While your franchisor will cover some advertising expenses and campaigns, more than likely you will need to handle your local advertising efforts. Consider this your guide to getting started and putting your money in the smartest places.
Know Your Audience
Before you can invest any resources into advertising (or marketing, for that matter), you need to know exactly who your customer is. That means you know her age, education level, preferred activities, and how she likes to receive marketing messages.
Does she read the local restaurant blog religiously? Is she a coupon-cutter? Understanding how your ideal customer interacts with brands, as well as where she looks for new resources or savings, will guide you to the next step of finding advertising opportunities for your franchise.
Explore Your Advertising Options
Likely there are several places you can purchase advertising for your franchise at the local level:
- Newspapers and local publications
- Television websites (digital ads)
- Social media
- Sponsorship of community activities and events
Start by building a list of any and all local advertising opportunities you can find. You won’t end up exploring all of them (especially those that your audience doesn’t interact with), but knowing what’s out there is a good place to start.
Look next at costs. What does it cost to run a campaign with your top picks out of the available options?
Create Your Budget
Armed with the knowledge of what an advertising campaign will cost on, for example, the local newspaper’s website, you can now determine what you can afford to spend.
You may not be able to afford a half-page banner ad on the site, but you could afford a smaller sidebar ad. Your first rounds of advertising will be more about experimentation to see what delivers results, so err on the side of spending less to see what results you get before you invest more.
Here’s a tip: invest in one kind of advertising at a time. Not only will this keep your budget manageable, but it will also help you track where results are coming from. If you’re only advertising on that newspaper website, you know that much of your new traffic is coming from that source, which helps you better measure results.
Make Your Offers Trackable
If you do want to get aggressive and advertise in multiple places at once, make sure each of your campaigns are trackable. Some online advertising options will track leads for you through technology, but you can also go old school: simply create a different offer for each channel.
You could offer a buy one get one free promotion on one channel, and any redemptions you get for a BOGO you’d know came from that source. On another ad channel, you’d have a different promotion.
Measure and Tweak
Not every ad channel will net great results. But pay attention after about three months of effort to assess what’s working and what’s not. For what isn’t bringing you enough customers, drop and reinvest that money into what is working.
Investing a little into local advertising can help you boost sales at your franchise significantly.
Susan Guillory is the President of Egg Marketing & Communications, a marketing firm specializing in content writing and social media management. She’s written three business books, including How to Get More Customers With Press Releases, and frequently blogs about small business and marketing on sites including Forbes, AllBusiness, The Marketing Eggspert Blog, and Tweak Your Biz. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.