Digital marketing is evolving fast. So fast, that it can be hard to keep up with the pace and make sure you’re making the right decisions when investing your media budget.
As a Franchise Owner, you might distribute flyers in your local area to make people aware of your business, but what happens next when they decide to check you out online and you’re nowhere to be found but your competitors are?
1. Set Up Your Google My Business Profile
One of the easiest ways to make your online presence stronger is to set up your company profile on Google My Business. It is important you set up a unique address for each of your locations if you posses more than one territory or store, in order to be visible when people are searching for one of your specific locations.
Once this is set up and if you are using Google Ads to run some of your digital advertising activity, you can then link your Google My Business profile to your ads, increasing your chances of getting more traffic. It also allows people to better navigate to you if you own a physical store.
2. National vs Regional campaigns for a localised message
At Push, we use 2 types of search campaigns to ensure franchisees get the highest results; National campaigns and Regional campaigns.
With National campaigns, we target the whole of the UK to promote your business, but we keep it localised by ensuring your locations are present in the keywords. Then, Regional campaigns come as extra support, targeting your specific area only, without specifying any location in the keyword.
We usually see better results from National campaigns as the intent of the search is stronger but by implementing the 2 types of campaigns, we ensure there are no gaps.
3. Use a landing page with local content and a clear Call To Action
You might already be running some campaigns on search engines or social channels and getting a good amount of traffic, but are you receiving enough enquiries or calls? (Not that we don’t all want more!)
After doing all of the work to bring people to your website, you might not actually them the right information or not making the work easy enough for them to pick up the phone or fill up a form.
Make sure you have a dedicated landing page for your business, providing local information and pictures showing your local area! You also need to have a clear action for the user to take. Do you want them to sign up? Call you? Request a Callback? Request a quote?
For example, by creating new landing pages for the Stagecoach franchises with a clear CTA to get a Callback, we’ve managed to increase the conversion rate from 2.41% on the microsite to 7.86% on the landing page.
Don’t overdo it, keep it simple!
4. Use Audience Data
Audience data is more important than ever, and as the saying goes ‘data is the new oil’! Search engines and analytics platforms give you more data than you may know what to do with, corresponding to the interest of the people visiting your website, what they are shopping for, which categories of websites they are interested in, who they are, where they work, their income… Use this data to fuel your digital campaigns and target with precision the customer you want to sell to!
5. Track your results so you know what’s working and what’s not
You might have heard before the famous statement of John Wannamaker “I know that half of my ad spend works, I just don’t know which half”. What’s brilliant with digital advertising, is that you can track from which channel your calls or enquiries are coming from, and actually optimise your campaigns according to which keywords and channels are bringing you the best return on ad spend.
Conclusion
When it comes to run your digital marketing, be open to testing, whether it’s testing new ad copies, new landing pages, new keywords… Often as your spends increase your return will start to drop in the short term until you optimise your activity and keep testing.
Be organised in what your testing and how you are targeting your dream customers to get the best results from your campaigns.
And don’t forget to set up tracking, so you actually know which test is working for you and how you need to invest more budget moving forward.
I know it seems like a big job, so if you’d like some help with this process and more advanced strategies, get in touch with Push! We have a dedicated multi-market team who are experts in the franchise market and have helped hundreds of businesses expand their network and get more relevant leads & sales.
