Franchise businesses are different businesses than traditional ones. In principle, they might work as a normal business, but in today’s world, it is much different.
Many things trigger this difference. The main differentiator is the number of locations a franchise has compared to one location businesses. It is easier to manage one-location businesses because you have fewer things to do.
Why Franchise Content Strategy is Harder
Running a franchise business and improving it is much harder. There are many things that you have to do.
One of those things that help to improve the performance of a franchise business drastically is the content strategy.
A normal business must also do content strategy, but how you do it is different from what a franchise business does.
A franchise business must do it in a more detailed and oriented way. That is because a franchise has multiple locations.
Multiple locations mean multiple efforts. You have to find everything for each of the locations.
Nothing is the same, and you must create different content for each location. This takes more time, effort, and sometimes even money.
However, putting in this effort and making this investment in your content strategy will help to improve your franchise business.
Read: The Challenges In Franchise Marketing & How To Fix Them?
Also Read: Franchise Content Marketing Agency
Know Your Goals
Just like with every strategy, knowing your goals is also important in creating your content strategy.
If you just write whatever you wish, it will likely not bring you any traffic and not improve your franchise business.
Your goals must have a link to your business and your potential customers. These goals include what to write about and what your endgame is.
Your endgame means what you want to achieve with your content strategy. This could be more visitors, sales, or just increasing brand visibility. Each of these will have different things to do for your content strategy.
Create a path for yourself and know what kind of goals you want to achieve with your content strategy. This will help you further in the next steps.
Do A Thorough Research
Once you know your content strategy, you must start preparing your content. If you are not aware of who will read your content or who searches for what, you will not get what you want.
Your traction will still be low, and you will not be able to reach your goals. That’s why you have to do long and thorough research.
This research should ideally include everything regarding your content and who will read your content. You have to know what topics are more popular and what your potential customers or visitors want.
It will paint you a picture of the general situation of your sector for your franchise business.
Finding The Keywords
The most important thing in your research should be the keywords. When you are creating your content, you should focus your content on the topics that your potential customers search for.
You have to use the right keywords to find exactly your potential customers. You have to find keywords for each of your locations because they will be different.
You might know what topics are popular and what topics people are reading. If you don’t know with which keywords they research those topics, you will not put your franchise business in front of them.
Your Customer Base
Your customer base will have certain characteristics. Things they like, want, read, and so on. The content you create should include these things.
This way, your customer base will be more prone to reading what you have to say.
Knowing your customer base in each of the different locations is important because not every customer is the same everywhere.
While doing your research, you can talk to your customer base or read what they are writing online on social media.
It is important to get a sense of how they behave, what they like, and what they spend their time on. This way, you can focus your content on these to improve your franchise business.
Determine The Topics
Now you know what your customer base likes. It is now time to determine what topics to create your content on.
This phase is rather easier because you can use already high-ranking content on search engines.
You can have a good idea by searching the keywords you found and checking out the content already out there.
These are the stuff that you can look for:
- Go from a very wide topic to something narrower.
- Ideally, introduce the concept and then move to the narrower topic
- Make your topic interesting and add relevance to your keywords
- Use location-specific topics
When you are writing content about the topics you choose, never use the same content. Always create unique content. This includes the content you write for different locations of your business.
If you use the same content or plagiarize, Google will punish or even ban you from search results.
Creating unique content will also help improve your business because it will be unique to your business, offerings, and so on.
Add Solid Call-To-Actions
You are creating content to improve your franchise business. This means increasing your sales, brand visibility, or something that will benefit your business.
Whatever your goal is, you have to make people take action. You can only do so by adding solid call-to-actions within your content. However, these call-to-actions can’t be too much or too annoying.
Call-to-actions must be within the content. Not separately. You should discuss what you want and add your call-to-action after discussing the problem or the customer’s interest.
This makes it subtle enough not to make it annoying. An ideal way to include within the context.
For example, let’s imagine you are operating a plumbing franchise business. You created content about common plumbing problems in households.
After talking about the most common problems and how to fix them, you should start talking about how you can help them and make the process easier.
Simply adding a link to where they can book a meeting with you is an efficient call to action. This is subtle and not annoying. Call-to-actions can be in different methods:
- Hyperlink on a text
- Extra button
- Using action words like “buy now” and “learn more.”
Have Good Inbound Links
Your content could be good content. Unique, simple, and plain. However, if you don’t show the search engines that they actually provide solid information and not wrong ones, you have to have good inbound and outbound links.
Inbound links are the links that other websites put in their article that comes to your website. Outbound links are the ones that you add to your content.
In both of these scenarios, if the links are not quality, your article will not be seen as a quality article.
If the websites directed to your website are not good, and Google doesn’t respect those websites, they will likely treat your website as a bad one, too.
If you add links to your content that are badly ranked, the same thing will happen.
Quality Links
That is why, when you put links on your website or let other websites use your link, they have to be quality.
Quality links mean that search engines like Google will understand that your content is valuable. However, finding quality links might be hard.
The best way to go around this is to use links that come up on the first page of the search results under specific keywords.
If a website ranks high on search results, Google or other search engines probably like and trust them.
If another website that is not good uses your website in their text, you can reach out to them and ask them to remove it.
The Verdict
To sum up, improving your franchise business using content strategy is not easy. You need to first know your goals. After setting your goal, then you move on to doing research.
Detailed research must include anything for each of your franchise locations. You have to know your customer base in each of your locations.
You will then later determine the topics of your content. Topics must be in accordance with the keywords you found in your research.
Then you start writing your content and adding good call-to-actions. Once you have everything, you will have your content strategy, and you can start producing more content with this strategy.
Sources
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.