After reading the franchiseknowhow.com pros and cons of setting up a franchise business and doing additional research about it, you may have decided to pursue it. But making your franchise materialize is one thing. Spreading the word about it to your potential franchisees and customers is another. If you want your first ever franchise business to succeed, you’ll have to let them know that you exist by doing the following ways to market it:
- Establish your social media presence right away.
Social media is the new battleground of the fledgling entrepreneur as most people use it nowadays to discover businesses. So if you want your franchise to get noticed quickly, you should set up a social media account for it.
However, know first which platform your potential franchisees and customers use often. You won’t want to spend your marketing budget promoting your franchise business on Twitter, for example, if most of your targets prefer using Facebook instead.
Once you’ve successfully created your business’s social media account, you’ll need to establish your presence there by:
- Grabbing any opportunities to discuss in your account’s comments section whatever trending topics are there right now in your niche
- Sharing content that has something to do with your business even if indirectly (for instance, a post related to any soda brand that you carry if you operate a burger franchise), and
- Promptly replying to any inquiries anyone might have about your franchise that they sent to you via chat
- Build attention-grabbing content.
Assuming you’ve already set up your franchise business’ social media account, you then have to come up with content that can pull potential franchisees and customers towards your direction by:
- Uploading infographics and video clips that should aim to entertain and convince them at the same time to do business with your franchise
- Ensuring that your visuals aren’t inappropriate or saying mean things about your competitors, and
- Offering promos such as discounted fees for franchisees who can sell the most number of products in a month or a free item for every single-receipt purchase made by a customer
- Allow your franchisees to create separate social media accounts per business location.
Once you’ve pulled in franchisees towards your business, you should give them the option to put up separate social media accounts for their respective franchises so that you can reach out to each of your various locations more easily.
Bear in mind though that you should put a social media policy into place wherein you have the right to approve or reject whatever content a franchisee of yours had decided to make in the hopes of attracting customers in their location.
- Encourage customers to leave honest feedback about your franchise business.
Some of your customers might discover not through social media but by consulting an online map. Beside that map is a listing of all businesses near their area, each with a corresponding rating and review.
To ensure that your business will eventually get five out of five stars and mostly glowing reviews, you should encourage customers who visit or interact with your franchise’ social media presence to leave feedback about your enterprise.
Some things you should take note when doing this are as follows:
- Don’t bribe your customers into getting discounts or freebies in exchange for positive reviews
- Let them speak their mind about your franchise and post even negative feedback that you might occasionally get because you can’t please everybody, and
- Use any criticisms leveled towards your business to improve how you treat both your franchisees and customers so that you can earn a higher rating next time
- Attend franchise exhibitions.
Registering for a franchise exhibition and setting up a booth can be expensive, but it can boost your chances of finding franchisees who might spread your brand across different locations.
Events like this can also let you showcase your marketing skills outside of social media and the Internet, especially as some potential partners might want to talk to you personally about your business rather than sending you an email or a message online.
Conclusion
The US alone has more than 744,000 franchise businesses that is established which only goes to show that the franchising industry in that country is doing great as always. However, it also means that you’ll face competition the minute your brand becomes popular. Any initial jitters you may have after putting up your franchise shouldn’t be a cause for you to neglect its promotional aspect. As long as you follow the ways listed above, then you can market it. You’ll want people to notice you after all and not have to look elsewhere.
