Digital Marketing Strategies For Franchisors

One of the topics that continues to be a popular theme at industry conferences is digital marketing strategies for franchisors, specifically around lead generation and franchise development growth. 

Everyone in franchising wants to know how to grow their system using digital marketing! But how do you start? How do you differentiate your brand on digital platforms? How can you use digital marketing to attract qualified franchise candidates? 

We answer all of your questions in this post – ready, set, let’s talk digital.

Why Digital Marketing Is Essential for Franchise Growth

For decades, the only way to grow your franchise (or any business!) was to use traditional marketing strategies such as flyers, events, radio, and even newspaper ads. Despite digital marketing only being around for 35 years or so, it’s funny how running ads in a newspaper feels ancient to modern marketers!

Marketing your franchise is all about attracting attention and connecting with your audience wherever they are, which is why digital marketing for franchisors has become more and more important.

Seeing as around 67% of all people in the world are on the internet, the need for a strong digital marketing presence for franchise brands is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s now an absolute necessity for brand awareness and lead generation.

Digital marketing helps your franchise brand grow by:

• Bringing attention to your brand across channels
• Creating connection points with potential candidates
• Telling your story and sharing your mission and values
• Directing potential leads to your website and inquiry forms
• Offering both organic and paid marketing opportunities

Key Digital Marketing Strategies for Franchisors

Here are some of the essential digital marketing strategies for franchisors to help you attract qualified leads, nurture them through your content, and create brand awareness.

SEO for Franchise Websites – Optimizing for local and franchise-wide search

Your franchise website is your hub. It’s like a digital home for your franchise brand where campaigns are directed back to, leads can find you and learn more, and ultimately convert your audience into your funnel.

SEO is a key part of your franchise website. Use SEO research tools like SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, or Moz Keywords to find terms and questions you can address on your pages or blog posts to help drive traffic to your website. Search is constantly evolving as AI changes how websites rank and how users view search results, so be sure to monitor the impacts of AI on your website rankings, traffic, and SEO.

Optimize your website for local and franchise-specific audiences by using targeted keywords (‘fitness franchises available in Dallas’) and having an excellent user experience to continue to boost your website ranking on search engines.

Paid Ads (PPC & Social Ads) – Running geo-targeted franchise campaigns

Paid ads are a great way to target specific audiences, focus on certain keywords, and see an increase in traffic to your website. PPC (pay-per-click) is an especially effective, although competitive, way to generate leads for your franchise website.

Geo-targeting allows you to direct ads or search engine placement specifically to people in certain geographic areas. Here’s a great article that outlines how to use geo-targeting in your digital marketing strategy.

Social ads are another great option for brand awareness, improving conversion for existing leads, and targeting by geographic location. Paid social ads are a high-volume, low-quality digital marketing tactic, so it is best used in combination with other digital marketing strategies.

Social Media Marketing – Engaging potential franchisees and customers

Organic social media marketing offers many ways to get in front of potential candidates for free. Be sure to focus on the platforms where your ideal franchise owner already spends time, and create a content and engagement strategy to connect and interact with your audience.

Engagement is just as important as content and posting on social media. Have a plan (with guidelines mapping out dos and don’ts) to comment meaningfully, follow new people, and reply to messages. Engagement creates conversations and helps you grow your social media channel.

There is a huge opportunity for short-form video, showing the behind-the-scenes of owning a business and mixing consumer with franchise-focused content. Short-form videos help with reaching more people on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts.

Content Marketing & Blogging – Thought leadership and franchise education

How is content marketing different from social media? While social media does use content, it is typically short form and exists for a short period in an algorithm cycle. 

Content marketing is typically longer form and more evergreen. Long-form content can direct traffic back to your website over an extended time and is more dedicated to thought leadership and building SEO.

Examples of great content marketing for franchise growth include:

• Creating educational videos on YouTube
• Writing blog posts with thought leadership or education
• Articles you submit to publications
• Podcasts – start your own or feature as a guest on others

Email Marketing for Franchise Growth – Lead nurturing and owner support

As you attract and convert your audience into leads in your nurture funnel, you’ll want to nurture those leads continuously. Email marketing is a hugely effective way to nurture your leads and support your existing franchise owners!

Email marketing allows you to access leads directly in their inbox, share news or announcements, educate them on your mission, and get them to book calls to learn more about next steps in their franchise journey.

Email marketing is also a great tool to support your existing franchise owners with resources, keeping them in the loop, sharing helpful suggestions for business growth, and supporting them if issues arise.

Leveraging Data and Analytics for Marketing Success

As you implement your digital marketing strategies and techniques above, you’ll want to capture data and understand your analytics so you can adjust, tweak, and compare your results over time.

Tracking Key Metrics – Conversion rates, engagement, ROI

There are a lot of data points you can track in your franchise digital marketing – here are the metrics we recommend capturing:

Conversion Rates — How many people are clicking on your campaigns? How much traffic do you get from your SEO efforts? Conversion rates are the number of people who successfully performed a desired action. Know what the desired action is for each channel and track the successes.

Engagement — Engagement is anything that intentionally interacts with your content, from clicks to likes to comments to shares. Knowing what content is getting higher engagement will inform your future strategies, so tracking this metric is key.

Want to know how to track your ROI? See a few options below:

Cost per lead — How much does a lead cost on a specific channel? Calculate by dividing the total cost of a campaign by the number of leads generated by that campaign.

Lead-to-close ratio — This metric shows your ‘close rate’ and can be calculated overall, by source, or by campaign. Divide the number of closed deals (calls booked is another strategy) by the total number of leads and multiply by 100 to see it as a percentage. 

ROI on marketing spend — To see your return on investment for a specific campaign, channel, or even your overall franchise marketing efforts, calculate your total revenue and your total marketing cost and use this formula: ROI = (Revenue – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost 

AI & Automation – Chatbots, automated email sequences, AI-driven content

In any good digital marketing strategy for franchisors and franchise brands, there will be a lot to accomplish. To streamline tasks like content marketing, lead nurturing, and website management, AI-driven automation and content creation can be extremely helpful. 

The time you save can be used for tasks that need the human touch, like coaching franchisees on their marketing efforts, coming up with unique, creative content ideas, or running engaging events.

Here are some examples of how AI-driven solutions can help your digital marketing:

• Transcribe videos you create for YouTube for your blog
• Chatbots on your website can answer customer questions
• Automated email campaigns to convert more leads
• Analyze high-performing content to generate more content ideas
• Write video script wireframes for faster filming

Learn how our FBR clients are succeeding in their digital marketing with our featured case studies: Spoiled Rotten Photography is attracting high-quality leads, and 360Clean is closing 3x their franchise leads.

In Summary: Digital Marketing is Essential for Franchise Growth

Digital marketing is a necessity for franchise brands to create awareness, drive lead generation, and grow their system. This article provides a comprehensive guide to why digital marketing is important, what to put in place, and advice for the best results.

In summary, here are the steps for digital marketing and what to have in place for an effective franchise marketing strategy:

• Franchise website built for conversion
• SEO for your franchise website
• Paid ads (PPC and social media advertising)
• Social media marketing and engagement
• Content marketing – blogging, podcasts, articles, etc.
• Email marketing and nurture funnels
• Tracking and analytics for all channels and conversions
• AI & automation in place to save time and money

Ready to grow your franchise? Learn more about how the FBR Franchise Validation and Lead Generation programs can help you attract more qualified candidates and speed up your development process.

Contact our team for a 10-minute demo or download our free media kit to see all the ways we can help you expand your exposure to qualified candidates.

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• A confidential assessment of your brand
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