Social Marketing for Franchise & Multi-Location Business
We have been involved with Online Marketing for over 15 years and have seen the dramatic effects on business in general by search engines like AltaVista, Excite, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and of course Google.
However, in our recent blog post, we talked about the seismic changes occurring as a result of social marketing. To reiterate, the Social Media Marketing channels have risen to the top of consumer confidence and purchasing decisions. Only word of mouth ranks above Social Marketing in consumer confidence.
So who are the slowest adopters into these rapidly expanding marketing channels? Yet again, like many past opportunities, small business is trailing far behind in implementing a solid social marketing strategy. Even worse are the multi-location and franchisers and franchisees.
A strong solid social marketing strategy combined with strong brand and brand awareness is becoming paramount among the soon to be top performers in any business. Losing control of your message and brand identity can and will cause a heavy burden when attempting to correct or turn around the negativety imposed at a later date.
Most major social marketing outlets offer the ability to brand your business. Youtube, Twitter, Wordpress, and others offer your business the opportunity to present a common brand. Smart business strategists are rapidly understanding how to use online outlets to forward and spread their message and brand in a unified and common approach.
Many large franchisers, institutions, and firms are contractually demanding their franchisees, license holders, and or agents subscribe to a corporate level branding and messaging campaign. Many are even prohibiting the use of individual web pages, marketing campaigns, and content submission.
The window for small business to implement a strong message and brand within the social media marketing platform is wide open! However we suspect, like many other open marketing opportunities in the past, this low or no cost window might start closing within 1-2 years.