Once you’ve decided to turn your business into a franchise, you have to think carefully about your marketing. Franchise marketing is different from marketing a conventional business. This is especially true when it comes to digital marketing, because you have to think about how much control to give each of your franchisees over social media. Do you make local pages for each franchisee, or control them all from a central account? Furthermore—and no matter what—you have to think about how local customers in each of your areas will be able to find the franchise location closest to them. Fortunately, we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll point out some common PPC marketing mistakes that franchisers often fall prey to, so that you can avoid them and your franchise can thrive.
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Hold On: What Does PPC Mean?!
PPC means “pay per click”, and it’s an incredibly important term to understand if you want to be successful in your franchise’s digital marketing efforts. PPC marketing involves paying your advertiser each time one of your ads is clicked. You’re essentially buying visits to your page. This brings us to mistake number one: assuming PPC is the only strategy you need. In fact, PPC marketing should always be done in conjunction with a careful SEO campaign so that your page still has organic reach no matter what happens.
Think About Your Customers’ Likely Keywords; Not Your Own
Like SEO, PPC relies on keywords to display your ads in search engine results and elsewhere on the internet. That said, you have to do serious research to figure out which keywords will effectively reach your target market. Don’t just think of what you would search for—use a professional service to conduct market research, and choose the keywords most likely to garner results from the customers you want. For franchises, some of these keywords should be local, so that your individual branches can be found by customers in their areas.
Don’t Ignore Your Call-to-Action
How will you know that your efforts are working? What metric will you set to quantify your success? If you haven’t thought about that, there’s no way to know whether your PPC campaign is working. Maybe you want customers to subscribe to your email list, or download a whitepaper. Once you’ve decided, choose a number that will let you know your efforts have worked when you hit it.
Make Sure Not to Neglect Your Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are just as important as positive ones. Negative keywords are keywords you don’t want your advertiser to use—they might mislead customers by appearing to reflect a different product or service, or be controversial in some way. Negative keywords can also help you refine your niche. For example, if you run a business that exclusively sells citrus fruits, you might want “bananas” to be one of your negative keywords. The same goes for franchises. Some of your negative keywords should be areas where you do not currently have franchise locations (of course, you’ll want to update those as you open new branches).
Make Your Landing Page Specific, Instead of Generic
Some brands use their homepage as the landing page for their online ads. DO. NOT. DO. THIS. Instead, make your landing page one that allows the user to fulfill your call to action without delay. If your call to action is to have them subscribe to your email list, your landing page should be your subscription page.
PPC marketing for your franchise doesn’t have to be difficult, but you need to do your homework. Refer to this list often and implement the suggestions above—when you do, you should find that running an effective campaign for your franchise is much easier than you anticipated.
Author Bio
Nick Rojas is a self-taught, serial entrepreneur who’s enjoyed success working with and consulting for startups. He concentrates on teaching small and medium sized enterprises how best to manage their social media marketing and define their branding objectives.
Twitter: @NickARojas
