6 Biggest Enterprise Marketing Hurdles and How to Overcome Them
There are several challenges common to franchise marketing regarding the balance between local and centralized marketing policies. Learning to recognize these challenges can also help you prepare to overcome these common hurdles in franchise marketing.
Lack of Balance Between Local and Brand Marketing
Both franchisor and franchisee must understand their roles in promoting the brand. A franchisor provides centralized guidance on achieving a brand identity that already has some momentum. Franchisees, however, must market on a local level to thrive. It's important to ensure that the core brand is not an overpowering local strategy and that local policies maintain a consistent on-brand experience.
What to Do:
Create a branding guidebook featuring colors, themes, and core values while taking feedback on marketing strategies used successfully by franchisees. This guidebook will help create and share the most effective marketing strategies.
Unclear Goals and Strategies
Make sure your franchisees know what goals they are trying to reach. Setting the right goals can help everyone maintain an on-brand mindset. Contrarily, unclear goals are among the biggest causes of brand disharmony. Clear goals also allow each franchise to operate within the bounds of the brand design while seeking solutions that work uniquely with their location, suppliers, or customer base.
What to Do:
Define the brand with clear goals that every location should strive to meet. Set goals that benefit the entire organization and provide tools to help meet those goals. Then review the efforts and provide on-site support to any locations struggling with specific goals and milestones.
Creating Content without Consistency and Differentiators
A great franchise brand has a unified theme but leaves room for each location to set itself apart. This theme allows your customers to seek out each location, knowing that they will find a familiar and satisfying venue, but also remember each franchise for what makes it unique and special, providing both brand consistency and differentiators.
What to Do:
You can unify and set apart the franchise brand with website design - giving each location a separate page off the corporate homepage, but it can also be done with individual branding strategies.
Inappropriate Outbound and Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound and outbound marketing is also a balancing act, and nearby franchises can oppose each other for the top spot without realizing it. Unbalanced inbound to outbound strategy or conflicting approaches to content will not only muddle the brand but can also dilute your total marketing efforts.
What to Do:
Your franchise must share a strategy for both inbound content marketing and outbound marketing efforts. Allowing you to truly optimize your online presence, sharing unified keywords to the homepage, and sharing regional keywords based on each franchisee's location or local theme.
Insufficient Data
Aptly managing an enterprise marketing campaign across multiple locations has become a matter of big data and concise evaluations. Not every team is equipped with the tools and insights to keep track of all the marketing data involved in a central franchise and network of franchise locations. Marketing with insufficient data means lost opportunities even if your strategy is well-aligned.
What to Do:
Invest in advanced and concise data tracking tools for your team. Optimize your marketing using the latest franchise and multi-team marketing software and integrate the right CRM with your marketing KPIs. Hone your lead funnel and conversion experience, and track your shopper trends. Armed with great data, you can build a greater enterprise marketing strategy.
Lackluster Franchise Leads
If you are looking to convert more new franchisees to open further locations, lead cultivation at this level is important. A brave and well-prepared prospective business owner must fully commit to purchasing a franchise. These leads consist of new investors looking to be their own boss and old hats looking to put their investment somewhere truly valuable. Without solid lead nurturing, you may have difficulty building trust in your brand and converting your best franchise leads.
What to Do:
Optimize your outreach to franchise leads and improve your visibility for those self-directed business leaders ready to leap into business ownership. These leads often prefer information centers and self-directed demos - paired with responsive staff chat and support. You may also consider boosting your local visibility to attract local business investors.
