How to market a franchise online

For any business or franchises, online marketing is the most efficient way of promoting your company to as many people as possible. Online marketing enables you to reach large audiences for a relatively low cost, but it is far from an automatic process. If you want your online marketing efforts to produce worthwhile returns, you need to approach it in the right way.

Below is everything you need to know to understand the basics of online marketing for franchisees and franchisors. With this information on your side, you can begin to construct an informed online marketing strategy that will enable your franchise to reach its full potential.

Know your online channels

Franchises have numerous online channels that they can and should exploit to maximise their reach and market themselves as efficiently as possible. Whether you are a franchisee looking to promote your franchise, or a franchisor with an opportunity to sell to eager entrepreneurs, understanding the channels available to you is essential.

The most important channels to be aware of are as follows:

– Search engine marketing
– Social media marketing
– Pay-per-click advertising
– Email marketing
– Analytics and reporting

The best channels and methods for you to use will depend entirely on the specifics of your franchise. But you should be aware of every channel at your disposal, even if you have no intention of using them.

Search engine marketing and optimisation

Search engine optimisation is crucial for any business marketing itself online, be it a office based franchise or cleaning franchises. SEO ensures your website is visible in search engine results. Without it, your website will end up buried beneath your competitors with no hope of making it onto that all-important first page of results.

If you aren’t on the first page of search results for keywords relevant to your franchise, you aren’t going to receive much traffic from internet searches. In fact, you need to be within the top one to three results if you want to gain an appreciable amount of traffic and attention from search engines.

If you want to rank highly for relevant search terms, you need to ensure you are doing all of the following:

– Generate unique, organic content relevant to your target keywords and provide value to your users.
– Build a professional website that is fast, responsive, and mobile-friendly. You should work with a web designer who understands SEO and can ensure your website is properly optimised to maximise search engine visibility.
– Establish your franchise as an authority within your sector and elicit backlinks to your franchise website from other authoritative sources.

As well as optimising your website for search engines, you should also list your franchise on a franchise directory like Franchise UK. That way, you can also take advantage of their search engine visibility and userbase. Franchise advertising on a franchise directory can boost visibility considerably.

Social media marketing

Social media platforms are vital marketing arenas for any modern business, including franchises. Whether you are a franchisor or franchisee, social media platforms will be a central pillar of your online marketing strategy.

The first thing you need to do is familiarise yourself with the various social media platforms available to you. Every social media platform is different, and each one favours different types of content and media. To use each platform to its full effectiveness, you will need to understand what type of content works best on each platform.

It is better to focus on promoting your business on one social media service at a time. You should maintain a presence on all the major platforms, but you shouldn’t expend too much time or money trying to simultaneously crack every service. Instead, identify the service best suited to the marketing media your franchise favours and focus on growing your brand through that platform.

Once you have gone as far as you can on your ideal social media platform, you can move onto the next one.

Effective social media marketing is about more than just putting out the right content. Organic interactions with other users are also important. Whether that means interacting with potential customers or potential franchisees, organic interactions are a golden opportunity to show other people what your business is about.

Email marketing

Email marketing is an often-overlooked marketing method, but when it’s used correctly, it’s one of the most cost-effective methods out there. The key to effective email marketing lies in building a list of email addresses to send your marketing to. The better your contacts list, the more effective your email marketing will be.

Your website will be the best source of useful email addresses for most franchises, but it isn’t the only option. Your social media page can also generate active email addresses for you. There are even businesses and services that can provide you with lists of email addresses of people who have expressed an interest in receiving marketing communications.

Ensure that your messaging is consistent throughout your email marketing and be careful not to overload your audience by sending emails too frequently.

Whether you are marketing a franchising opportunity as a franchisor or marketing your new business as a franchisee, online marketing will be a key component of your overall strategy. Make sure to consider the full range of online marketing channels open to you and think about how to exploit them most effectively for your franchise business.