Franchise Owner? Here are the Three Key Marketing Aspects You’re Overlooking
|Running one business is hard, but when you have a franchise that consists of more than one location that needs to run semi-autonomously, it becomes even trickier. The key to having a successful online marketing campaign as a franchise owner is local SEO. With the help of multinational experts in the field, like clickintelligence.co.uk, together you can be targeting the specific areas where your businesses are located and getting a good ranking for each one. What follows are three aspects you may be overlooking that you really can’t afford to neglect.
Aspect 1: Business Listing Data
When you have one business that’s in one location it’s very easy keeping all your business data up to date, but as soon as you have a franchise that are all operating independently, it becomes a lot more difficult. For local listing data to work it must be kept up-to-date which means you need to mercilessly keep on top of it all. It also needs to be accurate and consistent otherwise your overall marketing campaigns might suffer. You can find out here how to deal with business listing management, so you are not all over the place and can keep everything in line. Here in the US, there are four main ‘data aggregators’ that keep the data stored and you need to ensure that each one has the same business listing information, otherwise the whole thing falls apart. Make sure there are zero duplicates across:
Depending on your size, managing them all can be Herculean, so perhaps deploy a tool that will help greatly with this process. Bright Local and SweetIQ are good places to start.
Aspect 2: Unique Web Pages
The problem with having many locations is having a website that reflects this. Many companies will simply copy and paste the same content over and over again with the only difference being the town name. Doing that is better than simply not having a webpage for each location at all but it’s vital, in Google’s eyes, and for local listings, that every single one of your locations has its own dedicated webpage with a unique URL that features different content for each area. This ensures it stays fresh and makes a difference in the local searches.
Aspect 3: Good Old Fashioned Damage Control
When you’re sat in a head office somewhere it’s hard to keep an eye on how each franchise is operating. The best way for you to tell is to keep abreast of the reviews on the internet. You can easily see which business sites are constantly getting excellent reviews and which ones are being torn to shreds. With this information you now know exactly what isn’t working in a particular franchise. In years gone by there was no telling because unless people rang you to complain directly, you never knew why you were losing customers and you had to shoot in the dark trying to fix the hole in your service. Now all you have to do it pop online and every single fault is there for you to see.