In today’s complex landscape, there are countless opportunities for failure. Businesses can have great products, services, and awesome customer service and still fail to differentiate themselves from their competition. Consumer behaviors have changed significantly over the past several decades, and it’s getting harder and harder for franchise owners to manage their businesses successfully. One of the best ways of guaranteeing success is to work with a franchise marketing agency.
What is a Franchise Marketing Agency?
Franchise marketing agencies specialize in servicing the specific needs of franchises. Usually offering a mix of traditional and digital marketing services, franchise marketing agencies can ensure that a franchise isn’t missing any opportunities to differentiate themselves from the competition by highlighting locations, services, and products, and connecting with customers wherever they are.
Whether customers are online on Facebook or Instagram, watching their favorite streaming service, or even checking their emails, a franchise marketing agency can develop a sophisticated marketing plan to reach new customers and retain existing ones. By implementing a marketing campaign that’s tailored to the specific needs of a franchise, franchise marketing companies can help a franchise owner achieve their short- and long-term goals.
How Can a Franchise Marketing Agency Help?
Marketing in today’s environment is challenging for businesses of every size and structure. For franchise businesses, it’s especially complicated. Crafting a brand identity and ensuring that it’s represented among all of the franchisees is no small task. Coordinating and implementing brand messaging so that customers’ expectations are met regardless of the location can be incredibly time-consuming. For franchise owners, time is a precious resource.
One important way that franchise marketing agencies help is by developing marketing plans that suit the needs of the franchise. These plans typically include a mix of marketing channels, including social media, paid and organic search, email marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing. Each of these channels, if leveraged correctly, can greatly contribute to the overall success of a franchise by raising awareness and increasing overall conversions.
What are the Main Benefits of Working with a Franchise Marketing Agency?
Of the many benefits of working with an experienced franchise marketing agency, the main ones can be sorted into a few main categories: digital marketing strategy and implementation, brand uniformity, and customer relationship management.
Benefit #1 – Digital Marketing Strategy and Implementation
Digital marketing continues to grow in terms of importance for the success of a franchise. In a time where customers are increasingly turning online to discover and learn about businesses and services, no business or franchise can afford to ignore the digital space.
A lot goes into digital marketing, more than any franchise owner has the time to fully learn and execute on. That’s where a franchise marketing agency comes in. An agency can develop digital marketing campaigns to meet any goal a franchise owner may have, from raising awareness and creating a unified brand message to increasing and measuring conversions. Using a combination of established and emerging social media channels like Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok as well as email and search marketing, an agency can significantly expand the number of customers a franchise is able to reach.
Benefit #2 – Brand Uniformity
Operating a franchise can be more complicated than operating a restaurant or retail store with a single location. Because franchises have many owners in many locations as opposed to one business with many locations, it can be challenging to offer a unified presence that benefits the overall franchise and each individual franchisee.
A franchise marketing company can create or overhaul an existing franchise marketing campaign to ensure the kind of uniformity that customers expect. This includes making sure that every location is fully present on search engine results pages to managing services like Yelp and Facebook Local. Franchise marketing agencies can take the burden of creating and implementing a unified message and presence online off of franchise owners and franchisees. This saves them valuable time and helps to avoid customer confusion and dissatisfaction.
Benefit #3 – Customer Relationship Management
One of the most important functions of a franchise marketing agency is customer relationship management or CRM. Ensuring that customers are happy and engaged takes a great amount of effort and the consequences of doing it incorrectly can be catastrophic for a franchise.
Making sure there are eyes (and helpful responses) on reviews for individual locations, addressing customer questions and complaints, and maintaining a beneficial level of engagement are all aspects of a good CRM strategy. Franchises that attempt to do CRM without an experienced agency have historically delegated much of this work to individual franchisees with mixed results. In this online age, if one franchise location mishandles a customer issue, it can lead to disastrous consequences for the brand itself. By relieving franchisees of this responsibility, a franchise owner who works with an agency can free up their time and avoid these kinds of issues.
See the Benefits for Yourself
Working with a franchise marketing agency has many benefits. From developing and implementing a unified brand voice and marketing strategy to carefully managing customer relationships, working with an agency can save franchise owners time and avoid common pitfalls. Curious about how Bloom Ads can help support you with franchise marketing? Reach out to us today.