How Brands Can Help Franchisees Reach More Local Customers

Your customers count on your brand to always deliver the same experience — even when they visit different locations. That's why your corporate team works hard to ensure your brand is consistent across channels and locations. Meanwhile, your franchise managers know how to reach and engage their local market.

But your customers don't separate their experiences at a certain location - franchise-owned or not - from their experience with your overall brand. That's why it's important to ensure both brand and franchise marketers play a role in managing your digital presence (at the corporate and local level) to attract customers.

When customers can trust your brand, great things happen. According to a 2021 study from Marq, brand consistency can increase growth by 20% and revenue by 33%. And a Yext survey supports this, too: more than two-thirds of respondents indicated that they are more likely to return to a business if its online information is consistent and reliable.

As a franchise brand, you have to manage your holistic brand and your franchisees' local markets. After all, local customers often have higher intent: when searching for a local business, 88% of consumers will either call or visit within 24 hours.

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But what is a reliable and consistent brand? We asked Greg Phillips, founder and CEO of Arc4 to help define it.

Q: How do you define a great digital presence?

A: A great digital presence takes uniform branding, messaging, and company information and seamlessly blends that with tailored experiences across all touchpoints. Imagine a food brand that is consistent in its marketing and branding across all digital marketing channels. They showcase limited time offers on the main website and promote the offer through social channels. When a user interacts with the brand, the experience is consistent across all touchpoints, however, when they visit their local store page to place an order, the user experience is localized to them with relevant offers, promotions, and content specifically for that location.

Q: What do your franchise clients with great, consistent digital presences do differently?

A: Our clients are great at mixing their corporate brand with local messaging. They set the stage with branding, marketing, and content but also let franchisees throw in their own local specials, showcase local franchisees and their employees, and present flexible solutions for their franchisees while maintaining oversight and control. It's all about giving franchisees the freedom to shine on their own terms while maintaining a consistent brand experience at scale.

Q: Is achieving brand consistency more challenging for franchises than non-franchised brands? Why or why not?

A: Franchised brands come with the additional challenge of input and requirements from the franchisees. While franchisees crave some control and want to put their own spin on things, they also benefit from the power of the corporate brand. The challenge? Crafting unique local experiences that still fit with the overarching brand. It's an added complexity but when handled correctly, it allows for the perfect blend of scale while still keeping a local touch.

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Whether it's corporate or local, digital or physical, your customers expect great interactions with your brand. If you don't think you have consistency across your locations – whether because of separate platforms, siloed information, a growing list of digital channels to manage – just know it's harder than ever to achieve brand consistency.

So, what should franchise brands do to create brand consistency everywhere?

Corporate managers work hand-in-hand with franchise managers to create consistent content and experiences. They analyze revenue performance and think about how to support franchise managers at underperforming locations with better visibility and revenue-driving tactics.

One tactic to increase discoverability is to focus on listings. Local listings can drive visibility and sales, even if the customer never clicks to visit your website. On average, business listings receive 2.7x more views than a brand's owned website (including local store pages and directories). And because they reach a local audience at a moment when they're ready to convert, it's important that each location's listings are accurate, up-to-date, and consistent with your overall brand. To achieve this consistency, look for listings management platforms that can support locations across many digital channels and publishers.

Another easy way to support franchisees is with highly discoverable (and high-converting) website pages. When building these webpages, include:

• Location-based personalization: When you are driving discoverability for a physical location – and especially when you have more than one location – be sure to create pages for each location. Location-based queries reveal the customer's intent, making it easier to tailor local pages.

• Seasonal personalization: Seasonal promotions likely won't live on your website year-round. Customize your local pages for the time when they're live, and either update or remove them once the promotion has passed. These seasonal local pages allow you to promote specific messaging and offers to your customers with targeted content.

• User-based personalization: Using the right website management tool allows you to easily match results to user queries. You can gather a lot of information about your customer's intentions based on the search queries they use to find your local pages.

• Strong CTAs: Calls-to-action, (CTAs), are how you encourage customers to take the next step in their journey and move down the funnel. Your CTA should be relevant to the content on your webpage. What action do you want the customer to take next? This can include booking an appointment, ordering off the menu, making a reservation, and more.

Once you've optimized your local listings and built local pages on your site that support each franchise location, you can review the overall franchise group performance. Then, you can work with individual franchise managers to analyze and help improve their location's performance.

Franchisees want to drive revenue across their franchised locations, and they look to the corporate team for help. Are there specific campaigns they can leverage to drive more foot traffic? What corporate-owned offers can they highlight for their location?

Local audiences tend to interact and engage on social media. Local social media account pages on platforms like Facebook can help promote corporate and local offers to a loyal audience — and drive discoverability among new customers. This strategy can drive double the impact because social media posts sync with Google Business Profiles.

The key to a successful local social media presence is to allow franchise managers to personalize social posts through a shared corporate content calendar. Whether your brand prefers the corporate team or the franchise manager to write and approve the copy, you can be sure that your brand is consistent and your post is personalized for a local market.

Be sure to respond quickly to comments and messages on social media posts. Having franchise managers responsible for responses helps ensure replies are personalized, since they are more familiar with the local market. Or, create workflows that streamline collaboration between corporate and franchisees.

Finally, respond to reviews on your local listings. It's important that these reviews contain positive feedback and high ratings since this helps attract new customers. If the reviews aren't positive, be sure to respond to them quickly, and stay consistent with your corporate brand guidelines.

As a franchise brand, you want to support franchisees with great resources. Part of this effort is closing any gaps between corporate marketers and franchise managers. This will help you understand how each location performs — and whether there are specific actions you can take to increase revenue.

Our partner Dentsu drives increased user engagement for franchisee clients. Here, Elizabeth Jones, a Local SEO Expert and Champion, answers some common questions and shares the best practices they recommend for their clients:

Q: How do brands decide which channels should be managed by corporate vs. franchisees?

A: Franchisees tend to lack search experience as their focus is running their business, so they shouldn't be expected to manage your digital presence. By all means, encourage them to manage specific information like their contact details and opening hours, but it's best to leave most channels to be managed by experts.

Q: What's the difference between how customers use listings vs. web pages? How can brands maximize engagement on both?

A: I see listing users at the top and tail of a user journey. Users will use listings when imagining a future scenario (ex: "If I book a hotel in this area, how long will it take me to walk to the beach?" or "If I bought a house in this area how long would my work commute be?"). But they also use listings when they are in their car with their wallet in their hands (think of search queries like "Restaurants near me"). But for everything in between, they use your website.

As for maximizing engagement, my boring answer is account hygiene: Having a listing with up-to-date info and free from user edits increases trust and builds an image of the brand being digitally active. A slightly less boring answer is to include as much imagery as possible. Whether a user is buying a house or a burger, a huge part of the decision process is made when seeing what the product looks like.

Q: What are some key features that franchised brands should look for in a digital presence management platform?

A: First and foremost, you need a good support team. Then, the features that matter most to franchised brands are usually 1) the ability to bulk edit digital properties like listings and webpages, and 2) the ability to schedule updates.

If you're counting, we've mentioned four different channels that franchise brands need to manage for their digital presence: location listings, local pages, social media, and reviews. But how can you achieve brand consistency for each channel when you have hundreds – or even thousands – of franchised locations?

Yext helps franchise organizations turn their digital presence into a differentiator. By eliminating platform and information silos and encouraging collaboration between brand managers and franchisees, you can manage your entire digital presence from one platform.

Don't just take our word for it – here's what one managing director for a franchise had to say about working with Yext:

Ready to learn how you can leverage Yext to drive revenue for your franchises? Explore the Yext Digital Presence Management platform today.