Franchise content marketing is an affordable and effective way to ensure your business thrives. It is the best way to guarantee enhanced PR communications, customer retention, lead nurturing, and engaging audiences. Whether a franchisor or franchisee, you could undoubtedly benefit from franchise content marketing. Read on to learn more to understand better the benefits of content marketing, its most effective techniques, and the unique opportunities it offers both franchisors and franchisees.
What is Content Marketing
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that requires consistent productions beyond sales pitches and blatant self-promotion. All content from your brand must be born from a documented, goal-focused, brand identity-oriented marketing strategy. Content marketing enhances your search engine visibility and causes your business to rank highly for valuable search terms. Highly rated sources are implicitly trusted by consumers, even those with no previous business experience. You need to ensure your business ranks high because the first five results get two–thirds of all the clicks. Companies ranked at the bottom of the first page are most invisible and receive a measly four percent of all clicks.
Creating a Formal Content Marketing Strategy
It is essential to have a written content marketing strategy that allows you to define your goals, set realistic targets, set your target demographic, and define parameters that ensure the content generated fits your organization’s culture and identity. The strategy will set goals for your marketing agency and ensure they constantly update and review your online content.
Content For Marketing to Franchisees
Franchisors are always in need of capable entrepreneurs who can penetrate hot markets. Content marketing is a very effective way of attracting potential franchisees. Your agency will create informative and engaging content e.g.education blog posts devoted to answering specific questions or concerns that franchisees are likely to have.
Such posts will detail what it takes to start and successfully run a franchise. They focus on solving the potential client’s pain points without blatantly promoting the franchise brand. They also foster trust and goodwill in the discovery stage by shunning promotional language.
After the prospect engages with your franchise, they will be exposed to additional content that discusses the differences between various competitors in the market and reveals the benefits of purchasing your franchise.
Content for Marketing to Consumers.
There are two models for franchisees to use consumer target content marketing.
Corporate-generated Content Marketing
Corporate franchises usually support their franchisees by using their considerable resources to create content that builds brand awareness and trust on a national or international platform. This content is generally published in a company publication or corporate-level blog. The corporate team also has dedicated social media and PR teams who amplify the content and ensure it reaches a larger audience. Content on the corporate website is also likely to have a high domain score, enabling its content to rank high in search results. Corporate-generated content stretches the marketing budget further because it reaches many people with each post.
Franchisee-generated Content Marketing
Though franchisors have a broad reach, they have difficulty creating localized content for specific regions, which could offer more benefits to each franchisee’s business. At this point, franchisees have to step in by creating online content that is engaging and suitable for their local audiences. Franchisee-generated content can either appear on a local website or the franchisee’s section on the corporate site. It is created around local events that could help the franchise engage with and market themselves to the local community. Franchisees’ should ensure that all the content is in line with the goals, identity, and culture the franchise has established—some franchisors reserve the right to approve any franchisee-generated marketing content before it airs.
How to Avoid the Most Common Challenge in Content Marketing
Recent surveys have revealed that over 75% of companies list insufficient budget, staff, and time as their biggest hindrances to content marketing. Corporate support is crucial because resource-restrained franchisees face a significant burden in creating targeted and on-brand content. They are often tempted to repurpose content from the corporate site in their local area. Unfortunately, scraping content from another site is worse than having no content; search engines penalize this by pushing sites down in rankings or removing them from the search results entirely.
A great solution is a corporate sponsorship of local franchisee content. This ensures that the content is of a quality that matches that of corporate-generated content. It also guarantees that the franchisee-generated content aligns with the corporate brand, culture, and identity.
