1. You Will Get Found More Often
It may seem obvious, but maintaining individual websites for your local franchisees or distributors will help your company get found by more people who are looking for your products and services in local searches. Your argument might be that potential customers can simply go to your corporate website and input their zip code to find the franchise in their area. Yes, but how about saving your prospects a step?
The twist is that you’ll have the opportunity to take advantage of the second “w” in “www” — the “wide” part. If set up correctly, you will widen the top of your sales funnel by generating traffic you were not previously getting from search engines, blogs, and the social mediasphere. These are people who have never heard of you before but now have the opportunity to find your website if it’s optimized correctly.
2. You Can Tailor Communications to Your Local Audience
Maintaining your own website on a content management system (CMS) is now easier than its ever been. Content management systems are built so that non-technical people can maintain, update, and edit their own websites. Using a CMS allows for easy editing and the ability to regularly add new content and offers to your site. This allows you to create customized information tailored to your local market as opposed to the generic offers often pushed down from corporate.
By using a CMS to tailor communications to your local market, you are no longer held hostage to the whims of your webmaster. How awesome is that?!
3. You Can Amplify Your Local Reach Using Social Media
Social media is the new word of mouth. Many franchises think it’s sufficient to simply maintain a corporate social media profile. But simply having a corporate social media profile is not enough these days. If you want to amplify your franchisees’ reach, each individual franchisee should have a social media presence connected to its individual website as well. There are several reasons why each franchisee should have a social media presence. Establishing a social media presence helps you better engage with your local audience, something that is more difficult for your corporate marketing team to do because they just don’t know the local market as well as their franchisees do. Social media also allows the local franchisee to build relationships and loyalty over time with prospects in their local markets.
