Marketing advice
The social network
How can social media be used for to recruit and train franchisees? How can it be used as a sales tool and how it should be combined with offline activities? Coconut Creatives, Sarah Cook explains
There is a great synergy that now exists between on and offline networking. If you learn how to harness this for your franchise, you'll recruit more franchisees and you will be better equipped to train your franchisees to become more successful.
How should online social media be used?
The most obvious use of social media for businesses is to create and build a number of 'raving fan' networks across various platforms such as FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. These end up being networks of people who know you, have met you or know someone who recommends you and so they will listen to what you have to say, as long as you keep it brief, interesting and non-salesy.
Many people become so focused on utilising the different social networks online that they attack it in a rather hap hazard way: posting updates and tweeting messages that haven't been thoroughly thought through. You need to integrate it into your marketing. This way, you will know what you are going to say and when and you'll also have a better handle on whether it is working for you.
By making social media an official part of your marketing plan, you can measure its effectiveness, just like having a listing on a franchise recruitment website and measuring how many leads it delivers. The first step to doing this is to assign a ‘Social Media Keeper'. This can be any person within your company that has 30 minutes a day or more to devote to updating your social network mediums. You pick the message and they send it out via the various channels you want to use. You can even hand over business cards you acquire through offline networking and exhibitions and get them growing your networks online for you by adding their details. But where do you start to make it effective?
The perfect intro
When people find you or look you up for the first time, is it clear what you do? Is it clear how you do it and who your customers are? Your profile and key information should be planned and thought through carefully. You need to have the ‘perfect intro' explaining succinctly what you do and it is ideal to use the intro in many other places to keep your messaging consistent - one of the fundamentals of good marketing. When writing your perfect intro, you want to aim for about 200 words, broken down into four key areas:
1. Clearly state who you are.
2. What you do and for who.
3. Why you are credible, different and trustworthy,
4. An example of how it has worked for a customer - this gives credibility and believability.
It is definitely a good idea to spend quality time creating this and getting feedback on how it comes across and edit it accordingly.
Once perfected, this introduction can be used again and again. Integrate it into magazine features and show guide listings, use it on your website, on leaflets and literature, as long as you follow the four stage format and tweak the length, it will work every time.
Smart franchisors also choose to utilise their perfect intro as a training tool for the people they take along to help them on their exhibition stand at shows and events. By doing this, you suddenly increase the consistency of the way prospects are dealt with. You increase your success rate as people grasp quicker what it is you do and why you are different.
For more on how your franchisees can use social media locally, see the full article in Franchisor News magazine, available at The British and International Franchise Exhibition at Olympia, London.
Author's note
Sarah Cook is the founding partner of Coconut Creatives.
