Inbound marketing will help you earn the attention of your customers, bringing visitors to your website and to your storefront. It all starts with building a community for your visitors and customers, and creating relevant, targeted content to futher engage them and promote your localized business.

Search Engine Marketing

PPC and SEO will both help drive qualified traffic to your franchisee’s local pages. While it can take time to move up in organic search rankings via SEO, pay per click advertising on the search engines can help bring immediate visibility for each of your franchise locations.

Visitors searching for your products or services will find your targeted ads and be taken to your localized landing pages — making them more likely to convert.

Build a Community

After SEO and PPC drive traffic to your site, you’ll want to find a way to collect their contact details to continue building a relationship with them. Give your audience an incentive to opt in to your emailing list or like or follow you on social media. A discount promotion for your specific franchise location, for example, is an easy way to get this started (ie: “Sign up for our newsletter and receive 10% off your first purchase at the 55 King Street location”).

Turn your customers into promoters as well, by setting up a referral system. Use your current customers to bring you new customers, by offering free periods of service or a product incentive.

Reward That Community

In addition to promotions or sweepstakes offers to incentivize your audience to join your mailing lists or follow you on social media, reward your followers in other ways. Being part of your local ‘community’ can give them access to deals that they won’t have anywhere else, and sending out special offers through Facebook posts or email newsletters will help your customers see value in continuing to follow you or receive (and open!) your communications.

Build Engagement

As they say “no publicity is bad publicity”. Encourage online reviews and testimonials from your customer base — even the negative ones. Reviews are so important for local franchise businesses because they show consumers other consumers’ experiences with specific products or services at specific locations.  These reviews can be on Yelp, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc., and someone on your team should be assigned the task of monitoring each and every one, and responding to those that require a response. Negative reviews offer a great chance for you to publicly respond and show your audience your commitment to customer service and how you handle issues or complaints.

Consumers trust other consumers’ reviews and recommendations, so in addition to encouraging online reviews, also try to collect as many testimonials as possible to post on your website or on social media fees

Get Every Franchise on Board

The success of these intiatives will only be fully realized if all franchisees under the main brand are on-board and on the same page about the benefits of inbound. The goal of every location should be to increase the consumer communities and audience reach and engagement — which will in turn increase the overall success of the franchisor business.

Has your franchise marketing strategy been struggling? Contact us today for a free inbound assessment by one of our Certified Inbound Specialists, and we can help you understand where your current strategy is lacking and propose what you can change for the future.