In 2024, the franchise business model is booming. According to a recent report by the International Franchise Association (IFA), not only did franchises beat growth projections in 2023, they're expected to grow roughly 3% more by the end of the current year. That means 15,000 new franchise locations and over 220,000 new jobs created across the United States.
If you're a franchise owner, it also means something else: competition. And to beat it, you need a powerful franchise marketing strategy that will make customers choose your location over other local businesses.
This guide for franchise owners explores seven of the best franchise marketing strategies to use in 2024, including social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and location-based marketing. It also offers marketing tips for franchises, explains how to streamline your franchise marketing plan, and answers some of your FAQs about promoting franchise locations.
We have a lot of material to cover, so let's jump right in with an overview of what franchise marketing means and why it matters.
What is franchise marketing, and what are the benefits of implementing a franchise marketing strategy?
Franchise marketing is a collection of practices, tactics, and strategies that all share a goal of promoting the brand, attracting new customers, and increasing revenue. It usually involves a blend of traditional marketing tactics, such as TV commercials or print ads, and digital marketing strategies, such as email or social media campaigns.
While both traditional and digital marketing tactics can yield a high ROI for franchises, online marketing offers a few potential advantages. Not only does digital marketing tend to be more cost-effective than traditional advertising, but also allows for a greater degree of customization to local markets.
With the right digital marketing efforts, you can raise brand awareness, attract potential customers, decrease customer churn, increase social media engagement, and connect with every target audience — no matter the size of your marketing budget or how many franchise locations you operate.
In addition to these benefits, there's also another reason why franchises need a solid marketing strategy: franchise customers want consistency, no matter what location they visit. By creating and distributing a comprehensive marketing plan to all of your franchisees, you can ensure that every location aligns with your brand image and delivers the experience fans expect.
In any franchise business, there are two key parties: the franchisor, who owns the brand's trademarks and intellectual property, and the franchisee, who buys the rights to operate an individual location.
The franchisor is responsible for developing national and regional marketing campaigns, setting the company's social media policies, and creating logos and other branding assets. Although expected to conform to the franchisor's rules and standards, franchisees also play a role in promotional and marketing efforts. For example, franchisees may have limited control over certain local SEO or local social media campaigns.
Whether you're opening a new store, expanding into a new geographic market, or trying to revitalize a struggling location, here are seven of the best franchise marketing strategies to drive growth in 2024:
Let's discuss why these strategies are worth adopting — and how your franchise can implement them.
Google uses a complex search algorithm to determine how websites rank. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of structuring your website, along with various off-site elements, to boost your Google ranking and improve your online visibility.
A strong SEO strategy is essential for generating leads, outperforming competitors, and driving traffic to your website.
Let's go over some tips and best practices for on-page, technical, and local SEO, which are three of the most important SEO categories for franchises.
On-page SEO, which is also called "front-end SEO," involves modifying elements of your website to make it user-friendly and help it rank in search results. Technical or "back-end SEO" deals specifically with optimizing your site architecture to help search engines find and understand your content.
Here are a few ways you can improve your on-page and technical SEO:
Local SEO is a subcategory of SEO focused on boosting your rank in Google searches with local intent, such as "near me" searches or geographically specific searches.
For example, if someone performs a search like "Los Angeles fast food," Google will show results relevant to that geographical area. And even without a geographic term included in the search, Google automatically displays businesses located near the searcher, as one Google Support page explains.
Research shows that more than 22% of web traffic comes from local searches. And when businesses appear in the Google Map Pack, like the three in the screenshot above, their traffic increases by an incredible 126%.
Plus, there's another reason local SEO is valuable for franchises: it allows you to boost traffic to a specific franchise location, which means you can target stores that might be underperforming and reach a wider range of consumer segments.
Here are some ways to improve your local SEO and rank higher in local search results:
BrightLocal's 2024 Local Consumer Review Survey reveals that almost half of consumers — 45% — have checked business reviews on Facebook during the past year. 34% have checked reviews on Instagram, 23% on TikTok, and 18% on X (formerly known as Twitter). And it's not just your reviews that potential customers are checking — it's also the content you post, not to mention how you interact with your followers.
Here are some tips and best practices to help your franchise build a strong, cohesive social media strategy:
Location-based marketing (LBM) is a strategy that involves using data collected from a consumer's mobile device to provide them with personalized offerings and content in their geographic area. This practice can have powerful benefits for franchises, since consumers who are otherwise familiar with the brand may not always be aware of franchise locations in their town or city.
Here are some location-based marketing tips for franchises:
If you're a franchise owner, you need to make sure your business is listed in popular directories like Yelp, Trustpilot, and the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
Most importantly, you need to create a Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business). Creating a business profile is free and enables your business to appear on Google Maps, which means:
Depending on what type of service or product you offer, customers can even book an appointment or place an order online, like in the example below:
Google Maps has a powerful influence on the success of your business, with 81% of consumers reporting they checked Google reviews in 2024. By cultivating positive ratings and reviews, you can build trust with consumers and bring new customers to your local franchise.
Listing your franchise on Google also enables you to share information about the special features, amenities, or other attributes that set specific locations apart. For instance, in the example below, the business indicates that it has a wheelchair accessible entrance:
For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guide to Google Business Profile, or get started creating your account. But first, here are some local listings management tips:
Online reviews are a powerful marketing tool for multiple reasons. Not only do reviews have an enormous influence on consumers' shopping habits, they also serve as useful raw material for promoting your brand.
Data shows that the overwhelming majority of today's consumers — around 97%, according to BrightLocal — check online reviews, whether "occasionally" (22%), "regularly" (42%), or "always" (33%). And for 50% of consumers, reviews hold just as much sway as "personal recommendations from friends and family." 35% trust reviews "as much as recommendations from social media influencers," and 31% even say that they trust consumer reviews as much as content created by experts.
Additionally, reviews are a form of user-generated content (UGC). Why is that important? Because consumers trust authentic UGC more than any other type of marketing materials, including branded content and content created by paid influencers. That means you can get more clicks and conversions by incorporating genuine positive reviews into your online ads.
There's also another key point for franchises: good (or bad) reviews of one location can influence perceptions of your entire brand. According to BrightLocal, roughly nine out of 10 consumers — 91% — “feel that local reviews of chains and franchises impact their overall perception of the brand in some way.”
Since reviews of individual locations can have so much impact on your franchise, it's vital to manage them carefully.
The challenge for franchises (along with other large organizations) is finding efficient ways to manage reviews of multiple business locations. Here are a few tips to help guide you:
An email marketing campaign can consist of a single email or a series of multiple emails. It might take the form of a newsletter sharing updates about your company, an invitation to leave a review after a customer makes an online purchase, sign-up links for discounts or memberships, eBook downloads, reminders about abandoned shopping carts, personalized alerts and recommendations, or other types of content.
Here are some tips to help your franchise create solid email marketing campaigns:
Advertisements aren't the only way to connect with customers. Your franchise can drive more traffic organically by publishing relevant, helpful, original content based on keyword research. Here are some types of content your franchise can create:
Here are some tips to help your franchise produce content that converts:
By creating fresh, informative content that educates and resonates with consumers, you're providing value, building trust, and strengthening your relationships with existing customers.
Need a quick recap? Here’s a summary of the seven strategies we covered:
Here are four simple-but-unskippable tips to help you achieve better outcomes from your franchise marketing strategy.
It's critical for franchisees to maintain a consistent brand image that conforms to the parent company. Help your franchisees successfully align with your brand identity by providing them with clear and comprehensive guidelines around sharing content and engaging with customers.
It's also a good idea to use tools like review response templates or review response services, which ensures a degree of consistency across all responses.
An inactive or dead social media page sends red flags to shoppers and deprives you of opportunities for engagement, making it crucial to keep active on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Instagram. Shout About Us features review widgets that let you automate social posting, making it effortless to highlight happy customers and success stories.
After you create business listings for Google, Yelp, Apple Maps, and other directories, you need to keep all of them updated — and that doesn't even begin to cover responding to every review and rating, not to mention customer Q&A's.
To manage your online listings and customer reviews at scale, consider using tools that can automate these tasks for you. For example, Shout About Us lets you automate the process of requesting reviews through email, SMS, and in-store campaigns.
Your marketing strategy shouldn't just focus on acquiring new customers, but also finding ways to retain more of your existing customers. Building customer relationships enables your franchise to boost loyalty and minimize churn, while also giving you more opportunities for up-selling.
You can build stronger customer relationships by regularly communicating with your fans, reviewers, followers, and subscribers online, like sending personalized offers or recommendations via email, or responding to social media mentions and reviews.
Say goodbye to frustration and hello to automation with Shout About Us: the mobile-friendly, cloud-based platform revolutionizing review management for franchises.
Shout About Us is a feature-rich platform that harnesses powerful AI to help your franchise business automate and accelerate every review management task. Convert customers and drive engagement by requesting, tracking, sharing, and responding to reviews — all from one intuitive dashboard that keeps your data secure in the cloud.
As a multi location business, your franchise needs to monitor multiple directories and review sites, while also ensuring your listings are accurate and up-to-date. By automating this process for you, Shout About Us eliminates the hassle and inefficiency of manual review tracking and listings management.
We monitor over 50 platforms and provide you with custom alerts and notifications when your franchise location receives new ratings or reviews. Platforms we track your reviews on include:
Research shows that the majority of consumers expect businesses to have at least 20 to 49 reviews before they feel comfortable using their products or services. Your franchise can score more positive reviews by using Shout About Us to automate and personalize your customer feedback request process. Our platform makes it simple to send custom messages and review links via email, SMS/text, or in-store campaigns.
Shout About Us monitors 50+ review sites, business directories, and social media platforms for prohibited content, like spam or inappropriate reviews, that could hurt your reputation.
We automate the process of flagging and removing harmful reviews, including notifications about the status of each removal request. We'll also highlight sensitive reviews, such as allegations of fraud or abuse, so that your executive team can determine the appropriate course of action.
Respond to positive, mixed, and negative reviews and ratings from 50+ review sites, just by logging into your Shout About Us dashboard. Use search filters to tackle priority reviews first, and create your own library of response templates to cut down on writing time.
Our platform features social posting features and custom review widgets that make it easy to share positive reviews and show off your biggest successes.
Embed 5-star ratings, customer testimonials, and other positive UGC directly to your website and social media profiles, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Shout About Us enables your business to generate automated reports that deliver actionable insights into your performance.
We analyze customer feedback and review sentiment to identify trends and patterns, such as customers' leading complaints and pain points, empowering your team to make strategic decisions based on data.
Shout About Us works with franchises, chains, enterprises, and other multi-location businesses in industries like:
Whether your goal is to earn more customer referrals, showcase your 5-star reviews, expand to a new target audience, or boost your ranking in local search results, we offer custom solutions to fit your organization's needs, including ReviewNavigator and ResponseScribe.
ReviewNavigator comes with a comprehensive suite of review management features and tools, including review removal, generation, and tracking. ReviewNavigator also enables your local franchise to create and publish review responses on 50+ review platforms, all from one easy-to-navigate dashboard.
ResponseScribe, our done-for-you review response service, provides your customers with personalized replies to their comments, questions, and ratings. AI content is ready in minutes, ensuring fast and consistent responses. ResponseScribe also offers the option to respond using human writers, giving you flexibility and control over your content strategy.
As a franchise owner, your biggest goal is to keep the customers coming. Drive more growth and hit targets faster with AI-powered review management solutions by Shout About Us.
Designed for franchises, chains, and other multi-location businesses, our powerful review management platform scales to your needs to effortlessly automate tasks. From gathering customer feedback and removing harmful reviews, to generating business reports and custom review responses, Shout About Us is your all-in-one tool for franchise review management.
Discover what your marketing team can accomplish together with Shout About Us. Schedule a demo today to get started.
Done-for-you review management
built for local businesses.
