Author: Rallio

If a piece of content drops in the middle of Facebook and no one’s around to see it, did it even happen?

The answer is no, at least not in content marketing terms. 

The whole point of creating content is to make sure people see it, engage with it, like it and share it — and ultimately, do business with you and become loyal customers and brand advocates. 

And although there are many different types of content that get those results, this article is dedicated to three of them you might not have considered. In the short term, you’ll see a boost in likes, shares, comments and followers when you start posting them. And in the long term, you’ll build a community around your brand, and hopefully sales. 

#1 Infographics

Many of us are visual people. We’re also busy people. Rather than take the time to read something in-depth, we might only have time to skim something — and that’s the brilliance of infographics. With an estimated 65% of B2B marketers using infographics as part of their content marketing strategy, according to the Content Marketing Institute, it’s evident that infographics are here to stay and need to be on your radar.

Studies show that readers will spend more time looking at images containing information than they will reading text, according to Nielsen Norman Group. What’s more, they’ll likely ignore “fluff” photos (think stock photos) that are merely decorative at best, mundane at worst, and don’t add any real depth to a page. 

There are two takeaways here. First, infographics containing information of interest to your audience are more interesting, more useful and more likely to garner likes, shares and comments than low-value, boring photos. (The same can be said of authentic, real-life photos of people from your business. More value = more engagement.) Second, boring photos don’t belong on your page. Period.

Because they combine compelling visuals with valuable information of interest to your audience, infographics are some of the best kind of content you can produce. Not only can you share them on social media, but you can also incorporate them into a variety of content marketing initiatives, including case studies, emails, white papers and blog posts. 

Be sure your infographics are branded with your logo and website so that as the images are liked and shared, your name will travel along with them. This way, you have an opportunity to position yourself as a trusted thought leader and get your name in front of a wider audience. You can also boost these posts on social media for a broader reach.

Pro Tip: You don’t have to be a graphic designing whiz to make infographics. Online apps such as Canva offer free templates that make it easy to plug in your info, add cool visuals, download and share. 

#2 How-To Content

Bite-size, how-to pieces are content marketing gold. Like infographics, they allow readers to learn something new in an easy-to-read, digestible format. At the same time, they provide actionable steps. Give people step-by-step guides on topics of interest, and they’re sure to like, comment and share with their friends!

No matter what your industry, there is something you know how to do that your readers will want to learn. For example: Run a home improvement business? Put out a how-to on home-related projects, such as painting a room or hanging up pictures. 

How-to content not only makes you an authoritative voice in your industry, but also builds good will among your customers. You’re giving them something for free without asking for anything in return, thus building trust and confidence in your brand. The next time these customers need your product or service, you’ll be top-of-mind.

For inspiration, think about the most common questions you get from your customers, and turn them into how-to articles, videos, podcasts and social media posts. Look through your direct messages, social media comments, online reviews and your own FAQ section on your website for ideas. Once you have a topic you know your readers are eager to learn more about, create an in-depth how-to answering the question. 

Pro Tip: You can further repurpose these how-tos in a variety of ways — for instance, create an email campaign and send out a link to your how-to content. Always work to get the most mileage out of your content marketing initiatives by using them across multiple channels. It’s less work for you and potentially reaches more of your audience!

#3 Recognition Posts

Don’t you love when people talk you up? Admit it — it feels good when someone recognizes your work. And it probably makes you and your fans want to like, share and comment on such posts, right? Create an entire post or article that recognizes people or places in your industry you personally endorse, and that content will be liked, shared and engaged with, too.

There are many different ways to approach these “recognition posts.” A marketing firm could easily write a post about the “Top Facebook Marketing Experts” or something along those lines. However, these posts are also a great opportunity to create hyper-local content.

How about a roundup of the “Best Local Eateries” or “101 Local Spots to Take Your Kids in Summertime”? You know your town the best, as well as your customers. Think about the local spots your customers would be likely to go.

Again, this sort of helpful, free information goes a long way toward building trust and loyalty. Just be sure the content is substantial and not “thin” — you want people to get something out of the post and not walk away feeling like they just read a bunch of fluff.

Be sure to tag and link to any of the businesses or people you mention in your post so they can share it with their followers, too. The reach will grow exponentially according to the number of shout-outs you give! In other words, writing about 101 local spots — as daunting as that sounds — will give you more traction than just mentioning a handful.

You can take your “recognition posts” a step further by turning the recognition back toward yourself, too. At Rallio, we designed our Employee Advocacy program with this intention for our brands. By empowering their employees publish brand-approved content on their personal profiles, companies are able to significantly expand their organic reach and track all activity and results through our Employee Leaderboard.

Pro Tip: Once you’ve created a recognition post, give it some time to generate engagement. Later, you can approach the people or businesses you wrote about and ask them to link to you or create a mutually beneficial partnership, contest or promotion. Also, if you don’t feel you have the writing skills to tackle a lengthy post, outsource it to someone on your team or a freelancer who can do it for you.

What are some other types of content you’ve created that you’ve found to be the most effective? We want to hear your ideas in the comments.

Anytime we talk with franchisees, one of the most pressing needs always mentioned is finding top talent. We’ve been able to help many of them with their employee recruiting through social media, while also making sure they maintain a positive online reputation.

If you’re hiring, candidates will be checking out your social media pages, so you want to be sure you’re presenting your best self online. People want to see that you have a great company culture and core values they can get on board with. 

So today’s post is all about helping you recruit and retain talent for your franchise location. Start leveraging social media to connect with candidates and promote the culture you wish to create for your employees.

#1 Repeat After Us: Post Local Content 

If you’ve been reading the Rallio blog, then you know that one of our top tips for amplifying your brand on social media is by posting local content. Although your franchisor might supply you with branded corporate content — which has its place — the only way to build an engaged local community is with real-life images from your location.

Particularly when it comes to recruiting employees, you want to provide a glimpse into your culture. What’s a day in the life like working for you? Show the authentic side of your location — the fun aspects, the team-building events, anything that shows off your location’s personality. A great place to start is with employee and customer spotlights and any candid, on-location snapshots that make you more than just another XYZ company.

Remember, corporate content is syndicated across all locations. It doesn’t differentiate you. Consider the people and local elements that make you different from other locations and from competitors. People will want to work for you not just because you have a great product or service, but mostly because you have great leadership, people and company culture.

#2 Make Your Employees Brand Advocates

The majority of employees today are already posting employer-related messages and media assets on their social media pages, according to a study by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research. Employee advocacy gives you a chance to leverage user-generated content to your advantage for recruiting purposes. 

You can even incentivize employees with various rewards for posting on your behalf. For example, if you’re hiring a salesperson, you can create a few local assets advertising the position. Pass them along to your employees, who can share the opening with their circle of friends and followers. You can then offer a referral bonus of some sort for any new hires that result from those efforts.

Drill down deep into employee advocacy, and you might see a need to clarify your company’s core values and how they’re shared and demonstrated throughout your business. When employees feel like your company truly lives out its core values and supports its employees, they’ll feel more compelled to share about their great experiences working for you via social media. 

As those posts get shared, it creates a positive public perception of your location. New recruits will be more likely to seek you out and apply if they feel confident you’re a good employer who values its employees.

#3 Be Quick to Engage and Respond

Customers today take to social media if they have a question, comment or concern about a business. Whether in the form of a comment on a post, a direct message or an online review, these comments have the ability to help or hurt your reputation among customers as well as job candidates. 

Being quick to respond to both positive and negative comments shows that you’re an engaged business owner who cares about your customers. If you’re slow to respond, get defensive or don’t respond at all, it sends a message that you don’t care. If you were a potential recruit, wouldn’t you want to work for a company that values its customers? 

Moreover, responding to your online reviews and maintaining an accurate Google My Business listing improves your local SEO. When customers conduct mobile searches, the GMB listing is one of the first things they see — along with all of the reviews associated with your business. Job candidates will see this information as well when they’re checking out your business.

#4 List and Boost Your Jobs on Facebook

The Jobs tab on your Facebook page is an invaluable recruiting tool for franchises. There, you can post your jobs and boost them to reach a wider audience with your job postings. 

You can also use Facebook Messenger to help screen candidates, and they can apply to jobs directly through Facebook. As of May 2018, there were 8 billion messages being exchanged on Facebook Messenger between people and businesses, according to Facebook data. Make sure you’re tapping into the power of Messenger by including it in your recruiting strategy. 

Get in the habit of using social media to find top talent, and you’ll create a consistent pipeline of qualified candidates while also building an engaged, positive company culture. Have you used social media in your recruiting efforts? Tell us more about it in the comments, and you may be featured in an upcoming blog post.

Q&A With Eric Stites, CEO and Managing Director of Franchise Business Review

There’s something exhilarating about starting your own business — nurturing it from the ground up and working relentlessly to make it grow. That’s true whether you start a business from scratch or join a franchise organization.

For some business owners, however, there’s a particular satisfaction that comes along with joining a franchise. Although there’s certainly something to be said for becoming an independent entrepreneur, there’s also a long list of benefits to becoming a franchisee.

Indeed, satisfaction among franchise business owners is at an all-time high, according to research conducted between October 2017 and March 2019 by research firm Franchise Business Review (FBR). Of those surveyed — which included 29,341 franchise owners — FBR found that the vast majority:

• Enjoy operating their business (88% strongly agree to agree)
• Enjoy being part of a franchise organization (87% strongly agree to agree)
• Respect their franchisor (85% strongly agree to agree)
• Are satisfied with their franchise (excellent to good overall)

Given the high numbers, it begs the question: What, exactly, is contributing to franchisees’ levels of satisfaction? We chatted with Eric Stites, CEO and Managing Director of Franchise Business Review, to get the inside scoop. Below are some of the major factors that predict success for franchisees.

Success Factor #1: Preparedness for Economic Changes

FBR has been measuring franchisee satisfaction since 2005-2006. Although initial satisfaction held steady in the earlier years, not surprisingly, it dipped during the recession a decade ago. Today, the numbers are higher than they were prior to that recession. What gives?

“A lot of factors go into satisfaction and engagement, but economic factors are big,” Stites explains. “When the economy is doing well, consumer confidence is high.” That confidence equates to an increase in people going out to eat, opting to buy services for their homes and overall spending more money — in other words, an increase in people seeking out franchise products and services. And the more people spend, the more small businesses benefit.

Because franchising tends to follow the ebbs and flows of the economy, the most successful franchisees are those who are prepared for any bumps in the road. The downside of a sluggish economy may be a slowdown in consumer spending, with the upside being a possible increase in franchise growth. When times are tough, people may be more fearful about job stability and more likely to take the leap into business ownership. The opposite also tends to be true: During an economic boom, people have less of a reason to leave their jobs and pursue the potentially risky endeavor of starting a business.

As a franchisor, your best bet is to plan how you’ll combat a dip in consumer spending while also aiming to boost franchise sales. Work to strengthen your brand’s reputation and confidence in your products and services — with the understanding that social media and online reputation play a large role in how your franchise is publicly perceived.

By strengthening your brand, you’ll help franchisees stand apart from competitors even if the economy slows — not necessarily with lower prices, but rather with great customer service, responsiveness to reviews, community engagement and company culture. Both the consumer and franchise recruiting sides of your business stand to benefit from a thriving, positive online presence.

Success Factor #2: Access to Marketing, Technology and Innovation

Key drivers of franchisee satisfaction include marketing, technology and innovation — that is, having access to the most forward-thinking programs and services. The franchise companies that continually invest in innovative technologies and systems are the ones that thrive. In turn, their franchisees are able to thrive as well because they’re able to gain and maintain a competitive edge.

“I always tell [prospective franchisees] to talk to the franchisor to understand the programs they offer, but also talk to franchisees to see how well those programs work,” advises Stites. Franchisors may talk at a “high level” about their marketing, public relations and social media programs, he adds, but talking to franchisees will provide a more detailed and realistic picture of how those programs are functioning at the location level.

Evidently, it’s an area that not all franchise companies get right. “In all the years we’ve been doing this” — surveying franchise organizations and publishing their findings — “marketing, technology and innovation always score the lowest.” However, the ones that score high on the innovation front tend to have a few commonalities:

• They focus on the people. Successful franchise organizations live by the motto that franchisees are in business for themselves, but not by themselves. The most successful franchises involve franchisees in the process of implementing innovative new technologies and services. “They’ll use franchisees to test it first and prove ROI before rolling it out to the entire network,” Stites says. “If the franchisee feels like it was their idea, it will be much more successful than feeling like it was something mandated by the franchisor.”
  
  At Rallio, we’ve seen this process in action when we on-board new franchise brands. The franchisor will work with us to select a number of locations for pilot testing of our Rallio social media platform and Rallio Local agency services. After a testing period, usually around a month long, we’re able to show the franchisor certain success metrics such as an increase in followers and engagement, a boost in sales, a boost in online reputation, and/or an increase in new-hire recruiting numbers. From there, we can more easily get franchisee buy-in and roll out Rallio products and services brand-wide.

• They’re adaptable. No successful business stays stagnant. If you’re not continually updating your systems as a franchise organization, you’re not going to be around for long. Keeping up with changing customer needs and expectations by way of innovative processes, programs, products and services keeps you ahead of the curve both as a franchise and at the location level. You’re also able to empower franchisees to keep reaching their target customer market and building a loyal customer base (more on that in the next point).
  
  
• They focus on the customer. With new innovations, franchisees are better equipped to deliver better, more personalized customer experiences. The evolution of social media has given rise to changing customer expectations. Gone are the days of picking up the phone to voice a complaint or question; customers will simply take to social media. And customers who post brand-related questions or reviews on social media want their concerns addressed immediately. With better, faster technology and methods of replying to customers — e.g., the Rallio platform and our agency-style marketing services — franchisees are able to ensure rapid responses to customers.

Success Factor #3: Clear Communication Between Franchisor and Franchisee

The better the communication between franchisor and franchisee, the better the odds of success for all parties. Part of that clarity comes down to having easy-to-communicate programs and processes that any franchisee can easily execute with the proper support. Stites says the KISS principle applies: Keep it simple and easy to grasp.

Take, for example, the food industry. “If the menu gets too complex, then operating the business becomes too complex,” says Stites. The same is true across the board: From operations through marketing, if you can keep your systems simple, focused and duplicatable, then it’s much easier to plug newcomers into the organization and set them up for success.

With marketing, for instance, focus on three to five core methods and do them well, and franchisees will be more apt to try them successfully at the local level. Our Rallio Local clients are successful for this very reason. From corporate down to the individual franchisee, we help them execute a few key strategies focused on customer engagement and responsiveness on the major social media platforms, like this crowd-pleasing photo on one of our client’s pages:

Another benefit of simple programs and processes is that franchisee recruiting efforts become more streamlined, too. Imagine your developers out in the field recruiting candidates and having to communicate a set of lengthy, complex procedures to prospects. There’s a high chance of something getting miscommunicated or overpromised — and, later, franchisees getting let down or overwhelmed by an overly complicated system. Now imagine them in the field selling a plug-and-play system instead, one that a dedicated, determined franchise candidate can pick up and run with. Which system do you think will be more successful?

“It starts with setting realistic expectations from day one,” says Stites. “It’s better to underpromise and overdeliver.” From a corporate level, ask yourself if you’re aware of exactly what’s being said by your development team out in the field. What are they saying to candidates? What expectations are being set? Sometimes the CEO or development executives don’t even know what’s being promised, adds Stites.

The danger of doing the opposite — overpromising and under-delivering — is real. Oftentimes, expectations aren’t set correctly when franchisors bring candidates on. “During the recruitment process, they talk about bells and whistles,” says Stites. Franchisees think they will open their doors and customers will flow right in (more on that next), and they’re later surprised to learn there’s much more work involved. Making sure everyone is on the same page will help to set the proper expectations and set franchisees up for success.

Success Factor #4: Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Although the franchisor is responsible for setting proper expectations, it’s also up to franchisees to do their due diligence — in terms of both the franchise in question as well as their own appetite for hustling to build a business. Oftentimes, franchisees buy into a franchise system thinking they’ll just swing the doors open effortlessly and customers will pour in. In reality, the work involved with building a business is the same regardless of whether it’s a franchise or an independent business.

“Whether it’s a franchise or non-franchise, it’s a ton of work [to start a business],” says Stites. “It’s the hardest job you will ever have.”

Although theoretically there are systems and processes in place with a franchise, there’s still hiring to do, operations to facilitate and marketing campaigns to launch. No matter how you slice it, you’ve got a business to run, and you either have to do it yourself or hire a team to do help. “A lot of people think, they hate their job and they will go into business,” not realizing the work and commitment involved, says Stites. “If you hate your job, you can quit. If you buy a franchise, you signed a 10-year or longer agreement. If you don’t like it, it’s much harder to unwind that.”

In addition to considering your own desire to work tirelessly for your business, it’s also important not to commit to a franchise based solely on its particular product or service. “People may get excited about the product or service the company is offering,” says Stites, “but the skills to be a successful franchisee could be very different from what the actual product or service is.”

For example, a fitness enthusiast may think they should open a fitness franchise just because they like the gym. However, from a franchise candidate standpoint, it’s more important to understand what makes a particular brand successful and how you personally can make your location thrive. As a franchisee, you’ll need to be out networking in the community, building relationships with customers and colleagues, and pouring your heart into all the behind-the-scenes efforts required to run a business — i.e., you won’t just be working out all day.

This realization that franchising is much more work than anticipated can cause franchisees to fail or plateau. If they achieve a certain level of success, they have to either keep going, or stay stagnant and risk becoming obsolete. Just as the franchisor must adapt to changing times, so must franchisees.

On the positive side, the benefit of joining a franchise system is that franchisees have access to an entire network of owners who can help provide motivation and support. As a franchisor, you can help your franchisees by facilitating a connected community. Underperforming franchisees should have a lifeline to the most successful franchisees, whether by phone or through an online platform, so they can share ideas and find out what they are doing differently. Says Stites, “The most valuable asset is the franchise network.”

Success Factor #5: Finding Just the Right Size

According to FBR, of the approximately 3,000 U.S. franchise companies in operation today, 69% of those companies are smaller franchise companies with fewer than 100 locations. When preparing to join a franchise, candidates should consider its size in addition to the factors above so they know what you’re getting into.

On the one hand, a smaller franchise may have more opportunities for growth because they’re not saturated in the market the way McDonald’s is. It could be well-suited for risk-takers seeking more entrepreneurial freedom and flexibility if the system is still in development. They don’t have it all “figured out” yet and may rely on the first franchisees to help establish processes and systems. On the other hand, a smaller franchise might not be ideal for those craving structure in a well-established organization. However, one can’t assume that just because a brand is large that they’re successful at the franchise level.

Ultimately, in addition to researching a potential franchise thoroughly, talking to existing franchisees about their experience can help in the decision making process. As a franchisor, the more you can communicate with franchisees and support their experience of business ownership, the more satisfied and successful they are likely to be.