Many franchises come to our Local Search Traffic division struggling with how to improve their online presence and digital marketing strategies. It’s really difficult to ensure hundreds of locations maintain brand standards while appealing to their local audience with unique content. Common challenges include fragmented strategies, lack of adherence to guidelines, lack of education about the digital space and, paradoxically, too much corporate control.
The most common problem is a fragmented strategy; different locations are trying to accomplish different goals with different strategies instead of working together on an integrated approach. For example, corporate may have created a metro page that includes each location in a major city in order to bump the business up in the organic search results. But some individual locations are building links to their own site rather than the metro page, essentially competing with themselves for ranking.
Often corporate guidelines are not followed, leading to mixed messages from different locations and inaccurate targeting. Not following guidelines in measurement and analytics leads to inaccurate reporting. Corporate analysts cannot compare data from individual locations to see performance trends if locations are tracking data differently.
Corporate offices also face challenges in educating franchise owners about the digital marketing eco-sphere. It is complex, vast and frequently changing. Add to this the fact that many franchise owners are much more used to direct mail and phone book advertising, and you end up with unaligned strategies and wasted money.
Corporate oversight can go too far the other way as well. Thinking like a business instead of a consumer, corporate can have really strict ad copy regulations. These regulations may restrict best-practices for ad copy and result in ads that are impersonal and unattractive to local customers.
So at this point you might think I’m headed to telling you the only solution for all these challenges is to hire an agency that specializes in local, like us. Well, the reality is a corporation can handle franchise digital marketing in house if they are willing to dedicate the resources. These resources include tracking software, industry knowledge, local marketing specialists and a pool of labor to ensure listing accuracy and bid management. For some major corporations, this may be the right call. Anything less than that level of commitment, however, won’t overcome the major challenges that face franchises in the digital marketing sphere.