Marketing Your Franchise: How to Advertise Your Business Like a Pro
Lily Sweeney, writer
Published at 21/06/2021, Updated on 04/05/2022 , Reading time: 5 min
Franchising can be exciting, rewarding and profitable. But it isn’t always easy, and the competition can be tough. To stand out and find true franchise success, you’ll need to know how to advertise your business like a pro.
Treat this article as a comprehensive guide to marketing your franchise. All the digital advertising tips that you find below will help you to identify the right marketing strategies for your business, ensuring that all your advertising spend is working hard to increase your revenue and customer base.
What is advertising?
Advertising is a way to communicate with consumers. Whether you’re advertising your entire business or highlighting a particular product or service, marketing communications are designed to get the word out there. In the UK, advertising expenditure in the UK amounted to £23.46 billion in 2020, which should tell you just how much other businesses are investing into marketing [Statista].
Why is it important to advertise your franchise?
Marketing your franchise effectively and efficiently is paramount to franchise success. As a franchisee, the specific terms of your franchise agreement will determine how heavily involved your franchisor is with the marketing and advertising of your business.
Generally speaking, franchisor marketing support is available, but the onus to actively advertise remains on you. Advertising is important to your franchise’s success because it can:
Expand your customer base and network
Help you to appeal to new demographics
Raise the profile of your franchise
Introduce any new products/services to consumers
Drive sales
A franchisee can be provided with all of the marketing materials and tool kits in the world, but if they don’t know how to use them and crucially how to respond to enquiries from potential customers coming through the door, then those materials are going to be pretty useless. As well as the franchisor carrying out overall brand marketing, the franchisee will have to market their new business locally too. —Fiona Simpson, Forbes
Five advertising best practices that will ensure you’re using your marketing budget wisely
1. Targeted advertising strategies
If targeted advertising is a new concept to you, here’s the rundown: It’s a form of online advertising which focuses on certain specific interests and consumer preferences. By tracking the online activity of consumers, targeted advertising can get very specific and niche, appealing to a smaller but more directly pinpointed group of people. Targeted advertising is a wise choice because when you use these kinds of strategies:
Your consumer feels understood, and tailored to
Your consumer is able to directly relate to the content you’re showing them
You don’t have to hard sell - instead, you just hand the consumer what they want
Peter Munro, Founder and Managing Director of Nationwide Cleaners, extols the benefits of using targeted advertising. Having tried to leaflet door-to-door, and to advertise on more general sites, Peter finally found traction on sites like Point Franchise, targeting people who were actively looking to start a business. And, even more specifically, a franchise business.
Leads from franchising websites have been the most effective tools in growing the network. I soon realised I needed to present the opportunity to people who were actively looking to start a business of their own. —Peter Munro, Nationwide Cleaners
>> Read more:
- What is the Marketing Fee and Why is it Necessary?
- Developing an effective franchise marketing plan
- Try Out These 8 Outside-the-Box Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business and Engage Your Customers
- 10 Tips for Building Truly Effective Social Media Marketing Campaigns
- Franchising 101: 8 Essential Marketing Strategies for Promoting Your Business
- Franchising 101: 6 Tips for Building Customer Loyalty Through Marketing
2. Regular reassessments
When you’ve invested money into an advertising campaign, especially one that you’ve worked tirelessly on, it can be disheartening if it doesn’t work, or doesn’t create the same response as other campaigns. It can be tempting to continue injecting money into it, hoping it’ll take off, but often, your best and most financially sensible option at this point is to step back, reassess, and make some changes.
This is a strategy that many marketers are unwilling to follow, and if you can, you’ll be in a better competitive position. Of course, not every advertising campaign produces instant results. Things like SEO, for example, can take a while to come to fruition. But, generally speaking, continually assessing what is and isn’t working and being honest with yourself when you need to flip the script is your best bet.
3. Content repurposing
Every strategy, campaign and piece of marketing content that you produce should be different, and should add value. But that’s not to say that you need to start from scratch each time. There’s nothing wrong with using past work that has proven to perform as a template for future campaigns, or with repurposing and re-angling parts of your existing advertising content in order to say something new. Content repurposing is a regular facet of a good advertiser's practice, and there’s no point spending more time and effort than you need to, when you already have the information at your fingertips.
Rather than covering a topic once and letting it disappear into the archives, repurpose your articles to consistently deliver your message to your audience. This works great if you’re starting with high-value, authoritative content. It makes it easier to find unique ways to reinforce your message. —Aaron Agius, HubSpot
>> Read more:
- How to Choose the Right Digital and Social Media Channels to Promote Your Franchise Business
- Developing an effective franchise marketing plan
- Try Out These 8 Outside-the-Box Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business and Engage Your Customers
- 10 Tips for Building Truly Effective Social Media Marketing Campaigns
- Franchising 101: 8 Essential Marketing Strategies for Promoting Your Business
4. Outsourcing to experts
This strategy won’t be available to those on the lower scale of franchise investment options, but if you’re not an expert and you have a bit more capital to work with, strongly consider investing in marketing support. Handing your marketing money to an expert in the field from the get-go will come with a much higher likelihood of success, and of your advertising campaigns gaining some traction and working successfully.
Whether you need help creating compelling marketing content, managing your social media presence, or writing press releases, an expert in the field of advertising can help you out, and ensure that all your promotional materials shine and perform.
5. Multichannel advertising strategies
Don’t confine all your digital advertising efforts to a single channel, or you’ll miss certain consumers entirely. Multichannel advertising strategies incorporate, you guessed it, multiple channels. You’ll need to adjust your content to meet the standards and practices of each platform, but in many cases, you’ll be able to repurpose and restructure, so the workload won’t be too hugely increased.
Multichannel advertising strategies perform well because they meet customers where they are, on their favourite online platform. You can create far more consumer touchpoints when your content is in multiple places than you could if you stuck, say, to your own website.
Marketing your franchise successfully and effectively is extremely important
If you can hit the advertising nail on the consumer’s head, you’ll soon develop a profitable franchise operation. For more franchisee tips, explore Point Franchise. You’ll discover how to choose a name for your business, or how to create engaging video content, as well as hundreds of other topics.
Lily Sweeney, writer