There are many benefits to purchasing a franchise. The main one being that it gives small business independence with the support of a big business network. Your franchise provides you with the proper business model, which is essential for business growth. Even though the Franchisor provides franchise owners with many tools for your franchise to succeed, it is also crucial to venture out and maximize your local marketing tactics so that you can bring in new foot traffic again and again to drive sales.
Marketing is ever changing and ever involving, but if one thing stands true in 2019 is that you need to venture out to paid ads. The organic game is well kind of dead, and it is time to invest in the type of marketing that will help you reach the right people and give you better results.
If you haven’t tried Facebook, Instagram, or Google ads, it is time to dive right in. And if you have already started but are not seeing the kind of conversions that you had hoped, then check out our top 5 Social Media Marketing Secrets Every Franchise Owners Should Know.
To be truly successful in 2019 you should avoid only using one social media channel, and start running and testing multichannel digital franchise advertising to reach customers on the most relevant social media channels. Multichannel digital advertising is the blending of different social media and online channels for the purpose of using multiple online channels to reach your target audience.
For example, if you’re a coffee franchise owner, you can run a multichannel campaign simultaneously on Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Google Places, and Waze.
Facebook and Instagram would be used to reach your current customers, your social media followers, and even people that look like your customers.
Yelp and Google would be used to reach customers with high intent. Potential customers that are already looking for you, your products or your competitors. These people are almost ready to buy.
Then Waze would serve as a digital billboard placement to reach people in route to a destination. Imagine a person is heading to a meeting, and they plug in their destination address, and your coffee shop pops up as a quick stop en route to where they are already going. You can easily convert that person to a potential customer with an offer.
When you launch paid ads, you need to understand that there is this initial learning period where you are investing in nailing the target audience, creatives, and copy that will convert. In this period, it is important to do in-depth testing so you can tweak your ads. Franchise owners tend to create limited ads and not test them thoroughly. It is imperative that you launch a few types of ads so you can see which ones are getting more traction.
You could, for example, launch a carousel ad with a few photos, one video ad, and one image ad. Then run your ad and check it weekly. If you see that the video ad is getting more clicks and leads, then you can turn the other ads off and allocate the money from those ads to the one doing better. It is also vital to test out different copies of your ads as well as different networks. Maybe your ad is doing better on Instagram than on Facebook, so monitor your performance and test, test, and test.
A very crucial piece of being successful with your campaign is based on what you do with the new knowledge and results acquired. After doing multiple tests, you’re provided with valuable data that will help guide you to make more educated decisions with your campaigns.
For Example, you ran an ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram, and the results showed that 80% of your results came from Instagram, women ages 35 to 45, that lives 2 miles from your business. If you ignore the data and still run ads targeting people on Facebook, 18 to 60 that live 15 miles from your business, you will waste ad dollars and not reach the right customers because you didn’t pay attention to the results after testing.
On Facebook, you can use up to 720 days of your offline event data (loyalty data, etc) to create custom and lookalike audiences for your ad campaigns.
For example, you can create a custom audience based on customers who purchased a specific item or category of items in your stores in the last year. The audience will continually refresh based on offline event data you uploaded within the time frame you specify.
You can also exclude customers who recently made purchases offline in order to find new customers. Once you’ve created a custom audience, you can then create a lookalike audience to reach people who are similar to customers who’ve already interacted with your business.
Successfully implementing this could potentially double your customers instantly, and increase your sales.
As a franchise owner, you may be worried about investing in paid ads, but having the right ad budget can really catapult your business forward. We recommend you start with a smaller budget for the first month but then increase it in order to reach a bigger audience.
Decide how many new customers you need and how many current customers you can drive back to your business on a monthly basis to increase sales. Then calculate how much each customer is worth to you. So if you need 100 new customers and 200 returning customers with each customer spending about $10 per visit x 3 times per month = $9000 in additional sales. Spending 10 to 15% of monthly sales is an ideal ad budget to start with. Each industry and scenarios are different, so it could be more or it could be less.
You need to decide what you can afford and what a lifetime customer is worth to you.
Overall we believe paid ads can do wonders for your franchise by giving you more opportunities for sales and growth. If you are unsure how to get started and don’t have the time to do the ads yourself:
We have over ten years of Franchise marketing experience and have helped hundreds of franchises implement successful marketing strategies.
Sociallybuzz launched in 2009 based out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is a Social Media Management, Advertising, and Reputation Management Company. We exist to help businesses grow using social media, data, and advertising.
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