Are you planning to start a business this year? That’s a great opportunity to earn, learn, and grow. But what kind of business are you trying to pursue? If you don’t want to start something from scratch, you might want to enter the world of franchising.
Starting a franchise business can be exciting for entrepreneurs, especially those who want to leave the corporate world and be the boss themselves. Here are a few reasons why owning a business franchise is a smart move:
- Low Startup Cost – Unlike businesses from scratch, a franchise has fewer upfront costs, making it a cost-effective investment.
- Easy Financing – Starting a business from a well-known franchisor increases your chances of getting your loans approved by banks and lenders.
- Established Recognition – A franchise is a pre-established brand, meaning you already have a community of people who knows your products and services.
You need to establish an effective digital marketing strategy to maximize these advantages. And if you’re having difficulties, Digital Shift or other similar service providers may help you grow your franchise.
Why Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing allows you to reach more people than traditional marketing techniques (e.g., direct mail, TV ads, and billboards). Not just that, it can also help you establish your presence in the global market in a scalable, cost-effective, and measurable way.
Aside from that, here are other things digital marketing can do:
- Reach your target audience anytime, anywhere
- Get to know your prospects better by learning what they prefer
- Target the right audience through personalization
- Track every response to your marketing efforts
- Boost customer engagement to establish brand loyalty
- Reach more customers without spending more
Digital marketing is essential to building a successful franchise business. Whether you’re building a brand or growing your sales, the opportunities it can offer are limitless. These benefits prove what digital marketing can do to your franchise business.
What Are The Types Of Digital Marketing For Franchise Businesses?
Digital marketing aims to grow your brand and establish your presence through various online channels. These include search engines, websites, social media, paid ads, email, and more.
Here are the different types of digital marketing that may help you grow and expand your franchise business:
- SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to digital marketing. It aims to optimize web pages and content to boost your website’s organic traffic and search engine results page (SERP) performance.
Organic traffic is defined as people who visit your platform via search engines but that isn’t paid for. Organic visitors are more likely to purchase your offerings because they visit on their own accord without someone or something forcing them to do so.
This is why SEO is so important in digital marketing. Specialized franchise SEO services may help you build an effective campaign that will optimize and boost your website’s overall performance.
Here are some simple SEO tips for a robust SEO campaign:
- Target Primary And Secondary Keywords: Your primary keyword is your content’s main focus, while your secondary ones support your content’s idea. Your keywords must be relevant and easy to understand to attract people to your website.
- Optimize Your Meta-Tags: Meta descriptions and page titles are the first things people see when they do a search. Therefore, it’s only right to keep them impactful. Your page titles must be within 30 characters; meta descriptions must be within 160 characters.
- Optimize Your URLs: Your URLs must be simple, one that people can easily remember in one glance. Use your primary keyword (if possible), make it readable, and keep it concise (less than 60 characters).
- Improve Your Loading Speed: You may remove unnecessary elements that make your website load slowly, such as large graphics and plug-ins. Getting rid of these may help improve your loading speed and reduce your bounce rate.
These are just some of the most effective SEO practices you apply to your digital marketing as soon as possible. If you want to improve your rankings further, hiring an SEO specialist may help.
- WEBSITE OPTIMZATION
In digital marketing, your website is your most powerful asset. However, having one isn’t enough to garner the attention of the locals. You need to optimize your website’s design to take advantage of your most powerful digital asset.
Web design can affect how people perceive you as a credible source of information. If your website looks cranky and obsolete, do you think they would waste their precious time hovering around your site?
Here are some helpful tips to optimize your website:
- Improve Your Site’s Accessibility: You want to ensure that your website is accessible to everyone, including search engines.
- Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly: This is a no-brainer. Everyone’s been on mobile devices these days, and the best way to tap their attention is to go mobile.
- Improve Your Site’s Speed: Your site must load within two seconds, or people will bounce off and reach out to your competitors instead.
- Focus On User Experience: Your website should be easy to navigate. Your visitors must be able to search for the information they want as soon as possible.
Keep these four simple yet essential tips when designing a website. With this, your visitors will have a better experience and be more aware of your franchise’s existence in the market.
- CONTENT MARKETING
Content is the key to digital marketing. It’s an essential ingredient that will help your franchise expand its reach and grow its audience.
Content marketing is a strategy focused on creating and distributing relevant, valuable, and consistent information to attract and retain potential customers. Content includes infographics, eBooks, videos, blogs, and manuals.
Content marketing helps educate and create loyal customers. That’s why producing high-quality content is essential. But do you know what’s the most effective type of content there is? The answer is blog posts.
Here are some tips to get started with content marketing:
- Know Your Target Audience: Who are you trying to reach out? What kind of audience would be interested in your content? Answering these simple questions is the key to creating relevant and valuable content.
- Write For Your Audience: Once you’ve identified your target audience, the next step is to write for them. Make your content as helpful as possible, one that answers their questions and pain points.
- Check On Your Competitors: Understanding your competitors will help you attract more customers. What type of content are they using? What are the topics they discuss? How does their audience respond to their posts?
- Narrow Your Focus: Unless you have plenty of time to spend on long-form content, narrow your topics to cover them completely. This can also help you make your content more manageable and effective.
Another smart move is to link your content to other websites. With this, your visitors will have more reasons to stay longer on your website, helping you promote your franchise business without being salesy.
Also, linking your website to other pages allows search engine crawlers to index more pages, increasing your visibility to SERPs.
- Video Marketing
Video marketing is a form of content marketing focusing on producing relevant and high-quality videos to:
- Market products and services
- Attract potential customers
- Educate audience
- Boost engagement on social and digital channels
- Reach the target audience using a new medium
With video marketing, you can improve your SEO campaigns, reach millions of mobile users, increase sales and conversions, and build trust. Below are some tips for an effective video marketing strategy:
- Produce Company-Related Videos: Create videos about your company profile and culture. With this, you’ll be able to introduce who you are and what you are capable of in your target market.
- Tell A Story: Create videos with a story that captures the heart and attention of the viewer. Videos that focus too much on promoting products and services and driving sales are most likely to be ignored.
- Use The First Few Seconds Wisely: The average attention span of online users is less than 10 seconds. In 10 seconds, you must be able to hook their attention and make them watch until the end of the video. Using a great thumbnail may help.
- Create Videos With And Without Sound: Social media platforms can play videos automatically with or without sounds. People should be able to understand your videos even with sounds off. Using stunning visuals and subtitles may help.
Keep in mind to optimize your videos with calls to action (CTAs). CTAs encourage online viewers to subscribe to your channel, visit your website, follow your page, comment on the video, or share your content.
For better conversion and engagement, place your CTAs on the mid-roll and post-roll sections of your videos.
- SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is a powerful marketing tool. It’s the practice of delivering marketing promotions through text messages. Compared to emails, SMS campaigns have higher open rates that reach up to 98%.
On top of that, SMS marketing is highly cost-effective. It only takes a couple of cents to deliver marketing messages and reach out to your customers and prospects. That’s why SMS marketing is popular for franchise businesses.
Here are some helpful tips for an effective and highly-converting SMS marketing campaign:
- Never Send Messages Without Clear Opt-Ins: Opt-ins are the main focus of SMS campaigns. Send a message asking people questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no. If they don’t text back or answer no, don’t text for the time being.
- Include Clear Opt-Outs: If people can opt in, they should also be able to opt out. Your customers who are tired of your messages are more likely to leave than to bring sales. Giving them the option to opt out means you value their preferences.
- Introduce Yourself: Never assume that your recipients know who you are. Always make yourself known whenever you send them a message. Here’s an example: ‘Marius Park: Hey Rovic! It seems that you’ve left something in your shopping cart. Still interested?’
- Send At The Right Time: Time is crucial when sending SMS messages because some people turn on their phone’s Do Not Disturb feature. Never send messages early in the morning or late at night. Also, check your recipients’ time zones to be sure.
- Check Your Character Count: An SMS message is limited to 160 characters. Since it’s too short, get to the point as quickly as possible and use shortened links to provide more information.
You can also use SMS marketing campaigns to send reminders and confirmations when reminding customers to settle their bills or confirm their bookings and purchases.
- EMAIL MARKETING
Emails may not have an open rate as high as SMS messages, but it doesn’t mean it’s useless. When done correctly, email marketing can be your franchise’s lifesaver.
Email marketing focuses on creating and delivering relevant and valuable emails to attract prospects and engage with existing customers. You can use it to send marketing promotions, exclusive offers, and other services.
Email marketing can also educate your audience and keep them engaged when making purchases. Here are some tips for creating an effective email marketing campaign:
- Keep Your Emails Concise: If you’re not interested in reading long emails, so does your audience. But don’t make your emails too short; otherwise, they’d look relevant and reliable. Keep your emails between 60 to 200 words long.
- Add Stunning Visuals: People love images, especially when it comes to email marketing. Adding relevant pictures can make your emails more attractive, engaging, and converting.
- Add Social Proof: At some point, you’ll need to convince your readers about the legitimacy of your products and service. Include links that would redirect them to people using your brand, such as influencers and well-known individuals and organizations.
- Add CTAs: After reading your emails, readers want to know what to do or where to go next. For this reason, make sure to include a clear CTA at the end of your emails, whether it’s to encourage them to subscribe or try some of your products.
Email marketing is most effective when sending regular emails. But it’d be best to deliver at least three emails per week for better responses and higher engagement.
Final Thoughts
A franchise is a great way to start a business. It’s easy to finance and has a pre-established name. If you promote your franchise, the best way to do it is through digital marketing.
Digital marketing can help you establish your brand and grow your audience reach through SEO, website creation, content sharing, videos, SMS messages, and emails. The possibilities in digital marketing are limitless, so make the most out of it.
If you need help, don’t hesitate to hire a digital marketing expert for effective digital marketing campaigns.
