Technology has become a significant part of our lives, and evolving without it looks unsustainable and old-fashioned. The same thing applies to your franchise business.
No matter what franchise business you are in, if you don’t incorporate technology into your marketing efforts, you can lose the race.
When a franchisor has multiple franchisees to manage, marketing can become difficult. This is where marketing automation comes to the rescue.
The technology behind marketing automation makes marketing tasks more efficient, easier, and faster, allowing franchises to promote their business regularly without investing much time.
While too many people shy away from automated marketing, believing it to be too robotic, let us tell you that marketing automation is not as robotic as it sounds when done correctly.
In this article, we’ll discuss how you can automate your franchise, outline the benefits you can expect to see, and what to look for while choosing the best marketing automation software for your business. Let’s get started!
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is a process of identifying your potential customers and streamlining, automating, and measuring tasks and workflow to boost operational efficiency.
Marketing Automation software handles routine marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media marketing, and even campaigns across different channels at pre-scheduled intervals to provide a more personalized experience to the customers.
When it comes to marketing a franchise, the most common challenges marketers face include lead generation and customer engagement.
Marketing automation software helps overcome these challenges by streamlining the workflow and automating marketing processes related to generating leads and then nurturing those leads.
Also Read: Why Do Most SEOs Fail To Produce Results?
How To Automate Your Franchise Marketing?
Automated marketing is not as robotic as it seems. Here are three ways to automate your marketing and put your franchise in front of potential customers.
Advertise on Social Media Engines
Advertising on social media is as easy as setting up your ad, running it in the background, and attracting new leads.
Most platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow you to narrow your reach so that you can only attract people within your target market.
To create your ad, choose an image, write a few lines of text, and determine your audience. Then run ads in the background for as long as your budget allows.
You don’t have to go to long meetings with your sales team or be bombarded every month to renew your contract. This is an effective “set and forgets” approach to local advertising.
Automate Your Social Media Posts
Keeping up with social media can feel like a waste of time. Unfortunately, consumers of today demand an active social media presence to make sure that your business is alive.
Instead of depending on setting aside time every day to update your platform, automate your social media posts.
Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer let you organize posts weeks in advance. Here are the best types of posts to plan.
- Promotion of forthcoming specials
- Articles you want your readers to read
- Company events
Create A Funnel
Is there anything you can offer your customers for free? Get contact information in exchange for a giveaway, then create an automated follow-up funnel.
It looks like this:
- Create freebies, such as free lemonade at restaurants or free guest passes at fitness clubs.
- To reclaim the offer, ask the customer to give their email address.
- Use an email marketing program like Mail Chimp to create an automated funnel and keep in touch with these customers regularly while they are interested in your business.
Determine how long the funnel runs and what it does. Some companies may only want to contact you a few times.
Others will want to create longer follow-up series to encourage leadership. The length depends on how long the sales process typically takes.
Benefits Of Franchise Marketing Automation
Let’s take a look at how marketing automation can help streamline your marketing efforts and make your franchise grow faster:
Efficacy
Firstly, marketing automation makes the whole department more capable. You may be able to reduce labor costs while you free up your team’s time to work on more important and strategic projects.
Instead of manually posting to social media every day, marketing automation software lets you automate this process.
This means your team can do more creative work and brainstorm future campaigns and projects. Working with an automation platform makes your team’s tasks easier and faster.
Marketing And Sales Adjustment
Combining the sales and marketing automation efforts with the help of the same Software helps better align the company goals and sales efforts.
In essence, it makes the process of moving from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads much more convenient.
Marketing automation can increase sales productivity by 14.5% and reduce marketing costs by 12.2%. Additionally, it helps you generate more leads and boost sales.
Data Management
Marketing automation software helps you keep track of your leads and their engagement with your site, making managing your data feel like a breeze. Moreover, it will keep updating your data automatically.
Lead Scoring
Marketing automation software can build up lead scoring. This will inform your sales team when the lead transitions from a marketing professional lead to a sales-qualified lead.
This also means better coordination between marketing and sales teams. It also automates the process, making it easier and more real-time.
This means no time is wasted, and your sales team can reach out to the possibility right away.
Nurturing Leads
Marketing automation makes lead nurturing possible. Marketing automation software is where you create your email campaigns and track their success. Without lead nurturing, it becomes difficult to convert leads into sales leads.
Optimus Prime believes marketing automation is one of the best ways to create a marketing program that grows with your business.
Increasing Conversion Rate
When it comes to improving conversion rates, marketing automation can also make your team more efficient.
Marketing automation software can help you increase conversion rates and control leads more efficiently.
Marketing automation software can also track leads and use them to retarget non-converting website visitors, improving CRO.
Again, marketing automation gives your team more time to analyze marketing strategies and think about how to convert visitors.
Things To Look for In an Automated Marketing Program
With many marketing automation software and services out there, it gets confusing about which Software or service to choose for their business, especially for individuals who are not tech-savvy.
Before you settle for inexpensive and less-effective franchise automation software, make sure to evaluate the features and advantages of the product. Here are the top 5 things you should look for while choosing an automated marketing software:
Easy to Use
When automation works well, products and services are easy to implement and use.
But beware of fraud as many vendors claim that their product is simple to use, but you end up with Software that is very complex to use.
We recommend requesting a demo before making any pledges to ensure you understand how the product works.
The Integration Of The Software
Always do some additional research to ensure that the program you are choosing will not significantly change your company’s processes or operations.
Even if you are willing and able to make small changes to the way you work, you don’t want to disrupt the already established and effective business models and strategies unless this marketing software is failsafe to transform your business.
Price Of The Software
This is one of the most crucial factors you should look for as it is going to affect your pocket. There is a variety of marketing automation software in the market, some are free, but most are paid.
The price of the Software depends on several factors, including the brand’s popularity, premium features, storage, and server type.
The best way to confirm if the Software’s price is fair is by comparing it with others providing the same features and capabilities.
Analytics
Nowadays, marketing is all about dealing with a huge set of data, so you must be able to track everything you are doing in your automated marketing, or else you’ll be doing your marketing in the dark.
The Software you choose must be all the data about customer actions and behaviors, such as the number of clicks you get on your landing page, the number of opens from your email letters, and much more.
Reporting
This may overlay with analytics, but reports should be easy to understand. After all, there is no benefit of data if you don’t know the meaning.
For example, request a report before purchasing to ensure the reporting tool meets your needs.
Conclusion
Marketing automation can add value to your franchise in more ways than you can imagine.
Don’t spend too much time than you need on marketing, as the marketing automation software can help you streamline your marketing efforts to keep your business in front of your potential customers and generate revenue faster.
There are tons of marketing automation software and services available that you can use to capture and nurture more qualified leads without spending much of your precious time.
Besides the Software, many marketing agencies also offer franchise marketing automation on the web. Just be careful and keep all the factors we have listed in mind to make the best choice.
Amit Gupta is the founder of DrFranchises – a digital marketing agency that helps brands rank better on Google Maps through local SEO strategies. Amit has over 11 years of experience in digital marketing, SEO, email marketing, and social media marketing. He’s also the owner of multiple franchises and has helped countless brands achieve success online. When he’s not working, Amit can be found playing with his dog.