Use These Marketing Tips and Tricks to Grow Your Franchise
Franchise Business
Running any business includes keeping it profitable and striving to increase profits among other things. To increase our profits, we need to be able to increase our revenue and reduce our costs and in order to increase our revenue, an increase in the number of sales is a must. For thousands of years, now companies and earlier merchants tried gaining attention from their potential customers and tried to sell them their products or services. Today, we call this marketing, the promotion of one’s products or services to sell to their customers. In the case of a franchise too, you will have to create a marketing plan and invest in it. Let’s look at the key points to remember while creating a marketing plan for your franchise.
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1. Local Although the parent companies advertise and market their products and services nationally or internationally, but for your franchise to succeed you need to market it locally. Franchise marketing is all about creating a local presence and you need to reach out to the people in the area around you, your immediate customers. Your marketing plan would be catering to local customers and should be devised keeping the region’s sensitivity in mind. 2. Use Franchisor Support Franchisors offer varying support to franchises for marketing locally, so before you begin marketing discuss in depth with your franchisor about all the support you can receive from them. Franchisors provide creatives in the form of logos or ad creatives, which can be universally used by all franchises. Using these would help in reducing graphic designing costs. Some companies also offer a contribution to the franchise’s marketing budget and oversee the marketing campaign. Meet the parent company and try to get as much support as you can from them. 3. Monitor Local Competition A franchise needs to compete with other local competitors and you need to understand their marketing strategies. You need to know who are your direct and indirect competitors and what are the products and services offered by them. Understand their business models and their pricing models. Your local competitors are also marketing to the same group of people, by understanding their marketing campaign you can learn from their mistakes and from their successes. Try to find out how they reach out to customers and where do they advertise and how do they get involved in the local community. 4. Review Local Marketing It is very important to understand the people of the area to whom you will be marketing your products and services. The parent company might not be creating content, which suits the local community and so as a franchise, you will have to market for your unit and create engaging content. Follow other companies in your region on social media and pay attention to their offline marketing advertisements too. Focus on the content they use, how is it worded, the kind of language used and learn from them. In order to create a
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successful marketing campaign, you have to create good quality engaging content, which applies to local customers and which they can relate to. 5. Understand the Target Customer If you want to create a marketing campaign then you need to know who are you creating it for. You need to identify your target customer based on the demographic, age, income group, profession, etc. Unless you do not identify and understand your target customer, you can not create an effective marketing plan. You need to understand the demands and the needs of your target customer. You need to find out what is it that grabs their attention and then create a plan, which will be successful in engaging them and converting them to a loyal customer. 6. Market Through Local Events There are various local events, which see a high number of people participating. Sponsoring such events and getting visibility on billboards, flyers, standees and other advertisement content can be a very good option for marketing. Even if you are not interested in sponsoring, you could still have an option of participating in the event as a business, where you will be able to reach out to potential customers directly. You can narrow your choice of the event by selecting one, which will have maximum attendees who fall under your target customers. For example, if you are a video game parlor, you would benefit by sponsoring or putting up a temporary stall at a local comic con event, because your target customers, which would be children, teenagers, and millennial adults would attend the comic con event.
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Franchise Business
7. Devise Customer Loyalty Plans and More Today, the customer likes to have a relationship with every brand they use. If the brand is able to form a long term relationship with a customer it helps the brand multifold by having a recurring customer. You too should try to pass on the benefits of a long term relationship with the brand to the customer and creating a loyalty point system or a referral plan would greatly help in that. Most international coffee chains provide customers with a card, which either adds points or the number of visits to the brand. Within some time after www.frantastic.in 4
enough points or visits are collected or marked, the customer gets to redeem discounts or freebies. Such a plan can be devised with the parent company or by your unit alone too. 8. Customer Service Having a compassionate customer serving team is a must. Local community businesses thrive on the word of mouth and if a customer experiences rude or dissatisfactory behavior, the word will spread and can impact your future customers. So, it is important to inculcate the right service values in your staff. 9. Social Media Marketing Social media marketing is probably one of the most widely used media today. It has great reach and can you connect directly to your customers. Create engaging content and keep posting regularly to maintain a presence on social media. These are some ways to step up your marketing game and create a band of growing and loyal customers. Today, with all the competition, we need to orient our businesses towards customer satisfaction and only that can help us survive in the long run. For this, we need to understand our customers, draw them in, engage them and provide them the best products and services. Correct marketing techniques help a business grow and meet its goals.
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