Consumer Marketing

The previous two editions of the Franchise Update Sales Report introduced the topic and covered Step 1 and the beginning of Step 2 in successful lead generation. This third installment covers the essential element of understanding your buyer's motivations.

What are business buyers looking for?
So what is it entrepreneurs are seeking in owning a business? What is it that is important to them and their families? Why are they disturbed with their current situation, and what attracts them to your franchise offering? Decades of experience at thousands of franchise organizations has uncovered the basic needs and desires shared by business seekers. Here are some of the common motivators for owning a business:

A few weeks ago I introduced your franchise consumer marketing colleagues to a two-headed turtle named Ditto. I then challenged them to see similarities between Ditto and franchise marketing. Get ready, because I'm about to do the same with you.

First, meet Ditto, a rare two-headed turtle found on the shore of a pond in Massachusetts. While each head had its own brain, they shared one heart, one stomach, one shell, and one common fate.

Despite all they shared, Ditto's two heads would fight like crazy over whether to go swimming or to sleep, to walk left or right, and, most especially, over food to feed their single stomach.

If the two heads could have learned to work together, Ditto could have been a super-turtle...

What does franchise marketing have in common with a two-headed turtle? I know... it sounds like a bad joke. But hang in there with me because the lessons you can learn are anything but a punch line.

Meet Ditto, a two-headed turtle found on the shore of a pond in Massachusetts.
While the two heads of Ditto had individual brains, they shared one heart, one set of lungs, one stomach, and one common fate.

Despite all they shared, the two heads of Ditto fought like crazy. They fought over whether to go swimming or stay on shore, whether to walk left or right, and, most especially, they fought over food to feed their shared stomach.

It's sad when you think about it. If only the two heads could have learned to work together, Ditto could have been a super-turtle...

Wendy Odell Magus is well-versed in both consumer and franchise sales marketing strategies. She has worked in corporate and agency marketing roles for more than 20 years, where she developed marketing and communications strategies that got results. She has served as senior director of marketing at Sylvan Learning and is currently vice president of marketing for Kiddie Academy, a child care franchisor with 110 locations in 24 states.
Magus also is familiar with the types of strategies - and how to implement them - that can help franchise brands acquire and retain more customers. We asked Magus for her thoughts on today's rapidly changing customer acquisition strategies and techniques.

What customer acquisition strategies are you using at Kiddie Academy? Driving growth in our brand through customer acquisition and customer loyalty is a multi-faceted process that continues to evolve as our customers' behavior changes and new channels of communication and engagement emerge...

As we end one year and begin another, this is a good time to take stock of your marketing and branding strategies and execution - and to consider new sources for improving your results in 2012. Whether you're in the market for new marketing and branding tips, tactics, and tools; training your sales staff to succeed in the new normal; or simply looking to keep up with the ever-changing Social Web, here are more than 25 free "must-have" marketing books, magazines, courses, tools, and conferences, courtesy of Maria Pergolino's blog on Marketo.com.

From her blog:

Free marketing magazines
Call me old school, but I still read marketing magazines to stay up-to-date on the latest marketing news. I can't imagine a flight without two or three of these in my bag to ensure an interesting trip.

Bloggers can be a business's best friends
A powerful and frequently misunderstood aspect of creating an online presence is the necessity of link-building. Inbound links are the currency of the Internet, the most important things a website needs to rank well in Google and other search engines. One of the best ways to get inbound links is discovering which bloggers are most relevant to a business and cultivating friendly relations with them. Besides providing inbound links, bloggers can be a source of reviews, feature stories, and a crucial bridge to the community that's most interested in a business's products or services. This is a great piece about how to communicate with this important group of people.

YouTube releases updates to YouTube Analytics
Video creators have been able to find out who's watching their videos and where they come from through YouTube Insight...

Social media, social networking, social sharing, Web 2.0 - no matter what you call it, it's everywhere these days, and for good reason. The numbers are astounding:

As chief marketing officer for Massage Envy, Susan Boresow understands that engaging and supporting franchisees is imperative in getting them to buy in and play an active role in the brand's overall marketing efforts. Before joining Massage Envy, Boresow was vice president of marketing at Pump It Up and held marketing and leadership roles at Cold Stone Creamery, Godfather's Pizza, Mr. Goodcents Subs and Pastas, and McDonald's.

We asked Boresow about Massage Envy's strategy for building franchisee interest in marketing, the programs and support offered, and what techniques work for getting franchisees on board for the brand's marketing initiatives.

How important is local-level and grassroots marketing to Massage Envy's growth and development strategy?
Local store marketing is very important in our growth strategy...

The following is a review of the first Franchise Consumer Marketing Conference. The complete article is available online in Franchise Update magazine).

The first-ever Franchise Consumer Marketing Conference attracted marketing executives from 57 franchise brands with more than $11 billion in annual system-wide sales - all seeking better ways to connect with customers in today's digital marketing environment. Attendees at the groundbreaking event this past June, included CEOs, presidents, chief marketing officers, and ad directors, who gathered in San Francisco for an in-depth examination of the latest consumer marketing techniques and strategies.

Hosted by Franchise Update Media Group (FUMG), the conference - the first to focus exclusively on how franchise brands can more effectively reach consumers in today's rapidly evolving marketplace - provided an unprecedented opportunity for franchise marketing executives to meet with leading marketing experts, engage with their peers, and discover new strategies for reaching consumers and maintaining brand growth...

Siri changes the game for mobile search
The intriguing new Siri application that comes with the iPhone 4S has big implications for local search marketing. First, Google is the default search engine used when a search is done with the voice-recognition application. Bing and Yahoo can be requested by the user, but most will stick with the default, a big win for Google. And, since a search for the keyword "ravioli" on Siri will return a list of restaurants that mention "ravioli" in their Yelp reviews, understanding the keywords that people search for continues to be crucial in local seach marketing. Siri assumes a local search by default, so a request to Siri for a list of restaurants will use location services to show nearby ones...

Consumer survey results indicate that 97 percent of consumers investigate products and services over the Internet before buying. Many of these consumers rely on consumer reviews and social media for information. Approximately the same percentage of consumers place trust in the materials on brand websites and in other company-sponsored Internet content. Such impressive statistics highlight the importance of establishing brand Internet sites and social media pages. We asked franchise attorney Keith Klein to identify legal considerations associated with this. Klein is a partner at Bryan Cave LLP and is certified by the California Board of Legal Specialization as a specialist in franchise and distribution law.

From a legal perspective, are there best practices for registering domain names and establishing social media accounts?
Yes, particularly for businesses launching high-profile brands or products...

Franchising is a complex business in that as a franchisor we have to fully understand two layers of customer profiles: 1) our franchise partner profile (who partners with us to develop Mama Fu's sites); and 2) our retail customer profile (who spends money at our Mama Fu's locations). We feel strongly that we know what type of franchise partner we want to build our brand around - successful multi-unit, multi-brand restaurant operators - but until recently we didn't fully understand who our retail customer was.

Like many brands, we figured our customer had a particular income and family demographic, but beyond that, what traits did they have in common? What psychographic elements drove their behaviors? And how did distance from our store affect them? We very much needed to find quantitative answers to these important positioning questions and, not surprisingly, our current and prospective franchise partners wanted to know these answers as well!

To help us implement the customer model and site selection tool set that would allow us to 1) understand our markets better, and 2) drive specific action based on our findings, we selected the Buxton Company after a noteworthy amount of reconnaissance...

The final step in a simple social media strategy comes down to preparation. Your company may never be up against the worst-case scenarios, but creating a responsibility workflow to avoid potential knee-jerk reactions is crucial to ensuring that your team remains level-headed if such a situation ever arises.

Fear surrounding severe negative customer service reactions is, by far, the number-one item that's top of mind for all levels of management. However, social media is positive and provides your company the opportunity for real-time customer feedback, glimpses into operational misfires, or potentially harmful employee practices. Regardless of whether the consumer has inflated their experience, your company has a chance to save that relationship and influence other potential customers...

Study: How People Spend Their Time Online (Infographic)
Metrics firm Experian studied how people spent their time online in the United Kingdom this August. (Experian gathers the data they use from Internet Service Providers' anonymous usage logs, so it's based on actual consumer behavior rather than surveys). Based on this actual usage, Experian has created an infographic that visualizes 3.4 billion hours of Internet usage as one hour on a clock. Social media usage accounts for 14 minutes of the hour, outranking entertainment (9 minutes), shopping (5 minutes), news (3 minutes), and business (2 minutes). Their data also showed that Facebook was still the clear market leader in social media, accounting half of all social media activity...

I began this series in June by asking if your business had a social media strategy. I didn't intend to be condescending, but I'm still in awe every day of how many large companies are being misguided when it comes to this marketing option.

(Editor's note: Catch up with part 2 on setting measurable goals and part 3 on using Facebook for local marketing.)

Now I could write a long article about which channels are best and how you should gain traction by integrating several different resources online, but bottom line... if you're a franchisee it doesn't matter. Your franchisor should be worrying about overall branding. Your role is to focus on local-store marketing - just in a different way than you have before.
The majority of the North American population is using Facebook as their channel of choice, so why reinvent the wheel? You're probably thinking, "Really, Erica? That's all you've got for us?" And my answer is YES!
If you're just getting started or still getting your feet wet, stop and focus on where the customers are...

Every day you are flooded with articles about using social media and mobile technology, and how important it is for your company to keep up. However, few tell how to leverage this new world to enhance your overall revenue. Tom Harrington of Franchise Payments Network, shared some of his insights at Franchise Update’s Franchise Consumer Marketing Conference in San Francisco in June. Let’s review some important stats from that presentation:

What are some effective ways to get franchisees to "buy in" and become actively involved with local-level marketing efforts?

That's what we asked three people we were sure had something valuable to say on the subject - because local is where sales happen. Here are their responses:

Jayson Pearl
BrightStar Care
SVP Marketing & Franchisee Onboarding
Our focus on helping owners become actively involved in local marketing starts with making programs as easy to implement as possible. We've seen much higher satisfaction and adoption of local marketing initiatives when the process is easy and the communication is clear for our owners. We work to make this happen by focusing in three areas: services, training, and technology...

Facebook recently announced a major initiative regarding brand Pages and the ability to map and link to each local Place, basically creating a Facebook Place for every brick-and-mortar location. Before we dive into why this is a good thing, I'm going to provide a little history of how we got here. Stay with me... If you didn't take social media seriously before, I promise you will now!

A little history
Since 2008, Facebook has allowed businesses to build their online presence with a brand Page. Some franchisees also began to create Pages for regions or specific locations, since they also had an interest in driving awareness for their own businesses. Sounds good, right? Well, unfortunately this created fractured branding at the corporate level and a lack of guidance from many franchisors, causing confusion for franchisees and consumers alike...

According to a new, 24-page report (July 2011) from Focus Research, a market research firm based in New Orleans, SCRM "is the latest sensation in the business world. It came on very quickly - almost sneaking in on the heels of social media. Before we could figure out social media, we were discussing how to use it to improve our relationships with clients."

To create the report - "Focus Experts' Guide: Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM)" - Focus brought together four experts in the emerging world of social CRM. "Lead expert" Esteban Kolsky is the principal and founder of ThinkJar, an advisory and research think-tank focused on customer strategies. The three "contributing experts" are: Mike Boysen, CRM strategist at Effective CRM; Mitch Lieberman, vice president of marketing at Sword Ciboodle; and Brian Vellmure, the principal and founder of Initium LLC...

You won't find much disagreement among today's franchise CMOs and marketing executives with the statement, "Mobile marketing matters." However, as with any emerging technology, it's not as simple to agree on ways to use mobile marketing to connect with customers effectively. Three studies on the subject shed some light on how to translate opportunity into practicality - increased sales and customer loyalty - and to measure its ROI.

1) Why Mobile Marketing Matters
The first, titled "The Reason Why Mobile Marketing Matters," is from Coremetrics, an IBM company that provides web analytics and marketing optimization. The report is a general, high-level overview of mobile marketing that includes plenty of figures and charts...