5 Pointers for Content Marketing at the Franchisee Level
So you run an Australian franchise, and you want to ensure your company has a great online presence. Measures will need to be taken on a national level, but the activity of your franchisees are equally important.
Your national online presence will show what your company is all about, including your values, services/products, and your mission statement. Through your franchisees, you will be able to show how your business works at a local level, and use content that is designed to attract and engage customers on a more regional level.
These five pointers will help you maintain a great online presence, and give your company the resources it needs to reach new customers.
1 Encourage Franchisees to Create Content
The first step to getting the best content for your business is encouraging your franchisees to produce their own content. Your franchisees can produce localised content that is designed to reach people all across Australia. This content helps create a reputation – and word of mouth marketing can be extremely powerful.
By using localised content, building links and getting guest posters on board, you will be able to create content that encourages new people to engage with your website and business. If you want to make sure your franchisees are producing the best content, be sure to introduce your teams to online tools like Word Stream (www.wordstream.com), which can help with SEO keywords. Small SEO Tools (www.smallseotools.com) also offers a keyword density checker, to ensure that all content achieves the search ranking they deserve.
2 Have a National Social Media Specialist
Content that appears on search rankings is important, but so is social media. In fact, social media is more important than ever, and even provides a first contact between your business and potential clients or customers.
When you produce high quality content, you need a strong social media presence to promote it. By hiring a national social media specialist, you can provide information to all your branches, and help ensure there is no miscommunication between those branches.
The national social media manager can provide advice and support to your branches, but it’s also important that the branches have the tools they need to create their own content. Internet Marketing Ninjas (www.internetmarketingninjas.com) offers a popular SEO tool, which can help branches create quality, search-engine-optimised content. Assignment help also provides real life support from editing and proofreading professionals, which can ensure franchisees produce content your company can be proud of and can be found at www.australianhelp.com.
3 Encourage Franchise Owners to Improve SEO
When your franchise owners produce content, it’s important that they not only ooze quality, but are optimised for search engines. For this reason, you should encourage your franchise owners to improve SEO by managing their word counts and analysing meta data. Easy Word Count (www.easywordcount.com) is a super simple tool that your franchise teams can use to make sure that the content is the right length. Human services like Do my assignment (www.essayroo.com) can be extremely valuable as well. This is an online service that puts you in touch with professional writers and editors. You can encourage your franchisees to utilise this tool and learn from the experts, which will eventually translate into even higher quality content being published on their websites.
4 Let Franchisees Hire Writers
If your franchisees are focused more on the business and day-to-day side of things, then hiring a writer could be extremely beneficial. Allowing your franchise owners to hire writers gives them more time to spend on providing the high-quality service you expect from them, and it also means that they’ll be producing extremely good content.
Before encouraging franchise owners to hire writers, however, it’s important to set out some guidelines. Try using Ginger Software (www.gingersoftware.com) for a great word processing and writing experience. Make sure you outline exactly what kind of editorial guidelines you expect, what kind of message and story you want to tell, and your goals with social media and search engine ranking. If you don’t want your franchisees to hire a writer to create the content, perhaps consider allowing your team to hire writers who can provide an editing and proofreading service. This can help your franchise owners to write content that sticks to your editorial guidelines, and it also helps your team learn how to improve their content and become more independent in the future.
5 Effectively Track All Branch Content
Finally, remember to have a master sheet that tracks all the content your franchisees produce. Your master sheet can help you manage all the content that is produced nationally, and it allows you to see how well all your branches are performing. Your master sheet should have specific information, and so the following columns are recommended:
– URL
The URL of the article published should be documented so you can quickly see the content produced.
– Notes
Next to the URL, you should add notes. You can make notes about the kind of call to action that was used, the style of the content, and the purpose of it. Also include the author and editor responsible, and you’ll have all the information you need at a glance.
– Name of Website
The name of the website should also be listed next to the URL. Remember, not all content you produce will be for your franchisee’s site – your team might produce content for other websites.
– Date
Remember to include a date, too. This provides you with historical reference as your master sheet expands.
Bear all of these things in mind, and use popular online writing tools, and you’ll be able to create the best content for your brand on both a national and regional level.
Gloria Kopp is a digital marketer and an eLearning consultant. She graduated from University of Wyoming and started her career as a business writer and an educator, and is now working as a tutor at Online Assignment Help. Gloria is also a regular contributor to websites including Engadget and Huffington Post.
Gloria Kopp