There’s a lot that goes into planning a robust franchise digital marketing strategy. If you’ve hired an outside team to help craft one, you’ve likely had numerous meetings with content writers, SEO experts, account managers and a few to design a suitable goal sheet. Now outsourcing comes with a price, and that price is your strategic investment to expect a return several notches higher sooner than later.

But is it only money that you have to invest for assured returns? Effective franchise digital marketing takes time too. And so, you do not terminate your contract with an agency in just two months of signing up.

Effective Franchise Digital Marketing Strategy

Co-Design & Commit

When you hire a digital marketing agency for your franchise digital marketing, look for experience and enthusiasm. A food franchise business needs a different approach to marketing strategy than a fitness or education franchise. One agency may wear multiple hats as long as they have prior experience or massive inclination to demonstrate. Also, besides having your vision for your business, ask your agency what they have in mind for your growth strategy and the milestones they will achieve as per their delivery timeline. If you agree with their proposition, ensure you commit to the entire timeline to see the results they committed to signing your deal. 

Build a Robust Foundation

When you hire a digital marketing agency for your franchise digital marketing, encourage agency partners to focus on the basics for the first month. It starts with understanding if your website is designed to the taste of your target audience and then connecting it to Google and Bing website analytics. The website should have its logo, brand colors, text, messaging style guide, email response, social media handles, etc., all defined and mapped to your long-term expectations. Should your social media language be, B2C or B2B or B2H depend on your business model. Once all is defined, you have a style and strategy guide to follow for consecutive months. It takes a minimum of one month to observe the first impressions. 

Define Task & Parameters

When you hire a digital marketing agency for your franchise digital marketing, encourage the agency partner to define their resources and parameters for you to observe growth indicators. Know who is your content manager across the blog, social media content, Press Releases, website content, guest post, and ad copies with strong command on SEO as content and SEO are inseparable. Ask the content manager about publishing strategy, estimated traffic, backlink profile, and engagement strategy that they would like you to observe. Ask them for a 3-month content calendar with specifics and estimated growth over the period. 

Franchise Digital Marketing Basics

With a robust content base, layer up the whole initiative with marketing outreach by the fourth month. While your content manager continues with their responsibility, ask your agency for the resource for building your outreach database through Linkedin, Zoom Info, and other business databases. This is prospecting, and it should be as neat as possible, ensuring you have active emails and phone numbers. Your email marketing executive can have email copies from your content manager, but the prospect management of invalid, valid, and lead nurturing should be expertly handled. This also requires industry liaisoning and PR communication. This is where your patience is very important. 

So, expect nothing before a minimum of a six-month engagement. At six months, you learn if your agency is doing everything right. The more you stay committed to the grind, the better the churn rate. Better the efforts, the more engagement. Only after six months of things done right, you are ready to tune up the volume of repetition.