marketing in a more organic way. While this does have extreme potential for business growth and reach, there is another way you can supercharge your efforts. And that is through social media advertising.

Paid social media ads have the potential to reach a much wider audience and if the content is engaging enough, you can truly earn from your efforts.

However, you need to be aware of which channels you will advertise on and have clear expectations or key performance indicators that you can use to measure the success of a particular social media campaign.

7. Monitor and analyse social media metrics

Finally, it’s all about monitoring and analysing your social media metrics. If you don’t know what is or isn’t working, how will you know whether your campaign has been successful or not?

This is where social media analytics comes to the fore as an essential step that is used to refine and test your efforts so that you can produce even better and more effective results for your next campaign.

It’s all about learning about what works and doesn’t work and making the necessary tweaks and adjustments to your campaign to maximise its value for your franchise business.

Bottom line

If you are convinced of the power of social media, you are already on the right track. The question that now arises is how to actually implement your social media strategy. Yes, you can use your in-house teams to help you strategise on and implement your campaigns.

However, working with a digital marketing agency with experienced staff that know the franchise industry inside and out is your best bet. Get in touch with us at Franchise Fame to discuss the goals you have in mind for your social media channels and we’ll create a powerful social media strategy that gives you the results you want to achieve.

Additionally, you can take our Franchise Growth Quiz. Let us know a few details about your franchise and we’ll send you a personalised report.