The rapid rise in social media usage means social platforms no longer exist on the outskirts of a successful marketing strategy. In the modern branding and advertising landscape, many large marketing campaigns have a social element at their core, whether it is focused on generating word-of-mouth awareness, sales through social media, or social sharing. This Guide provides a snapshot of how franchise businesses are using the most popular social media platforms to achieve their marketing objectives. I’ve also thrown in some specific examples so you can see exactly how these...

Social media no longer exists on the outskirts of successful franchise marketing strategy. In the modern landscape, successful branding and marketing campaigns must have a social element at their core in order to be relevant and sustainable. From our work in the franchise sector we see more and more brands doing some wonderful things in Social Media but the most common question we get asked from franchisors and franchise marketing managers is ‘where do I start?’ In our last post for 2011, we’ve put together an action list of the top 3 steps you can make to get started...

Trademarks are a potentially thorny and often forgotten area for franchises to navigate, especially when it comes to Google Adwords. Google has strict rules and guidelines surrounding ad creation and the bidding of trademarked terms. So much so, there’s been a number of high profile and protracted legal battles between some brands and Google. A very recent example saw Louis Vuitton claiming Google Adwords were illegally allowing competitors to purchase keywords relevant to the Louis Vitton trademarks. Whilst Google won the protracted 7 year court case, they also subsequently...

If you have struggled to keep up with the raft of changes Facebook made over the last few weeks, you're not alone. Facebook is overhauling the site and changing the way they want users to interact with each other, with the site, and with businesses. The struggle for franchisees and franchisors will be to keep across these changes and adapt your social media strategies to be better aligned and get the most out of the new interface. In this post I'm going to run through some of the major changes Facebook has made to the site and explore what it means from a Franchise owner's...

The modern online marketing landscape is changing rapidly with some new strategy or tool appearing almost weekly. If you want to have success online in 2011 then at a minimum you need to be working on two key aspects of your online marketing mix. These are: Search Engine Optimisation – Getting your website found online Social Media – Engaging and communicating with your prospects in social networks These two areas are now inextricably entwined, with Google and the other search engines incorporating social signals and social participation as a factor in the way...

Location, Location, Location. It’s a critical element for many in the franchise sector and in the land grab for online real estate Facebook is taking location very seriously with some exciting new developments for franchisors both large and small. For quite a while, Traffika has talked about the collision of Social Media, Location & Mobile (SoLoMo) and it appears our predictions are right with the world’s largest Social platform leading the way. To put some perspective on just how quickly SoLoMo has reached scale in Australia, Facebook as almost 10.5 million active...

For any business with an online presence, website analytics is a vital component for succeeding both on and offline. Fortunately, Google offers a free Analytics service to help website owners gather meaningful data on their website and its users, and provide insights that can be translated into real opportunities for your business. However, one of the main challenges for franchise business websites is being able to segment these insights into the different regions in which their franchises operate. For example, how does a franchisor with stores across Australia determine which of their...

Last post I discussed the top SEO opportunity for franchises, and how to get started with local search optimization. Once you’ve followed those tips, it’s time to move on to the next step: #2 Optimise Your Website for Local Search In October 2010 Google started creating a blended listing in its search results where it joined together the Google Places listing as well as the normal organic listing of the website. This makes it more imperative that your website is optimised for local search. You optimise your website for local search by: Making sure your websites...

For many people the cost of investing in a new franchise is probably the largest investment they will make outside of their home. In addition the importance of the performance of the franchise business to the future wealth of the individual cannot be understated. With that in mind I am going to outline the #1 opportunity for the franchisor and franchisee to get targeted visitors to their businesses from online sources. What is the opportunity? With the massive growth in the number of people going online to buy goods and services there is a real opportunity for location based...

Thanks to social media, it’s never been easier for franchises to build meaningful connections with their customers, but it's important to have the right strategy before diving into this grand new world. In today's article I'm going to take you through the first three of the ten of the most important steps to get your franchise started on social media. (You can read the remaining seven in my following blog posts). It's vital you set your franchise up with a good strategy before getting too serious with your social media efforts. Proper management of your social media profiles early...

In ‘Seven ways to use LinkedIn for franchisee recruitment - part one’, I covered how to: Develop a complete and keyword rich company profile on LinkedIn. Gather recommendations from existing franchisees. Actively search for prospective franchisees based on keywords, qualifications and experience. In this post I will cover the four remaining ways to use LinkedIn for franchisee recruitment. 4. Proactively service people by responding to questions in LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn Answers provides a ‘knowledge marketplace’ for people to ask and answer...

Here are the remaining four of the ten most most important steps to get your franchise started on social media. If you missed either the first three steps or steps 4-6 to get your franchise started on social media posts I suggest you read these first before moving on. 7. Social Media Communities This is where you define which social media channels will best matches your audience, your key messages and your content. Have a look at the 'Big Four' social networks, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube and think about which ones will suit. Generally speaking, Facebook...

In today's article I'm going to take you through steps 4-6 of the ten most important steps to get your franchise started on social media. The first three steps to get your franchise started on social media were covered in my first blog post.  4. Define Your Audience Segments Again, this is probably something you already have a good idea about if you have previously done an advertising campaign. If not, have a think about your products and services and relate them to specific demographics like gender, age and lifestyle. It's also handy to think about your sales cycle, and the...