How To Develop A Marketing Plan For Your Franchise Business | SkillsAndTech

For an entrepreneur, there’s no better feeling than seeing your business venture grow into a successful franchise.

However, marketing a franchise business is far more challenging than marketing a single company.

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You need to fine-tune all aspects of business operations, balance your digital marketing efforts across different channels in multiple physical locations, and coordinate your advertising budget with your franchise owners while maintaining a consistent brand identity. 

Moreover, the marketing tactics that work in a single location could prove less effective when applied to multiple locations.

To build a successful franchise business, you first need to set a clear path to reach your goals and develop and implement a solid franchise marketing strategy to promote your business, which begins with your franchise marketing plan. 

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In this article, we’ll be sharing how you can build a successful marketing plan based on your marketing need that delivers the most benefit for your franchise. Let’s get started!

What Is Franchise Marketing? 

Franchise marketing involves all the efforts to advertise your franchise to your target audience using both traditional and digital marketing channels.

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Marketing a franchise business is no walk in the park since you must maintain brand consistency throughout your marketing strategy. 

A franchise marketing plan includes all the details about your marketing platform, strategy, marketing materials, franchise brand style guide, and more.

As a franchisor, you must coordinate your marketing efforts across multiple platforms and locations, which is only possible when you have a marketing plan that all your franchises can implement.

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How To Develop A Marketing Plan For Your Franchise Business? 

Before you tap into developing a franchise marketing plan, finish all the crucial groundwork to ensure the final idea is feasible.

In other words, this means building the business to the point that it operates smoothly like a well-oiled engine and generates sufficient revenue to support a wide-scale marketing initiative.

Here are the four pivotal steps to creating a franchise marketing plan to increase your brand awareness and drive solid brand growth: 

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• Establish Your Brand Image 

Building a marketing strategy for franchise business growth creates a firm foundation for your franchise business.

But before you can get into the marketing plan development stage, you first need to lay your groundwork and core values to support your marketing idea.

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Try to build a strong brand identity early on to maintain consistency across all aspects of your franchise business and encourage participation among franchisees.

Most importantly, create a unified message that engages the whole organization and ensures a consistent experience everywhere.

• Define Your Target Market And Segment Your Target Audience 

The final goal of any franchise marketing plan is to optimize your marketing efforts and maximize your campaign results.

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The best way to do this is to convey the right message to the right audience. Determining your target audience is crucial in creating an effective marketing plan because any franchise marketing strategy that addresses a general audience will only dilute the message.

Knowing whom to target helps you specify your market and convey the right message to the right people.

• Identify the Right Marketing Channels 

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Managing a digital franchise marketing campaign across all available channels is a smart move, but this only works if your business has an active presence on numerous platforms and your target audience is also using them.

Identify the best platform to reach your target audience while maximizing ROI. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each marketing platform, especially at the local level, can help you develop the right marketing strategy to get the best results.

• Identify the Key Metrics to Measure Your Success 

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For franchisees to embrace your vision, they must be able to see the worth of your franchise marketing plan. Show them that you can deliver consistent ROI to be considered a feasible growth partner.

To back up your claims with quantifiable data, you must track your marketing efforts and measure your success consistently.

Thankfully unlike traditional marketing methods, digital franchise marketing has simplified this part. Digital analytics and tracking software let you constantly collect data about your campaigns, giving you access to real-time information about the success of your marketing strategies to grow your franchise business. 

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The Four Main Tenets Of Franchise Marketing Success

Once your business is ready to support large-scale marketing efforts, start developing a franchise marketing plan.

It is important to remember that a franchise marketing plan serves two purposes. Building consumer awareness and promoting your brand, and attracting potential franchisees, can be achieved by following four principles: 

1. Brand Standardization is Vital 

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When it comes to franchise marketing, all major efforts center on telling a story to consumers to create brand identification and drive engagement.

To maximize the influence of these efforts, consumers must provide a consistent experience across all touch points regardless of franchise location. This is why operational consistency has always been so important. 

2. Social Media is a Principal Marketing Channel 

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For franchisees, social media provides a direct communication channel to their target audience, unlike any other medium.

It creates a two-way dialogue with consumers that helps franchises establish brand identity and provides chances for valuable feedback and personalized messaging.

For this reason, franchise businesses need to prioritize their social media presence to make the most of today’s major marketing channels.

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3. Location-Specific Email Marketing Campaigns 

Maintaining brand standardization across franchises is important, but that doesn’t mean you should not include room for customization in your franchise’s marketing plan.

One of the best ways to incorporate personalization is to give franchisees the tools and knowledge they need to run their location-specific emails, market their campaigns, and reach out directly to customers.

It is important to motivate franchisees to use the highest possible level of marketing automation to keep the total cost of ownership of each store low and attractive. 

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4. Marketing Must Deliver Consistent and Clear ROI For Franchises

When creating a franchise marketing plan, make sure that it serves multiple purposes. The first objective, as already explained, is to promote the brand and establish its market position.

Our second objective is to provide our franchisees with a consistent and demonstrable ROI. Franchisees become the primary insurer for marketing activities with a monthly fee structure.

This is because results are not evenly distributed across multiple locations and are influenced by the franchisee’s local efforts.

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To demonstrate the ROI on main marketing efforts, it is crucial to create a coding structure that can track overall results. 

Top 5 Strategies To Market Your Franchise Business 

Here are winning marketing tactics to attract the right target market for your franchise business: 

• Social Media Marketing 

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Customer care is a top priority as franchisors manage multiple locations. Social media is, therefore, essential for listening to customers and responding to complaints and questions.

Social listening is such a powerful practice that 62% of businesses use it to build relationships with their customers. Social media marketing also includes paid advertising such as Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and YouTube Ads.

These ads not only help you get more conversions, but they also help increase brand awareness if you use branded hashtags. 

• Content marketing 

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Content marketing includes creating and sharing online materials such as blog posts, videos, and social media posts.

The essential thing of content marketing is finding great topics that your target audience wants to know more about.

To make a good plan for your business, you should follow these points: 

• Determination of your platforms 
• Ideas and research for Brainstorm  
• Creating the content 
• Public Relations 

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Digital public relations (PR) are an underused but highly effective marketing strategy. Public relations have traditionally consisted of press releases, sponsorships, and goodwill campaigns.

Guest blogging is writing content for the website of another company aimed at the same audience as you.

By writing valuable content on these sites, not only will you be referred to by your readers, but more probably, your readers will trust you, too, because you were featured on a site they already trust.

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• Email Marketing 

Email is one of the most efficient methods and low-cost marketing techniques. As per Litmus, retail, e-commerce, and consumer interest marketers earn $45 for every dollar they spend on marketing the email.

So, to use email marketing effectively in your franchise, you need a central account for all of your various business locations. 

• Optimization of Rate Conversion 

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Optimization of rate conversion is the process of continuously improving the design and discoverability of your website. The goal is to make it easy for visitors to find websites and take a specific action.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in particular, is a highly effective optimization tactic to make your website easier for your ideal customers to find. 

Conclusion 

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Franchise marketing is vital for the consistent growth of your franchise. With so many marketing tactics to consider, marketing without proper planning can burn up your marketing budget without showing results.

However, with some creativity and finesse, you can make your franchise marketing strategy do the heavy lifting for you. 

Begin with an all-inclusive franchise marketing strategy to align your efforts and build a clear roadmap for success. Then put together a comprehensive marketing plan for your franchise.

A marketing plan that satisfies all the four tenets mentioned above will stand a good chance of establishing your brand in the minds of consumers while creating an attractive opportunity for potential franchisees.