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Marketing franchised business

Recently I had a UK client for whom I was managing their Internet marketing, but since moving to Thailand I recommended she find a new trainer in UK and for me to hand over what we have done so far and make recommendations.

I feel the correspondence that I wrote to the company will be of use to anyone who is thinking of franchising their business and, or, thinking of managing a social media marketing strategy:

Hello everyone,

I am glad you have found a decent company to take over from where I left, so here is where we have managed to get to so far:

What our goal for ABC Co was; was to increase the search engine optimisation of ABC Co and raise the overall online brand, whilst doing this, the premise of one all over internet structure to pass down to franchisees was a major factor. So this is why I went down the Word Press route, and on many sites, this has been enormously effective for my own brand.

Search engines have told us that good content and links back from sites which are deemed as authority sites and sites similar to the core topic are paramount, and having a structure of different sites with similar themes all pointing back to one main site will, if consistent with the content, endear the business to search engines and readers of the websites alike.

Word Press is simple to use, well one of the easiest for non techies like the management of ABC Co. After seeing the Admin panel (CMS) of ABC Co’s original site and how difficult it was to use, I thought no potential franchisee is going to be attracted to that.

Our challenge was that all my clients, bar ABC Co, took a two day training session from myself and off they went and managed their new blog and social media themselves, which is the true essence of social media. I find it very difficult to understand the benefit of any companies that offer to do social media on behalf of companies, as every individual is different and masquerading as a business is full of flaws. We did not do it like this I am glad to say, and I posted whatever content the management gave me.

However, the management must get back to learning the very basics of how to add a page and a post, images and videos on all their own sites, and how once published a blog how to then get that blog on to social media and how to do this consistently. The management must learn what the value of Twitter Facebook and LinkedIn et al provides in branding a business, and the reputation this affords. Reputation and brand is a very difficult thing for people like me to demonstrate with KPI’s and ROI’s, so the difference between branding and advertising must also be taught.

Statistics are vital in learning about how your business is performing online so it is vital companies who want to franchise their business can demonstrate their knowledge of website analytics. I wanted ABC Co to buy and manage their own hosting account (shared) so they could open new sites for their franchisees and manage emails and stats, yet there are other companies involved who host ABC Co websites. So this will be the challenge for a new trainer.

I am, and always will be, a training company I got dragged down the route of “will you do this for me” quite willingly, though I should not have, but the owner is a lovely person and has innate abilities of managing people and I was totally enchanted damn!!! I agreed to help and got swept down a road that was away from my basic core of: Teach a company how to manage everything for themselves. This is where we find ourselves.

So my suggestion is to get the management kicking and screaming to learn how to do it all by themselves with effective teaching and to start with “This is how you open your admin panel, this is how you create a page etc. etc.” or otherwise you will find yourself becoming more and more a part of the fixtures and fittings of ABC Co as franchisees come on board. The owners business has massive potential and I can really see schools and businesses becoming more and more organic in their approach to how pupils and business people manage their stress so you will end up with a lot more clients to manage every day.

Duplication is the name of the game with franchising and it always starts from the top. So either manage the management now with training so they can teach their franchisees themselves, or set in place a structure to be uploading blogs, news, images, videos, slide shares, from different franchisees on the different websites all around the country each and every day which I think will be very costly, difficult to manage and not much fun at all.

I do however have ABC Co as a premium listed company on Biz-find.co.uk and I make a small charge of £20 per/month for this as this business directory and article marketing site has first page Google ranking for the keywords that matter and 6,000 visitors a month see her business every day so it’s vital branding. < Jan 2015…WOW! Just re reading this article and I am glad to say we are now at 39,000+ visitors for the UK site where ABC is published and 70,000 p/m across the Biz-find franchise>