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Best Practices for Franchises to Address Privacy Changes

privacy changes impacting franchise brands

In the world of social media marketing for franchises, the landscape looks decidedly different than it did even just a year ago. With new ad-targeting and privacy changes impacting the ways that brands can reach and engage with their desired audiences, franchise brands are having to rethink the ways they find local customers. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal notes that while Facebook and Instagram marketing is still among the most effective forms of promotion, brands still need to adjust their marketing strategies and be prepared for some trial and error with their advertising dollars.

What’s Changed?

In April 2022, Apple began requiring apps to ask users for tracking permissions across apps, meaning people have an easy way to opt out of tracking throughout the web. If a consumer opts out of tracking, this makes it more difficult for brands to target customers who expressed interest in products or services like theirs.

Meanwhile, starting in January of this year, Facebook changed its detailed targeting options related to potentially sensitive topics, such as those related to health, sexual orientation, religious practices and groups, political beliefs, social issues, organizations, and public figures. 

Combined, these changes require a sea change in the ways that brands focus their marketing and advertising efforts — particularly small and independent businesses that are trying to make a name for themselves. Even established brands like well-known franchises need to ensure they are using their time and money as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. In the following guide, we break down what’s shifted for franchises and how they can reprioritize their resources to keep up with the changing times.

What Franchise Brands Have Going for Them: Brand Recognition

WSJ notes that Apple’s new policies have impacted many younger direct-to-consumer brands that lack the name recognition, alternative sales channels, and diversified marketing plans of their larger counterparts. In many ways, franchise brands have an advantage in this regard, particularly for franchisees, in that: 

  • Even startup franchisees can take advantage of the brand recognition that goes along with owning a franchise. This is one of the biggest benefits of franchise ownership, allowing franchisees to use the company logo, branding and established reputation to build their local businesses.
  • Franchisees often have franchisor support for their marketing, both in terms of the assets provided and even national advertising dollars in many cases. Franchisees can immediately use a plug-and-play marketing system that achieves results rapidly.
  • Franchisees can skip over the steep learning curve of marketing their businesses and tap into proven systems. Ongoing support ensures that they can get their questions answered quickly.

Related: Facebook Ad Targeting Changes and What They Mean for Your Business

Best Practices for Navigating Privacy Changes

While naturally, some franchisors are better at providing the needed support than others — franchisee satisfaction surveys like those from Franchise Business Review and listings like Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 are a good starting point for research — franchisees who do their due diligence can easily find and invest in a franchise system that works. With the support of a franchisor, paired with proven marketing systems, franchisors are navigating privacy and targeting changes with success. 

Below are some of the best practices we recommend to our franchise clients looking to improve their overall marketing strategy. The goal is to build a community around your local business and around your brand in general — so that even if changes come down the pipeline, you’ll always have a loyal base of customers. 

1. Create organic social media posts.

It’s not enough to pay for ads anymore — you need to be creating organic content that people want to see. Organic content does not require a big upfront investment; with little more than a good smartphone with a camera, you can begin taking photos and videos, posting them on your social media pages, and creating a following around your brand.

For the most effective organic content, make sure it’s authentic. That means posting pictures from your location such as customers who frequent your store, writing blog posts about topics related to your business, and sharing videos featuring real people from your place of business. 

2. Generate original content

Along the same lines as organic content, your content should be original, too. It’s important to remember that the whole reason you’re creating social media content is to promote yourself and your brand, not someone else’s. You want people to seek out your content and keep coming back for more. If you’re just sharing other creators’ content, what will make them come back? 

On the flip side, if you consistently post original content that makes your followers’ lives easier, entertains them, explains a complex topic in a way they can understand, inspires them, or solves a problem for them, then your followers will eagerly seek out your content. 

The key word here is consistently! You can’t post once and expect results; aim to post at least three times weekly on the major social media channels for the best results, with a mixture of posts, Stories and Reels. A great way to ensure you have great content going out consistently is to make use of user-generated content from employees and customers. The Rallio mobile app makes the process of collecting, managing and storing such assets incredibly easy, so you and your franchisees always have a flow of original content to choose from.

3. Be Responsive to Messages, Comments and Reviews

The quickest way to lose a follower, or a customer, is to ignore them when they reach out online. It’s vital that as a business page owner or manager, you respond to every comment, direct message and online review (both positive and negative) within 24 hours — even quicker is ideal. Not only is this just good customer service, but it also ensures that Facebook continues to view your page as a responsive business that’s happy to help its followers. 

And while Facebook’s algorithm can change at any time — it has done so consistently over the past decade — as of now, Facebook prioritizes content in people’s feeds based on ranking signals that they define as “meaningful interactions,” such as:

Engagement

  • Comments, likes and shares
  • Engagement with content shared by friends
  • Shares via Messenger
  • Replies to comments

Relationships

  • Who posted the content (users are more likely to see content from friends and businesses they have interacted with)
  • Percentage that the page’s profile is complete 
  • Interactions between people (those between people and pages are not given the same weight)

Content type

  • Type of post, such as photos, videos, or links
  • How informative the content is
  • Time spent viewing the post

Recency

  • Newer posts are shown first
  • Technology (type of phone and internet connection used)

Final Thoughts on Privacy Changes

It’s important to note that we don’t advise stopping your advertising completely on social platforms, especially considering that your competitors are likely continuing their ad campaigns. Keep in mind that you can always check your competitors’ Page Transparency tab to view the current campaigns they are running. 

Aside from that, you can continue to reach your audience through Engagement Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, targeted lists, and other methods that comply with the recent privacy and targeting changes.

Like Facebook’s algorithm, its ad policies can always change, and you can expect to see more changes coming down the pipeline in terms of targeting restrictions as early as next year. As such, we advise following the best practices above in order to best navigate the current and future changes. 

Here at Rallio, we are helping franchise brands grow their local businesses on social media with our all-in-one platform that connects all your social platforms in one place — pulling in every interaction, review and message generated through your pages, so you never miss an opportunity to engage, respond and connect with your community. To learn more about our suite of solutions, reach out to sales@rallio.com.

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Uncategorized

5 Quick Tips to Improve Your Social Media Now

quick tips for social media

It’s no secret that people are using Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms to find local businesses, hunt for new jobs, and learn more about their favorite brands. But with all the different platforms out there, it can be hard to know how best to use them to help your business grow. To save you the hassle of doing hours of internet research, we’ve gathered some quick tips that will help improve your social media right now.

1. Be Consistent With Posting

If you want people to see updates from your business on social media, then make sure you post consistently so people are regularly seeing your content. This might mean posting daily or weekly, depending on how active your audience is and what kind of content they prefer seeing from you. It’s also important not to overdo it though — don’t flood their feeds with too many updates in one day, because that can be overwhelming for anyone who follows you (and annoying).

2. Use Social Media Management Tools

Social media management tools allow you to schedule posts, manage multiple accounts, and track engagement. Some even offer insights into how your audience is interacting with your content, which can help you make better decisions about what kind of content to post and when. Rallio offers an all-in-one dashboard where you can connect all your social accounts, create content, store your media assets, engage with your community, and track detailed analytics. 

Think about the time savings of not having to log in to multiple accounts, multiple times, and you can imagine why such tools are important for your business. Having the right technology to automate things allows you to spend less time on each platform and more time connecting with new customers.

3. Answer Questions Quickly

Have you ever tried to contact a company about an issue, only to be told that someone would get back to you “within 24 hours”? That’s frustrating because you’re left waiting with no real idea of when someone will respond. As a business owner, be sure to answer questions on social media as soon as possible so customers can get back to what they were doing without having to wait around for an answer. It also helps if you have technology like Rallio, which, again, pulls everything into one dashboard for easy management — from comments on your posts to reviews of your products or services.

Related: The Best 7 Social Media Tips for Small Businesses

4. Use Engaging Visuals

Use images, videos and links to make your content more visually appealing to visitors. Share photos of your products, office space or employees, and post videos of customer testimonials, product usage tips, and behind-the-scenes snapshots of your business. 

You can also share links to blog posts or other websites that are relevant to your industry or business. If you have a company blog, aim to write a blog post about once per week. Regularly posting new content will keep people coming back to see what you have to say next, which gives them another chance to learn more about your company and services and establishes you as an industry expert.

5. Piggyback on Social Media Trends

It’s not that hard to find out what’s hot in the world of social media. In fact, there are plenty of tools you can use to keep up with trending topics and monitor your competitors’ activity. Here are some great ways to capitalize on these trends:

  • Find popular hashtags on Twitter and Instagram
  • Monitor your competitors’ Twitter feeds for mentions from influencers or customers
  • Listen in on conversations taking place around your brand or industry by checking out Twitter lists or monitoring relevant hashtags
  • Monitor what people are saying about your competitors using Google Alerts

Use These Quick Tips to Your Advantage

Even if you’ve been using it for years, you can never be sure that you’re doing everything right. So learn as much as you can, and make sure to always keep an eye out for new tips and tricks—they can only help improve your business. And above all, always make sure that your posts reflect the authentic personality of your brand. The more genuine you are, the better off your business will be.

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Social

Brand Storytelling: Guide to Telling Your Story on Social Media

brand storytelling guide

With the rise of social media, we have seen an increase in the number of brands building their own voice in a crowded space. One of the most effective methods of establishing your unique identity is through brand storytelling, the practice of sharing your values, background, and reasons for doing what you do. By telling a brand story in a relatable and engaging way, brands can build a loyal following that engages with their content and is more likely to take the next step in the customer journey. This guide will help you understand the basics of brand storytelling and discover the power behind it for your brand.

What Is Brand Storytelling?

We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by content. For brands to survive in this environment, they need to find ways to stand out from the crowd. Brands are doing this by creating real connections through storytelling that conveys who they are as a company, what they stand for, and what value they add to people’s lives. 

The power of storytelling lies in its ability to inspire us to take action or change our beliefs or behaviors, but it also can be used as a way to express your brand’s core values. The best brands use their stories to build long-lasting relationships with their customers by creating meaningful experiences for them.

It’s not just about telling your story; it’s about how you tell it — and how you use it to connect with people. Companies that use brand storytelling effectively are able to establish emotional connections with people based on the values they share with them, helping to foster a relationship between brand and customer. Here are five ways innovative companies are using brand storytelling to fuel growth.

Related: 4 Huge Reasons to Start Storytelling on Social Media

1. They understand the value of empathy

Consumers want brands to be more empathetic when interacting with them online — even if they’re just shopping for something as simple as coffee mugs or socks. They want to feel like individuals whose voices are heart, not faceless customers. And because many customers use social media as a customer service channel — via comments, reviews, and DMs — it’s imperative that brands respond to them. Having a dashboard like Rallio that pulls all your customer engagements into one inbox makes the process simple, so you never miss an interaction with a customer and a chance to make their day.

2. They use narrative techniques

From the hero’s journey to the three-act structure, there are many different narrative techniques that brands can employ to tell their stories. These are the kinds of narratives that have been around since the beginning of time, and for good reason: They resonate with audiences and help them to remember a story from start to finish. 

Other writing mechanisms can come into play for a well-rounded story, including anecdotes and metaphors, fairy tales, legends, and any other tools that resonate with you personally. Don’t get too caught up in the technique at the expense of sharing your story authentically; just write what you know as though you are sharing a story with a friend, which leads us to #3 below.

3. They’re authentic

The most compelling brand stories come from a place of authenticity. When you’re creating a brand story, you have to be honest about who you are and what you stand for. This allows your customers to connect with you on a deeper level.

The best brands don’t just talk about themselves, too — they share their story. When people see the real behind-the-scenes moments that led up to the creation of a product or service, they can relate to it in a way that’s real and authentic.

Not only do these stories help build trust between your brand and customers, but they also showcase how much time and effort goes into each product or service. This can lead to greater customer loyalty over time as people get to know your brand on a more personal level.

4. They make it a collaborative effort

Effective brand stories facilitate a connection between the audience and the brand — even making followers a part of the narrative. Getting audience input, interacting with followers via comments and DMs, and sharing user-generated content helps to build a bridge between brand and follower.

Ultimately, your audience needs to feel like they are part of your brand story — not just another follower on your page. They should feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves; that their contribution matters; that they have an impact on what happens next; and that their voice matters in shaping the future of your company, product or service.

Before you start crafting your messages, take some time to dig deep into who your audience is — what makes them tick? What are their values? What do they find important? What makes them laugh? What makes them cry? By getting inside their heads first, you can tailor your messaging with more accuracy.

5. They tailor messaging

When telling your brand story on social media, you can’t simply write it once and post it on every platform. For example, when you’re publishing on Facebook, your posts might include links to your blog, but on Instagram, you need to tell more of a visual story. Tailoring your message for each platform ensures you are reaching your followers where they’re at and seeing what’s relevant to them based on their interests and the networks they follow. With the Rallio platform, you can create different versions of your posts and schedule them out from one place instead of having to log in to each platform to do so.

Related: Content Marketing 101: Engage Your Audience With Great Storytelling

Conclusion

Great storytelling isn’t just for sitting around a campfire; it’s what allows your brand to stand out on social media and build relationships with your audience. The more you use storytelling, the better you’ll get at it — so dive in today! Check with the experts at Rallio about how to use our platform to streamline the process, saving you time and money and helping you tell your brand story both now and in the future. 

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Social

Toolkit: Unlock Social Media Success for Your Local Business

toolkit for social media success

If we’ve learned anything over the past couple of years, it’s that social media is critical to the success of local businesses, creators, and influencers. Yet at the same time, some brands may struggle to find the right strategies for connecting with and influencing their audiences. If that sounds like you, fear not! We’ve put together this toolkit to help anyone from startups to enterprise-level decision makers ramp up their social media success, both now and in the not-so-distant future.

What’s Inside

  • How to: Create Engaging Local Content
  • Tips: Provide Outstanding Customer Service on Social Media
  • Checklist: Find the Right Content Mix for Your Brand
  • Video: Increase Exposure With Both Paid and Organic Posts
  • Tool: Get Organized With the Rallio Dashboard 

How to: Create Engaging Local Content

You may already know that people are more likely to make purchases from companies they feel are relatable. That’s why it’s so important that your social media marketing strategy includes local content. If you’re not posting local content on your social media pages, you’re missing out on opportunities to connect with your audience, build trust, increase leads, and ultimately boost your sales.

While it might sound complicated to create local content, it’s quite simple. The steps look something like this:

  1. Snap a photo of someone or something in your store, at home, or behind the scenes of your business. You can also film a short video.
  2. Upload it to your social media channels of choice. We recommend, at a minimum, posting on Facebook and Instagram for B2C businesses and including LinkedIn and Twitter if you’re looking to develop B2B and professional relationships.
  3. Add a caption. Tell your audience what’s going on in the photo or video. Add hashtags when posting on Instagram. Tag other people and/or businesses to increase exposure.
  4. Post your photo or video. You’re almost done!
  5. Go back later and check your post analytics to see how it performed. Make any tweaks as needed to the content. Boost at least one post per week to increase its reach.

Here are some ideas for engaging local content:

  • Create posts based on calendar events, such as holidays and national celebrations
  • Share relevant news stories and blog posts on Facebook
  • Post pictures and videos of your products in use
  • Link to stories about others in your industry
  • Show “before and after” photos if your business lends itself to that type of content

Tips: Provide Outstanding Customer Service on Social Media

Social media has become the go-to place for people to share their experiences and get feedback from others. If you’re a business, you must monitor your social media channels for customer service opportunities.

When a customer has an issue with your product or service, they may be more likely to reach out on social media than to call the company directly or submit a complaint through its website. Here are some tips for providing outstanding customer service on social media:

  • Be responsive. As soon as you see a question or comment from a customer, respond to them as quickly as possible. The faster you respond, the better the odds they’ll be satisfied with your response and won’t escalate their complaint any further.
  • Be helpful and proactive. Your ability to help customers goes beyond just answering their questions; sometimes it means anticipating their needs before they even ask for them! For example, offer to credit their account with $10 for their troubles.
  • Respond to positive comments and reviews, too. This shows you’re listening and you’re grateful for your customers.
  • Use technology to help you manage the process. Rallio’s dashboard pulls in comments and reviews and allows you to respond to them directly.

Related: Responding to Online Reviews in 3 Easy Steps

Checklist: Create a Balanced Mix of Content for Your Brand

Your social media content mix is the combination of different types of posts you share on your social profiles. It’s important to have a good balance to reach your audience with the right type of content at the right time. To create a balanced mix, make sure you’ve checked off the items on this list so you know what type of customer you’re trying to reach. This list will also help you with creating targeted ads.

  Identify audience demographics such as age range and geographic location

 Develop messaging that this audience will find relatable and authentic

 Determine which social media platforms your audience uses the most

 Take photos throughout your location of team members, customers, products, etc.

 Film four or five short videos to use throughout the month 

 Gather customer testimonials

 Create a content calendar that includes key holidays and events

 Identify two dates per month when you will go “live” with your audience

 Create four different Instagram Reels and/or Stories

 Curate four different inspirational quotes that will resonate with your audience

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you go through the checklist:

  • What are your business goals?
  • What do you want people to do after they see your post — i.e., what’s your call to action? Buy something? Sign up for a newsletter? Share it on their profiles? Whatever it is, make sure this is clear in every piece of content you create so that you can measure success.
  • Are there any key performance indicators (KPIs) you’d like to use to evaluate success?
  • Is there someone on your team you can rely on to be a dedicated social media manager, or do you need to outsource your social media management? At a minimum, having someone who can take photos will help you stay on track.

Tool: Get Organized With the Rallio Dashboard

Rallio’s social media dashboard is a great tool for managing your business’s social media accounts. The dashboard allows you to schedule posts across platforms, view analytics, engage employees in advocacy, respond to reviews and comments, and monitor what’s going on with your brand — all with a single login. Easily monitor your follower growth and engagement rates, as well as view detailed analytics for each post. If your business has multiple locations, Rallio allows you to schedule and syndicate content across locations.

Our dashboard is a powerful tool that helps you get organized with your social media marketing and can help you uplevel your efforts. You’ll spend less time trying to organize your efforts, leaving you more time to engage with your followers, and focus on your business. Here’s how:

  • Activate Rallio’s Local Tech and Local Team to ignite the engagement of your local pages. 
  • Engage REVV, our reputation management app, to add massive numbers of positive reviews to your online reputation. 
  • Finally, use our local listings management solution to maintain consistent location data across the web and give Google confidence to list your locations at the top of the search results.

It’s the ultimate solution to maximize your local social media engagement and improve your local search results. Ask us about the details, bundled pricing solutions, and case studies to prove the measurable results.

Video: Increase Exposure With Both Paid and Organic Posts

There are two main ways to increase your exposure on social media: paid and organic posts. What’s the difference between the two? Organic posts are posts that are shared by users who see your post and decide they like it enough to engage with it or share it with their friends or followers. Paid posts are ads that pop up on someone’s screen when they’re browsing Facebook or Instagram and may include both boosted and sponsored posts.

Paid Posts

Paid posts are the easiest way to get more exposure for your business on social media. You have two options when purchasing paid posts: boosted posts and ads. A boosted post is simply a regular post for which you pay to increase its exposure, while an ad is a completely separate piece of content that uniquely promotes your brand and requires an Ads Manager account connected with your business page. Both can be used to promote your business and website, but they’re different enough that you should consider using both if possible.

Organic Posts

Organic posts are free but take a lot more time and effort to create than boosted posts do. However, they can help build credibility with followers by showing them that you care about their interests and opinions — even if they don’t always respond or share what you post. You can also increase your reach with organic posts by engaging employee advocates; Rallio enables you to provide limited logins to employees on your team so they can upload and share more content.

Start Using Your Toolkit Today

The future of social media is interwoven into the fabric of our society and will continue to grow and expand. As such, you must investigate and adopt new tools and tactics to keep up with these changes. Social media marketing requires that you become a curator for all social networks, using social listening and insights to keep current, enhancing your content with multimedia and live-streaming, as well as engaging your customers in fresh ways. Hopefully, this toolkit has provided you with some practical tips for getting the most out of your social media engagement and taking your marketing to the next level.

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Social

Spring Clean Your Social Media in 4 Easy Steps

spring clean your social media

Social media can be a powerful tool for your company. However, if you haven’t spruced up your social accounts in a while, it’s time to take out your spray bottle and squeegee and get to work. Take a look at four quick ways to spring clean your social media accounts, and get your social media marketing working even harder for you as we head into the summer months.

1. Update Your Branding

You may be tempted to use a selfie for your profile photo, but that’s not the best way to make a great impression on your audience. Use a professional logo that highlights your brand and helps people recognize you wherever they see it. Be sure to use the same photo across all of your profiles so your audience can easily recognize you, no matter the platform. “This not only ensures consistent branding but also helps make it easier for people to recognize you when they see your profile image on each of the different social media platforms,” notes Social Media Today.

2. Secure Accounts

Review the access and privileges across your accounts. Remove any employees who are no longer with your business, and make sure all current employees have access only to the information they need to do their jobs well. This way, you can avoid inadvertently giving them too much access, a recipe for problems down the road.

For current employees you wish to give access to your Facebook page, you have the following options for page roles:

  • Admin. This is the highest level of access; admins have the ability to manage all aspects of a Facebook page, including creating ads and viewing analytics.
  • Editor. This is one step below an admin; an editor can do everything an admin can except assign page roles.
  • Moderator. A moderator has more limited access; while they cannot post content, they can respond to messages and comments, create ads, and see Facebook insights, for example.
  • Advertiser. As the name implies, an advertiser can create ads and view insights.
  • Analyst. An analyst has the least amount of access; they are restricted to viewing insights and cannot create ads or post to the page. An analyst view can be helpful if you want a third-party expert to look at your campaigns without giving them access to your page.
  • Custom page roles. A combination of roles as per your specifications.

Related: 5 Ways to Use Social Media Marketing to Promote Your Franchise

3. Audit

If you’re looking for ideas on how to improve your social media marketing strategy, you might be wondering what to do with all of those old posts. Though it may be tempting to delete them and make way for new content, there’s a lot of valuable insight that can be gained from reviewing past posts. Check out posts from the past and ask yourself:

  • Which topics are resonating the most with my audience?
  • What kind of content do my followers respond best to?
  • How many people did I reach?   
  • How many likes or shares did each post get?
  • Do people comment on or share my posts? If not, why? If so, what makes this post so engaging?
  • Did any of my posts go viral or get picked up by other blogs?   
  • Did any of them end up being featured on other sites (for example, did one of my photos get used by an influencer)?   
  • Did any of my articles rank well in Google search?
  • Which posts have outstayed their welcome?
  • Which channels drove the most traffic and conversions? Which ones underperformed?
  • What types of images work best? What captions work best? Are there any themes in my photos that might make sense as a series of posts?
  • How many times per day should I post (and at what times)? How often does my audience engage with my content across platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)? How do these numbers compare to competitors?

Yes, this is a long list of questions, but it’s necessary to answer them all as you’re working to spring-clean your social media.

4. Set New Goals

Based on the insights and analytics you see on your social media posts, you can use that information to make your new content even better. Take a look at your existing key performance indicators to set new goals that will take your social media marketing to the next level. The most basic KPIs are related to engagement and follower growth, such as:

  • Number of likes and saves
  • Number of shares
  • Number of comments
  • Number of new followers

There are also more advanced KPIs that can help you get even more insight into how people interact with your content and what they think about it, including:

  • Unique visits. This metric tells you how many different people visited your site from your social media posts. If you have multiple sites or landing pages linked to from your social media accounts and want to know how many people visited each one in total, this is the KPI for you.
  • Brand awareness. Reach and impressions are two of the most popular metrics used to measure brand awareness. These measures indicate how many people saw your posts, but they don’t tell you whether or not anyone actually saw them. To measure brand awareness, you’d want to use an image KPI like click-through rate (CTR) or engagement rate.
  • Sales. You can also use social media to drive sales by tracking your conversion rates — the number of people who convert into customers after seeing a particular ad or promotion on social media — and ROI (return on investment). Your conversion rates will vary depending on your industry and audience but should be tracked across all platforms so you have a good idea about what works best for your business.

Spring Clean Your Social Media for Better Results

Use these four tips to take a fresh look at your social accounts and spring clean your social media marketing, especially if it’s been a while since you analyzed your accounts. By doing this, you can make sure your efforts are as effective as possible both now and for the remainder of the year. If you need any extra tips as you spring clean your social media, reach out to our experts via support@rallio.com and we’ll help you get on track.

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Employee Advocacy

Employee Advocacy Benefits for Franchises

employee advocacy for franchises

Have you ever wondered how you could enlist the support of your employees in advocating for your brand? The idea is simple: Encourage your employees to provide feedback on their company, tell others about your company and products, and help build a better brand through honest word-of-mouth marketing. Employee advocacy programs are essential to building a strong customer base and brand loyalty. Take a look below at just a handful of the top employee advocacy benefits you can expect for your franchise.

Improved Brand Awareness

Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful tools in any marketer’s arsenal — and even more so when it comes straight from employees. Why? Because people tend to trust their peers more than brands themselves. ​​One study found that word-of-mouth influences 93% of consumers to make purchasing decisions. Just 6% said they rarely rely on referrals to do so.

Employee advocacy is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that helps build your brand and reputation by developing a community of people who are passionate about your company and what you do. When people share the experiences they’ve had with your brand, they’re telling their friends about how great it is to work there or how much they love your product. They’re also building trust with their followers. With an employee advocacy program in place, you can leverage this natural propensity toward word-of-mouth marketing by encouraging employees to share their experiences.

Ability to Reach New Audiences

Employees are a great resource for building your brand on social media because they already have existing relationships with people who could be potential customers. In this way, they become authentic spokespeople for your brand. They know the product and service offerings, and they’re able to share them in a way that feels more genuine than if you were to do it yourself. 

This helps you reach new audiences on social media who might not be familiar with your brand. Employees can help grow your social media following by sharing content from multiple platforms at once and engaging with followers across different networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. For franchisees, they can also help build a local community of customers who become familiar with your location via employee advocates.

A Cost-Effective Way to Increase Sales

Employee advocates enable low-cost marketing channels that you don’t have to pay for. They’re already an integral part of your business, and they have an emotional connection with your brand. They also have credibility because they’re speaking from experience as customers themselves. In effect, employee advocates can help generate new leads and increase conversion rates at no additional cost to you or your budget. 

The most effective employee advocacy programs should do all of the following in order to generate more leads:

  • Encourage employees to share their experiences with customers on social media, in blogs and reviews, and at events like trade shows or conferences.
  • Provide incentives for employees to participate by rewarding them for sharing their opinions online about products or services and providing feedback about how well companies are serving customers.
  • Incorporate technology like Rallio to provide a seamless experience for advocates and enable analytics that show how well employee advocates are performing. With Rallio, employees are able to upload their own photos for use at both the local social level as well as all the way to corporate social accounts — while also getting rewarded for their efforts. 

Related: Employee Advocacy Checklist: A Guide to Creating Your Advocacy Program

Improves the Customer Experience

Employee advocacy can improve customer service and the overall user experience by giving you more insights into how your customers feel about your business. Customers expect companies to listen to them and respond quickly when there’s an issue — yet many companies fail to do this. With an employee advocate program in place, your employees will be able to give you feedback on how customers are feeling about their interactions with your brand. This will help you understand what issues they’re facing so that you can address them in a timely manner.

An employee advocate program also allows customers to have a direct line of communication with those who know your business best: your employees. You can use this information to improve processes and make changes based on what customers are saying about their experiences with your company. For example, if multiple customers complain about poor service over email or social media channels, then this could be a sign that you need more training for your staff members or an improvement in processes.

Boosts Employee Morale and Retention

Employees who feel engaged with their work are more likely to stay with your company long-term. Employee advocacy helps employees feel more invested in their jobs and connected to their employers — which can lead to greater loyalty among staff members, which is good for business.

As such, one of the biggest benefits of employee advocacy is that it helps increase employee engagement by encouraging employees to feel like they’re part of something bigger than just their daily tasks. Employees who share content about your business on social media or via email feel more connected to their job because they’re contributing to something larger than themselves — in this case, your company’s success. This is especially true if you have a strong culture that encourages employee engagement, such as providing opportunities for employees to give input on how the company operates.

Once you formalize an employee advocacy program, this also gives you an opportunity to reward employees for their brand advocacy efforts. With Rallio’s help, you can establish incentives and rewards that entice them to want to spread the word. 

Employee Advocacy Can Help Grow Your Franchise

The goal of an employee advocacy program is to get employees to talk about your brand, products and services without being asked. However, as much as companies want their employees to talk up their products and services on social media, many have strict policies on what they can and cannot say.

To help alleviate some of those concerns, it’s to your benefit to set up an employee advocacy program that encourages them to share content that supports your company’s mission or values — and steer clear of anything that doesn’t fit with your brand identity. This way, employees will have a clear understanding of whether or not something is aligned with your company culture.

If you need help incentivizing your employees to submit their own images for brand content, or if you want them to share your message across their own social networks, Rallio’s got your back. With reward programs designed by your team and technology that pulls it all together, we empower businesses like yours to reach new audiences while encouraging employee engagement. Find out more at rallio.com or reach out to sales@rallio.com.

Categories
Social

5 Ways to Use Social Media Marketing to Promote Your Franchise

promote your franchise with social media

Social media is important for any business in today’s world. But it can be even more important for franchises because of the nature of your business. Franchises are about spreading brand awareness and building loyalty — not just at a local level, but often at a national or international level. To promote your franchise, it’s essential to have a social media component to your marketing campaigns.

With the ability to reach a wide audience and garner the interest of potential customers, social media is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools at a franchise’s disposal. However, if you are a franchise owner, your use of social media must be strategic. While you want to leverage the social media platforms your customers use, you need to do so in a way that is consistent with the branding of your parent company.

To help you promote your franchise consistently and effectively, here are five ways that you can use social media marketing as a powerful tool.

1. Share Content From the Parent Company

For consistent branding and brand awareness, it’s a good idea to share content from your parent company. These branded assets are typically created at the corporate level and may feature brand-wide promotions, customer testimonials, and specific messaging that the parent company wants to make available to all franchisees. 

As a franchisee, using these assets for your local page builds trust and credibility for your business. Customers who see this professional-looking content will feel more inclined to engage with you and learn more about your brand. 

2. Share Local Content

For franchisees, it’s important not to rely solely on the parent company’s content for their pages. Although corporate-created content lends credibility, you also want to seek out ways to give your page a personality and a localized feel.

Share photos, funny anecdotes related to your business, and special deals or promotions you’re running. Give a behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on in your shop. Social media is about letting people see into your world — let them join you for a shift, or let them peek at the amazing new product you’re working on! With personalized content, you’re able to let your followers know what makes you different from the other franchises in your area. You’ve already got clientele, and you know what makes you stand out from your competition, so make sure to highlight those aspects of your franchise on social media.

Related: Case Study: How Local Content Boosts Engagement and Follower Growth for The Spice & Tea Exchange

3. Respond and Engage

If you have customers who are engaging with your brand on social media, it’s important to connect with each of them individually by responding to comments and messages they’ve left on your social media accounts. You’ll find that oftentimes, customers will reach out via social media if they need to get in touch with you. Other times, customers may leave a review about you, whether formally through an online review site or casually via comments on social media.

In any event, make sure you get back to customers — whether they had something nice to say or they have a problem. Promptly respond to any questions or concerns that are posted via social media sites or directed at you via private message on Facebook to ensure the highest level of customer service.

4. Reach Out to Old Customers

You probably already have a list of previous clients and customers that you send emails to on occasion to keep them updated on what’s new. When you send out your email campaigns, be sure to include links to your social profiles, along with information on any promotions or contests you’re hosting on social media. This is a great to way to create integrated campaigns, increase your social following, and also grow your email list.

Related: 5 Easy Steps to Run a Successful Social Media Contest

5. Share User Content

If a fellow franchise has just announced an exciting new product, share their post with a message of congratulations! The more you share, the more they’ll share, and it builds a sense of community around the business as a whole.

Try out some user-generated content, too. When customers tag you and share content related to your brand, be sure to repost their content on your pages to increase your reach. Get your employees involved with employee advocacy programs that boost morale while helping to promote your franchise.

How Rallio’s Technology Can Help

Rallio is a powerful SaaS platform combining cloud-based social media technology, artificial intelligence and employee advocacy. As the supplier of choice for franchise organizations and small businesses, Rallio enables multi-location brands and SMB operators to optimize their social media engagement, while managing their entire social media presence, online reputation, and online directory listings in one dashboard for all locations. By automating agency-like services and employee advocacy across their social media pages, brands multiply their reach exponentially and experience rapid month-over-month growth on social media. 

Whether you’re a franchisor looking for greater control over your brand and the ability to promote your franchise across platforms, or a franchisee looking for ways to create more impact at the local level, Rallio has solutions to meet every need. Reach out to sales@rallio.com to learn more and schedule a demo.

Categories
Social

Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Franchises

social media marketing for franchises
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Social Media is an incredibly powerful tool that entrepreneurs can use to market and advertise their businesses. But how does it work for franchises? There are different nuances that make social media marketing for franchises more nuanced, which makes it more challenging to master.

For starters, you need to understand how to keep your brand’s consistency while providing quality content on all types of social media. You also want to make sure your advertising efforts are getting the best results for any given campaign.

Are you a franchise owner looking to grow your business? Then this Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing for Franchises is for you.

Choose Your Platforms

Social media marketing is a great tool for franchises to use as they grow their businesses. It gives franchisees the ability to provide updates and engage with local customers in real time, all while targeting audiences that are most likely to become their next customers. 

But with so many social networks available, how do you know where to devote your time? You can’t be everywhere at once, so focus on a few social networks rather than trying to maintain an active presence on all of them. 

Many franchises do well focusing on Facebook and Instagram, but if your franchise is B2B, you might do better on LinkedIn. The point is to be wherever your customers are. For example, if you have a fitness-related franchise, Instagram may be a better choice than LinkedIn because it allows you to share photos of your space and activities more effectively and attract local business.

Related: Meet the Social Media Platforms: A Quick Guide to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter

Create a Buyer Persona

To help guide your decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts, you need to identify the persona of your ideal buyer. This exercise will give you a clear picture of who this person is and what their day-to-day looks like so that you can speak directly to them from a place of empathy. This will make your communications more authentic and relatable, which in turn makes it more likely that they’ll engage with your brand (and lead to more sales).

Identifying the persona of your ideal buyer is more than just understanding their basic demographics, like age and income. You want to think about what makes them who they are: their hopes, dreams, and fears.

For example, if you’re a home decor company and your target persona is a young professional on a budget who’s moving into their first apartment, you might write that their dream is a cozy living area in which to entertain friends but not spend too much money or get overwhelmed by the upkeep. Their biggest fear could be making an expensive purchase that turns out to be a fad — they want to feel secure in their choice for years to come. Once you understand these things about your target buyer, it will be much easier to find the elements of your products that appeal to those goals and fears.

If you have trouble coming up with a target persona on the spot, try thinking of someone close to you who has recently bought something like what you’re selling. What was going through their head when they made the purchase? What did they hope would happen as a result? The answers will likely be very similar for many people looking at your product.

Grow Your Followers

With your buyer persona in mind, now you can go about attracting this type of buyer to your social media pages so you can market to them directly. Here are some tips for growing your following:

  • Provide value to your audience. Set yourself apart from others in your niche by having a clear point of view and purpose for why you’re there. If you’re selling dog food, go beyond just posting about your products. Post content that shows people why they should buy from you, not the next guy. Show customers who use your product why it’s the best!
  • Post regularly. Keep content fresh and interesting. Post frequently and try out different types of posts like polls, memes, infographics, etc. to keep your audience engaged. Also, post at times when you think your followers would be active on social media—you might want to test out a few different times of day to see what works best for you!
  • Engage with your followers and other users. Respond quickly and appropriately to comments, questions and direct messages from your followers. They want answers back as soon as possible — it makes them feel valued by your company! It’s also important to be responsive in the event that someone has a customer service issue or leaves a review about your business. 
  • Use hashtags. More important on Instagram than other platforms, hashtags allow people to discover your posts via conversations around specific topics.
  • Make sure your profile is complete. Fill in your website, contact information, bio (also a good place for hashtags), “about” section, and all other fields so it’s easy for people to find you and learn more about your business.

Advertise

The buyer persona you created is somewhere on social media, and advertising can help you find them and attract their business. Here are some tips that will help you succeed at social media advertising:

  • When possible, use images and/or videos. Study after study has shown that people respond better to visual content than to written content — so don’t just write a caption and post a link to your website. Try to design something eye-catching that draws people in and makes them want to click.
  • Include a call to action in every ad, no matter how subtle. Whether it’s “sign up for our newsletter” or “download this free ebook,” always give people something to do when they see your ad.
  • Don’t overdo it! If you’re trying for an ad with a great image, perfect wording, and a strong call to action — but then you throw in another message about something completely different (like an upcoming event), you’ll just confuse your audience and drive them away from your brand instead of drawing them in.
  • If your budget is small, try boosting your posts initially until you’re ready for full-blown campaigns. Boosting allows more of your audience to see your posts than they would through organic methods alone.

Work With Experts

When you’re trying to grow your business, the last thing you want is a disconnected, out-of-date social media presence. If you lack the time or desire to make a splash with your social media marketing, consider partnering with a company like Rallio that has the technology and team to simplify the process. 

With on-point content and a platform for both brand management and employee engagement, Rallio can help you build an effective presence on any of the major social media platforms that will showcase your brand in the best possible light. To learn more, contact us via rallio.com or sales@rallio.com. 

Related: 4 Big Reasons You Should Outsource Your Social Media Marketing

Categories
Social

8 Reasons You Need One Social Media Marketing Provider

technology social media marketing

Let’s face it: Social media can be daunting for businesses. And trying to keep up with all of its changes is challenging — especially when you’re also running a business! To make matters worse, you might have a lot of different people from different agencies working on your social media marketing, and it’s causing confusion, mistakes and frustration. Below, we share eight reasons you need one social media marketing provider for all of your social media marketing needs — and why Rallio is the solution of choice for top franchise brands.

1. Consistent Brand Message

Consistency is key when it comes to your brand message, and a single provider can ensure this consistency. When you have one social media marketing provider, you create continuity and control for the brand.

When you have multiple social media marketing providers, it is quite possible that they will have different ideas regarding the brand image or what type of content to release. This can lead to inconsistencies in the brand message and cause confusion among your customers.

2. No Agency Chaos

The ability to manage social media and digital marketing activities for multiple offices is a key component of any successful multi-location campaign. And it’s even more important when it comes to social media, because of the sheer volume of accounts that need to be managed.

At Rallio, we work with clients who have hundreds or thousands of locations. With so many franchisees, they typically need a way to syndicate content from the top down and engage their owners in the social media marketing process. They also want a better way to monitor their data and roll-up analytics across all locations, so they can make smart business decisions and replicate successes that will benefit the entire system. Keeping everything under one roof at Rallio ensures everyone is aligned.

3. Tier-1 Training and Support

Rallio support will typically become the first level of contact for any questions related to the platform or their Rallio Local services. Because we provide both the technology and the team for our clients’ social media marketing needs, it eliminates the middle person. This way, support questions get handled internally in minutes rather than forwarded to an agency, causing delays and confusion. 

Related: Top 4 Benefits of Using a Social Media Management Platform

social media management provider platform

4. No Setup Required

Because the Rallio technology is already set up, the onboarding process is streamlined and quick, entailing meet-n-greets, strategy calls and training videos to get owners up and running. 

For many clients, this is where they can sit back and let Rallio take it from there. However, the platform also allows owners to have full control over their social media presence as well. They can monitor performance, approve posts in real time, and write their own content as needed.

5. Volume Discount Pricing

Rallio Local provides franchises with top-tier social agency work at a fraction of the cost to them due to volume pricing from brand-wide adoption. It’s a scalable solution that helps franchises:

  • Create authentic, effective and engaging local social media content
  • Simplify online review responses and reputation management
  • Manage and engage their audiences on social media, including review sites and local directory listings
  • Create advertising campaigns with best practices baked in

6. Minimizes Corporate Efforts

Rallio Local will use the digital brand assets that are already provided by Corporate in the Rallio platform. This process is much more efficient than working with multiple agencies, which typically put additional demands on the Corporate team to supply the same assets to each of them. 

This demand can become quite substantial when you’re working with numerous agencies. Further, Corporate can easily approve locally generated content with a click within Rallio, rather than via a different method with each agency. 

7. Integrated Mobile App

With the image library in the Rallio mobile app, franchisees are able to upload images and easily send them for approval. The Rallio Local team uses the approved images to create and boost highly engaging approved local content. Locations also have the ability to activate employees as brand ambassadors and expand their use of user-generated content. Plus, local images roll all the way up to Corporate, too!

8. Legal Protection

With the liability digital release form in the mobile app, franchisees can capture mobile images of employees and customers with a proper digital release form in order to use them risk-free on social media. The app provides a form for a digital signature in the moment. Most agencies that create local content do so with risk, as images captured often don’t provide proper release and publishing rights. 

Choose the Top Social Media Marketing Provider

Many franchise systems make the mistake of using multiple social media marketing providers for their business. Instead, we recommend going with a full-service provider like Rallio that offers a wide array of services, including social media management, strategy and content creation. Plus, our platform plugs into your current workflow and provides an assortment of tools to customize your approach to social media marketing.

Choosing a single provider streamlines the process, avoids major headaches, and makes your overall marketing strategy more comprehensive, effective and efficient. To find out more, head over to rallio.com or send us an email at sales@rallio.com.

Related: Case Study: Why Localized Social Media Matters

Case Study: Rallio Local

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