Marketing Byte: How Franchises Track and Manage Online Reputations

The 2024 Annual Franchise Marketing Report (AFMR) provides data-driven insights that marketing professionals and other leaders can use to measure and elevate their efforts. The franchise space is constantly faced with opportunities and challenges as marketers adapt to industry shifts, including the need to accelerate the digital transformation of their brands.

Franchise CMOs, CEOs, VPs, directors of marketing, and other senior-level marketing leaders completed detailed questionnaires for the sixth annual AFMR. The data and statistical findings were aggregated and analyzed to comprehensively examine the marketing practices, budgets, and strategies across a broad spectrum of franchise brands and sectors.

Tracking online reputations

The reputation of a business is everything, especially in the age of the internet and social media. It is vital to have an outstanding online presence, whether it is from customer ratings, reviews or comments. It is a validation of a company’s products or services and can be the first and most important thing a customer sees when researching a brand.

Negative reviews will happen, and it is imperative that brands have a plan in place to be aware of their presence and respond appropriately. The wrong review can quickly spread and damage the perception of the company to new and existing customers. Many different tools exist to gauge a brand’s online reputation and there is also a variety of options to manage them accordingly.

For this part of the latest AFMR, we asked franchises how they track and manage their online reputations. The respondents shared a variety of metrics in which they tracked their online reputation, often using multiple methods. Three-quarters of franchises used online reviews to gauge their online reputation, by far the most popular metric. More than half of the respondents also used social media mentions (54 percent) and website traffic (52 percent) to monitor online reputation.

The franchises were also asked about the platforms or tools they use to track their online reputation. The highest response, at 68 percent, said social media monitoring tools. Other responses included review monitoring platforms (45 percent), online reputation monitoring platforms (43 percent), and SEO tools (36 percent).

Survey respondents were also asked about the biggest challenges they face with online reputation management. Although there were six categories of challenges, the highest percentage of responses came with “none of the above” (38 percent). That variety may represent the unique and widespread approach of dealing with online reputations.

The specific category that received the highest response was “managing negative feedback” (28 percent), followed by “monitoring across platforms” (19 percent), and “adapting to algorithm changes” (17 percent). The majority of franchises (59 percent) handle online reputation tracking and management at the corporate level. Twenty-four percent outsource it to a third party, while only 11 percent of franchisees track and manage their online reputation.