What has two arms and two legs however can go in 289 instructions without delay? Every of your franchisees on social media. Eek. How do you retain advertising and marketing messages, branding, and buyer expertise in keeping with, fairly actually, so many cooks within the kitchen?
Worry not, franchisor: Right here’s how you can plan, execute, analyze, and keep a profitable franchise social media advertising and marketing technique that every one your franchisees will get enthusiastic about.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media guidelines template to quickly and easily create recommendations for your company and employees.
Franchise social media marketing is promoting your brand and engaging customers at both the corporate and local levels, while ensuring messaging and values remain consistent across all social profiles.
In a centralized corporation, the company owns all locations (or branches) and there is one chain of command. Simple.
In contrast, an individual or another company owns each franchise company location. These branches are technically separate entities, although they must report back to the parent organization, pay licensing fees, and follow the brand’s established practices.
One of the most well-known franchise examples is McDonald’s, with over 38,000 locations worldwide. Every restaurant is individually owned and operated by franchisees, however clients see the identical signage and menu objects — and hopefully, have the identical expertise — at each location.
Franchisor: An organization that owns the logos and rights to a model who sells licenses permitting franchisees to function enterprise places utilizing the trademarked model.
Franchisee: An individual or firm who pays a licensing price and recurring royalties to open a enterprise leveraging the father or mother firm’s present model, title, providers, and different proprietary property.
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Implementing model pointers
You need franchisees to benefit from social media advertising and marketing to develop their (and your) enterprise, however how do you keep away from a cringe-worthy fake paus, like utilizing an outdated brand in advertising and marketing supplies?
Reply: Creating an in depth brand guidelines document and protecting it the place all franchisees can entry the most recent model, alongside together with your model property.
Bonus: Get a free, customizable social media guidelines template to quickly and easily create recommendations for your company and employees.
Keeping content quality consistent
Besides using the right visuals and brand voice, there’s additionally the considerably ambiguous judgment of social media content material “high quality.” What’s good in the case of content material anyway?
Examples of consistency will be so simple as guaranteeing every submit is freed from spelling and grammar errors. Or sticking to 1 exclamation level as an alternative of 5. You understand, the easy issues.
These high quality requirements also needs to be a part of your model pointers doc.
Dividing duties
Will your company head workplace deal with all social media advertising and marketing, utilizing one account per platform? Will you create separate model accounts for various areas or languages?
Or, will every franchise open and keep their very own social media accounts?
Neither strategy to franchise social media advertising and marketing is unsuitable. Simply you should definitely doc your construction in your social media marketing strategy.
Monitoring efficiency and ROI
Was the final Black Friday promotion efficient? Or was it solely efficient in a sure market? Or just for a sure franchisee? What did they do in a different way on social in comparison with the opposite franchisees?
Getting efficient efficiency information is vital for all companies, however particularly for franchisors managing groups of franchisees.
Utilizing social media for customer support (successfully)
Offering customer support over social media is not non-compulsory: 40% of your customers now anticipate you to assist them on their most well-liked social platform. Over half (53%) usually tend to purchase from manufacturers who supply customer support by way of chat. And, unsurprisingly, 94% of people say constructive customer support makes them extra possible to purchase from you once more.
You higher hurry, too: 40% expect a response inside an hour and 79% anticipate one inside 24 hours.
So what does all that imply? When you’re not already fixing buyer issues on social media, begin now. (Don’t fear: I cowl how you can effortlessly get began with social customer support later.)
Reduce response time (and your workload)
Manage all your messages stress-free with easy routing, saved replies, and friendly chatbots. Try Hootsuite’s Inbox today.
Adjusting content material to suit numerous cultures
Whether or not your franchisees are unfold throughout your state, nation, or all the world, it’s possible that completely different types of content material will carry out in a different way throughout every area. Your social media content material must respect variations in tradition, attitudes, legal guidelines, and extra to resonate with as many individuals as doable.
Localization can be about greater than geography. Creating multilingual content material can set up you because the model of selection for hundreds of thousands: 2 out of 3 customers would change to a model providing service of their native language.
1. Set targets for the model and for particular person branches
Each weblog submit about social media advertising and marketing because the dial-up days spouts the significance of setting targets and KPIs to measure the success of your efforts, so I don’t have to. However right here’s how to set social media goals that really increase ROI, plus a free template to trace all of it.
Franchisors, one of the best ways to measure progress is to set targets to your group as a complete, plus separate social media targets for every department.
You each need the identical factor — Progress! Revenue! Loyal clients! — however the way you go about attaining these targets can be completely different. For instance, every department goes to have a a lot larger function in customer support and engagement than your head workplace (assuming every location will handle their very own social profiles).
In that case, targets for branches could possibly be:
- Delivering a response time beneath 1 hour for all DMs.
- Customer support satisfaction survey scores above 90%.
- Rising follower counts and engagement charges. (Psst: use our free engagement rate calculator to see the way you stack up.)
Whereas targets to your group can be extra brand-focused, comparable to:
- Monitoring and bettering your brand reputation.
- Utilizing social listening to proactively handle potential PR crises and conduct aggressive analysis.
- Supporting franchisee success by means of sharing analytics outcomes and training them on social media advertising and marketing greatest practices.
2. Create a do’s and don’ts information
You want three pointers to share with franchisees:
- Brand guidelines: All of the visible points of your model, like which brand model to make use of, colours, how you can spell product names and in the event that they want trademark symbols or not, and many others.
- Social media policy: You may embody this inside a bigger model pointers doc. This spells out your model voice,
- A do’s and don’ts information: Consider this as a fast, point-form one-pager itemizing out an important social media “guidelines.”
A do’s and don’ts information ought to function a cheat sheet franchisees can use to evaluate whether or not they need to submit one thing or not. Stating clear expectations is one of the best ways to keep away from potential PR disasters, and to your franchisees to really feel assured about what they’re posting.
Best Buy doesn’t name theirs a “do’s and don’ts” but it surely’s clear and to the purpose:
Maintain your pointers and coverage paperwork the place all franchisees can simply entry them. It may be so simple as a Google Drive folder. Put visible property in the identical folder too, comparable to brand recordsdata, so your franchisees at all times know the place to get essentially the most up-to-date variations.
Need assistance? Seize our free social media policy template, and test this whole information to brand guidelines.
3. Standardize publishing flows
That is the place the facility of a scheduling device is available in. Certain, you may schedule content material totally free on a lot of the platforms’ native apps, however a publishing workflow is a lot greater than simply scheduling.
For instance, in the event you set your crew up with Hootsuite, you additionally get:
- Shared Canva templates for on-brand content material: Earlier I discussed how vital consistency is. With our Canva integration, you may let franchisees entry customized branded Canva templates proper from Hootsuite Composer, guaranteeing everybody’s visuals are prime notch.
- Fast onboarding and account entry: You keep Tremendous Admin privileges for all accounts and it’s simple to arrange new franchisees at scale.
- Deep analytics insights: With all of your franchisee accounts linked in Hootsuite, you will get a macro or micro view of key analytics with a couple of clicks. Simply establish prime performing content material concepts to share with all franchisees and at all times know your social ROI.
- Highly effective publishing instruments: The personalised Best Time to Publish function routinely schedules content material for when every profile’s viewers is most definitely to see it. Plus: Drafts, a visible calendar planner, inbuilt promoting choices, and extra.
- Straightforward content material approval: Need to evaluation every submit earlier than it goes public, and simply collaborate on edits or revisions with franchisees? Hootsuite does that, too.
Plus, supercharge your franchisees’ advertising and marketing energy with OwlyWriter AI. Good for each novice social media entrepreneurs and execs alike, OwlyWriter immediately generates ready-to-post content material that really appears like your model.
Get all of the deets in beneath 60 seconds:
4. Monitor analytics (domestically and globally)
You already know analytics information is crucial for understanding in case your social media advertising and marketing technique is working. However analytics are much more vital for franchisors as a result of you might want to measure your total development, and be capable to break down efficiency by department.
Hootsuite Analytics makes it simple to see the whole lot you want immediately.
Get the large image overview of all of your franchisors without delay, throughout all platforms, or break it down by area, platform, or particular person department.
See what’s working (and what’s not) earlier than campaigns finish, permitting time to pivot if obligatory. No extra spreadsheets or having to log into every platform’s web site to get the numbers you need. Save your key metrics as customized experiences, able to view, export, or share with only a few clicks.
That is one other huge benefit of setting franchisees up in Hootsuite: They get environment friendly content material scheduling and also you get complete analytics.
Don’t know what to trace? Right here’s the whole lot you might want to arrange your social media analytics the precise method.
5. Conduct department social media audits
Don’t panic at using “audit” — it’s painless, I promise. A social media audit is a method of routinely evaluating efficiency and figuring out enchancment alternatives.
An audit evaluations:
- Present social media platforms
- Model consistency
- Analytics experiences
- Repute and sentiment by way of social listening tools
- Targets and ROI
It’s a repeatable course of you need to use to see how your franchisees’ social media advertising and marketing goes. Use it to reward and amplify top-performing content material, and to establish areas of enchancment to teach them on.
How usually do you have to run a department social media audit? That’s as much as you, however I’d recommend not less than quarterly to test in, and yearly, earlier than updating the subsequent yr’s advertising and marketing plan and funds.
Learn how you can do a social media audit and snag our free template, or watch beneath:
6. Assist branches with design templates
One of many largest challenges your franchisees possible have with social media advertising and marketing is creating content material, particularly visuals like graphics or movies.
The common creator spends 1-5 hours per week creating content material, which doesn’t sound like a ton of time… if social media is your full-time job. However for a lot of franchisees, it’s not.
Plus, over 1 / 4 (27%) spend 5-10 hours and a complete of 30% spend over 10 hours per week on content material.
Supply: Statista
Fortunately, that is one thing you may simply remedy to your franchisees. Create pre-designed content material templates that solely want small tweaks earlier than scheduling and publishing.
Set up a template library with Hootsuite’s built-in Canva integration so your franchisees can customise and insert templates proper inside Hootsuite Composer.
We’ve even acquired 50 free Canva social media templates to get you began.
7. Create a fast begin package
Whether or not you determine to handle your franchisees’ accounts with Hootsuite or have them handle their very own, a social media “fast begin package” may also help.
Your package might embody:
- Beneficial social platforms to make use of.
- Naming practices (e.g. @BrandNameCityName) to maintain branding constant.
- Model pointers.
- A fundamental one-pager masking social media advertising and marketing targets and expectations.
- Hyperlinks to the place you retain up to date copies of brand name pointers, technique paperwork, property, and different objects they’ll frequently discuss with.
- Tutorial movies exhibiting how you can arrange social accounts, add logos, schedule posts and/or submit posts for approval, and many others.
- Suggestions on how often to post.
Plus the rest you need franchisees to know immediately about how your organization does social media advertising and marketing.
8. Construct a social customer support technique
As talked about earlier, your clients anticipate to get good service out of your franchisees’ social media profiles.
However how do you:
- Guarantee all franchisees are offering the identical caliber of customer support?
- Set response time benchmarks?
- Measure buyer satisfaction?
- Construct genuine relationships with clients?
Shock: the reply is Hootsuite.
Yep, Hootsuite Inbox 2.0 is right here with all-new options to make social customer support simple and efficient to your franchisees:
- Unified Inbox: Branches can see and reply to DMs and feedback throughout all their social platforms inside Hootsuite, as an alternative of getting to log into platforms individually.
- 24/7 service: Night time owl buyer? No drawback. You may setup autoresponders to guarantee clients you’ve obtained their inquiry and once they can anticipate to listen to again from you. That is particularly useful exterior of enterprise hours.
- Time-saving instruments: Auto-filter messages, save customized replies, and consider cross-channel message historical past so your buyer doesn’t need to re-explain themselves.
- Sensible chatbots: Want to offer customer support at scale? Harness the facility of AI to resolve buyer issues immediately with adaptive, conversational chatbots.
- Highly effective analytics: Measure response instances, buyer satisfaction scores, reply quantity, and tons extra to judge efficiency total and per department.
Hootsuite Inbox dramatically boosts your social customer support capabilities and makes it simple to your franchisees to make sure each buyer feels valued.
Take a look at all Hootsuite Inbox 2.0 features in-depth, or higher but, request a free demo to see it in motion.
9. Leverage worker advocacy
One of many quickest methods to develop a brand new franchisee’s social media presence is to encourage their workers to get entangled. Worker advocacy can enhance natural attain as much as 200% and profits up to 23%.
Plus, a third of employees already share their firm’s content material with out being requested.
Apart from moolah and attain, worker advocacy additionally has other benefits:
Supply: Hootsuite and Altimeter Research, Social Transformation Report
Worker advocacy will be so simple as workers sharing your content material to their private networks, or you may go a step additional with Hootsuite Amplify: a devoted area for pre-approved posts.
Apart from accessing a library of ready-to-share content material, workers can generate customized captions in their very own model with built-in AI writing instruments.
Bringing workers into your advertising and marketing technique can strengthen their engagement degree and reduce your paid promoting prices on the similar time. A win-win for you and your franchisees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ZDrZ3vQWA
10. Encourage buyer evaluations
Testimonials encourage belief, in each the franchisor and franchisee.
If clients are already leaving evaluations on Google, Yelp, or your social media profiles, share them. Create a branded graphic your franchisees can copy and paste present evaluations into for fast content material that’s — to cite Pokemon — ”tremendous efficient.”
Folks rank buyer evaluations, and different user-generated content material, as 2.4X more authentic than something a model produces, even when your newest business has A-Listing Hollywood expertise. That’s vital as a result of whereas 92% of entrepreneurs suppose they’re producing genuine content material, solely 51% of shoppers agree.
No have to search out evaluations. Set up Hootsuite Streams to trace evaluations and mentions of your model, and share it with a couple of clicks.
11. Share top-performing content material suggestions
Did a submit from one in all your branches go viral? Determine why, then share it for instance for all of your franchisees.
The way you share any classes realized relies upon the way you’ve arrange your franchisee advertising and marketing construction. You may ship out a month-to-month publication masking nice submit examples and greatest practices. Or, host a weekly or month-to-month webinar or convention name about social media technique for all franchisees to participate in. You can even preserve it easy with a Slack or Discord group chat to showcase and talk about nice content material.
Everybody advantages from sharing social media success tales.
Hootsuite powers franchise social media advertising and marketing with environment friendly scheduling, publishing, and buyer engagement instruments to your franchisees, and superior analytics, collaboration, and branding instruments for you — throughout all platforms. See it in motion.
Handle all of your social media in a single place, measure ROI, and save time with Hootsuite.
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