Franchises and Multi-Location Businesses have a major advantage when it comes to digital communication. They are able to reach a wider audience, build a stronger brand, and share resources. However, on the local level, individual franchisees or SMB’s can’t only rely on the national brand. They need a robust local marketing strategy to grow their business.
The first step of defining a strategy for digital marketing for franchises or multi-location businesses is to start at the corporate level.
Generally, this first involves strategizing the content of the brand’s website. The website is a central element of your web marketing strategy because nearly all of your digital marketing programs will aim to attract prospects to it. A website with strong Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will rank higher in the organic results in Google. Good website design will take into account common SEO best practices before the website is launched.
Once your website is ready and you are certain that your potential customers can find the information about your business that they are looking for, you can then begin launching other digital marketing programs. One of the first areas that you should invest in is strong SEO for your franchise site, such as keyword-focused blogs, a strong content marketing strategy that is valuable to your customers, and technical website optimizations. Google is always changing its algorithms, so a good strategy will consistently be focused on improving SEO both on the brand website and improving credibility with on your pages by investing in citations, link building, customer reviews, and managing your Google My Business.
Implementing SEO both onsite and offsite will increase the visibility on the search engine results page for the most important customer keyword searches for your business. For example, if your business specializes in organic produce, your optimizations may need to be focused on search terms like “organic apples” or “local honey.”
The next channel you should focus on in digital marketing for franchises and multi-location businesses, after setting up your website’s baseline SEO, is paid advertising. Google Ads is a very powerful channel that allows you to precisely target Internet users who will type keywords related to your offerings.
Once the national strategy is well defined, it is essential to take into account the specialization of each location. Having a strategy focused on the individual locations’ digital marketing strategy will allow you to calculate a return on your digital marketing investment for each individual business location.
With Google Ads, for example, you can target very specific geographic areas, so instead of launching a national campaign, in some cases, it may make more sense for you to launch many targeted campaigns only a few miles around each of your locations.
In addition, you can also direct the ads to take users to specific landing pages, based on the ad they clicked on, the ad will point users directly to the local information they are looking for. This landing page could be for a specific product or service, your FAQ page, or a contact form on a location’s individual microsite or your main brand site.
This step is essential to the campaign’s success. Do not launch a digital marketing campaign without first ensuring that you will be able to track your return on investment. If necessary, call on a specialized web marketing agency for franchises or multi-location businesses.
Thanks to Google Analytics and similar tools, it is possible to precisely track clicks and ultimately conversions when visitors reach your website.
It is very important for both the top-level CEO and their team for your brand to be able to measure the ROI of national marketing, as well as the local ROI across regions. The central team can then promote digital marketing campaigns with the managers of individual locations within the network.
Managing and measuring hundreds of campaigns at scale can be a huge challenge, which is why marketing teams look to Adplorer to be their central marketing platform of choice. We know multi-location marketing, as well as which strategies work best for each industry. With our algorithms optimizing thousands of campaigns across the world, we are building the future of digital marketing for franchises and multi-location businesses with collective intelligence, bringing data from all locations to make each campaign smarter.
