Things franchisees should know about digital marketing

Many franchisees (and franchisors!) and dealers find email, social media and online branding more overwhelming than helpful. Most businesses don’t have time to manage their digital marketing presence and therefore the habit of doing enough just to get by seems ok for their business. Eg. The company Facebook page only has posts about special offers while your competitors have daily posts.

Local listings: Smartphone users have increased dramatically and therefore an updated local listing helps your potential or current customers find your location quickly and efficiently.

Online reviews: Good online reviews are great for business. On the flipside negative reviews can hurt your business and therefore constant replies to comments or reviews whether positive or negative is better rather than no feedback at all. This action indicates to your customers and potential customers that you’re listening and you care.

Online advertising: It’s not enough to have a website you always need to think of a way to distribute the information. This is how Google AdWords campaigns can help grow your business eg targeting people who visited your website but never became customers.

Google Analytics: If you’re investing a significant amount of your marketing budget on online advertising, how would you know it’s actually working? With Google Analytics you can and should track your website traffic. eg. What pages people are looking at? How long they stayed on a product page on your website?

E-mail marketing: E-mail marketing is known as the most effective digital marketing channel for customer. But it needs consistency and customization by target group.

Being anti-social: One of the main reasons franchisees struggle with effectively managing and growing their social media presence is either being on too many social media sites or too few. In both cases no effective strategy for each platform.

Social media: You’ve hired someone to do this internally but your internal staff also has other responsibilities so keeping up with social media platform features that seem to change on a daily or weekly basis is a no win game.

To get a better understanding of digital marketing and how it can improve your business performance contact John at digital@cooee.co.nz and let us help you make sense of it all.