Growing a franchise is an exciting entrepreneurial adventure. But it’s a lot more fun — and more profitable — when you avoid some of the common pitfalls many franchises face as they scale.
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Inconsistent Brand Messaging
When corporate doesn’t maintain control over franchisee branding, it’s easy to end up with inconsistent visual branding and messaging. The look and feel of every franchise must be uniform so it’s easily identifiable, whenever and wherever the brand is presented, which is critical to encourage brand recognition, trust and long-term growth.
To achieve the high level of consistency you need, all branding and content should adhere to the same set of established brand standards across all media and platforms. Individual franchises should be encouraged to tailor their content to local markets, but always within the constraints of the regional or national brand.
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Marketing Resources That Don’t Scale With Your Business
When it comes to franchises, growth doesn’t always happen gradually or predictably. And you can quickly outpace your marketing resource capacities when that happens. You don’t want to be caught flat-footed and not be able to keep pace with the growth of your business. That’s why it’s important to partner with an agency that can handle high-volume, high-demand work.
Take printing for example. When you work with an agency that offers full-service printing, you can gain greater efficiency and economy of scale — especially with larger projects. A firm with an in-house print shop can be more responsive to the changing needs of your growing franchise. And keep in mind that when using advance marketing tactics, print jobs rarely operate in isolation. From trackable phone numbers on mailers to dedicated landing pages with QR codes and social media callouts, many parts of your print and digital marketing need to work together for maximum impact.
When you work with a full-service agency, all parts of these processes can be highly coordinated. You can create a direct mail piece with a special offer, link it to a dedicated landing page, set up website analytics and call tracking — and analyze the results of your split testing to determine what works best to reach your customers.
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Lack of Web Development Resources
This is another common area that can hold a growing franchise back. A marketing firm with the ability to design and launch multiple websites within a week, or even a day, is a valuable and necessary asset to a growing franchise.
But web development work shouldn’t end with the launch of a new site, which is why you need a firm with the expertise to make sure that all franchise sites are coordinated so they don’t interfere with each others’ SEO efforts. And syncing business directory listings can help keep franchisee websites ranking high on the SERPs.
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Failure to Coordinate Campaigns and Track Results
The ability to efficiently cross-post content to franchisee blogs and social media channels is a must. Look for an agency with experience setting up call tracking, review systems, and business directory syncing and integrating them into every aspect of your digital presence including PPC and SEO. If you’re not coordinating all these efforts, you may be wasting valuable time and resources.
A rapidly-growing franchise should continually compare marketing results across locations to fine-tune strategies and optimize outcomes. For example, with PPC, make sure you don’t end up having one franchise bidding against another and driving up the price of clicks for both.
Having a single account executive for all aspects of project management of an omnichannel marketing program saves time and ensures efforts are not duplicated or conflicting, while keeping all campaigns coordinated and synchronized. If you want a marketing firm that checks all of the boxes discussed, you don’t need to look any further. Kymera has helped many franchises rapidly scale their growth. With in-house web development, graphic design, full-service print and direct-mail services, SEO, PPC expertise and much more, Kymera can help take your franchise statewide or national.
