How to Overcome Challenges of Franchise Social Media Marketing in 2024

Recently, traditional marketing has seen a significant decline due to higher price points, lack of immediacy, insufficient targeting possibilities, and a substantial cultural change.

You see, during COVID-19, 50% of consumers became more digital, which directly resulted in new social media trends and an increased need for disruptive digital marketing.

But how does this exactly influence franchises? And how can franchisors and franchisees work together to create a single cohesive franchise social media marketing strategy?

In this article, we'll take you through all these burning questions and many more:

• Why is social media marketing important for franchises?
• What challenges does social media pose for franchises?
• How does content governance help franchises manage and scale social media?
• How to create an effective social media strategy for franchise marketing?
• Bonus:

  4 tips for franchises to scale their social media efforts

Why is social media marketing important for franchises?

With the right management, franchisors and franchisees can use social media marketing to:

• Reach a local target audience

• Answer their needs immediately

• Create hyper-localised, authentic, engaging content

A strong social media presence is essential for businesses today. It's the most cost-effective way to reach a target audience worldwide - in a relevant and timely manner.

The benefits of brand awareness, lead generation, customer acquisition, and retention alone can be profound. A solid social media strategy that scales across markets can have tangible, long-term impacts on individual franchisee locations.

McDonald's uses a very simple yet effective social media marketing tactic to connect with their local audiences. They create a strong bond with their followers by promoting their local teams and taking them behind the scenes of their local franchisees.

So, why do some franchise businesses fail to use this potential, and others give up on it before even trying?

What challenges does social media marketing pose for franchises?

There are a few challenges every franchise faces, but keep in mind they can all be overcome:

1. Inconsistency in brand messaging and community management
2. Posting brand-approved content
3. Insufficient resources to support local franchisees

1. Inconsistency in brand messaging and community management

This challenge leads to a high variance in generating the right social media experience you want your audience to have.

Inconsistency in brand messaging and community management can damage a consumer-facing brand. But playing safe and limiting your local franchisee's social media marketing team's creativeness can be just as harmful, as the content won't be personalised to the needs and particular traits of the local audience.

How to overcome this?

Having an advanced but user-friendly social media tool like Sendible can come in handy. A simple feature, such as Custom Tags, allows you to ensure you're including the right, pre-approved information across all social media posts while tailoring the rest of the content to the local communities.

2. Posting brand-approved content

Monitoring tens or hundreds of social channels is exhausting and almost impossible.

Posting the same content is not the answer either. 

The most scalable solution is to invest in a social media tool that allows your franchisees to create and schedule content that resonates with locals that's then shared with your central digital marketing team who can edit and approve it.

How to overcome this?

A good social media management tool should allow your team to create, approve, and schedule social media posts in one place.
Sendible offers a few handy solutions that will help your franchise business ensure everyone's on the same page:

• Adding pre-approved or branded images to a shared Content Library. With Sendible, you can use the bulk import feature to do this quickly with multiple images.
• Assigning messages for approval in bulk
• Creating pre-approved posts on an internal website, from where users can grab it via Share Button
• Shared access to Canva, which has an advanced integration with Sendible
• Bulk scheduling of content
  

3. Insufficient resources to support local franchisees

Implementing a cookie-cutter social media strategy to avoid this risk will prevent you from achieving the maximum potential of an individual franchisee's social media presence.

This type of rigid strategy sacrifices engaging, hyper-localised, and creative content for the sake of brand consistency, risk reduction, and simplicity.

How to overcome this?

• Other than having a shared Content Library divided in categories, each branch can have its own that the main users can pre-approve.
• Different branches can also use previously mentioned Custom Tags to ensure they're sharing important, branded information.
• Sendible's Google Chrome Extension allows all team members with tool access to add content to the Library and ask for approval.
• Finally, RSS feeds are a handy source of relevant news and ideas.

How does content governance help franchises manage and scale social media?

Content governance is a system, or better yet, a set of guidelines, that determines how an organisation's content gets created and published.

In other words - content governance helps you avoid chaos and ensures that a single source of truth and protocol informs the content creation process.

Sounds pretty straightforward. Now, let's see how it can help you scale your social media presence and performance while achieving marketing goals.

For a franchise, this means that social media managers will have the power to quickly and easily leverage local knowledge and adjust social media content to match particular traits of the local audience. But, they will do so within a clearly defined workflow that ensures consistency and quality.

In the end, content governance will provide you with:

• Consistency
• Efficiency
• Quality

For example, Labello divided its global Facebook page into multiple market pages. Depending on the user's location and language, they will be presented with social media content adjusted to that particular market. This way, Labello's local social media marketing teams can celebrate unique holidays and support relevant causes.

4 key components of a franchise content governance

Depending on your franchise's social media marketing needs and goals, your content governance system might be super detailed or simplified.

Either way, it needs to include these four key components:

1. Clear brand guidelines

2. Centralised asset management system

3. Pre and post-content production process

4. Community management guidelines

1. Clear brand guidelines

Having a clear set of brand guidelines democratises content creation.

Well-documented practices will ensure consistency and quality of both visual and written messaging. 

This type of document should include guidelines on:

• Franchise brand's vision
• Milestones for the foreseeable future
• Preferred profile picture
• Naming policy for each social media channel
• Colour palettes and graphic design instructions
• Logos
• Voice and tone of communication
• List of branded hashtags
• Examples of best practices

This way, you'll ensure that local social media content will always be on-brand, unified, and adjusted to that market.

Take the example of Coca-Cola's Italian Instagram account. You can immediately recognise the famous brand by the tone, colours, atmosphere, and main message.

But they've adjusted it to this particular market by adding Italia's traditional dish and common disagreements about which pizza is better.

2. Centralised asset management system

Another thing that can save you from headaches (and heartache) is having a solid, centralised asset management system.

A digital asset management system, such as Sendible's Content Library, stores, organises, and distributes rich media files in a central location. Rich media files can include photos, creative files, video, audio, presentations, and documents.

This type of system provides direction and guidance without limiting your local and regional social media managers to tailor and personalise content for local markets.

3. Pre and post-content creation process

Effective content governance includes transparent workflows and defined roles. But what does this mean when it comes to franchise social media marketing?

Let's break this down into two segments.

What to do before creating content?

1. Assign the responsibility of approving content to a specific person
2. Make sure each social media content creator knows the brand's guidelines
3. Define what success looks like by setting clear goals and KPIs

What to do after creating content?

Create a checklist for content owners. This is possibly the best way to make sure local content owners make sure everything's on-brand before approving content:

1. Accuracy. Are all prices, data, and information updated and relevant?
2. Brand/Voice. Is the messaging on-brand?
3. Alignment. Does the content piece align with one of the goals?

4. Community management guidelines

A community manager bridges the gap between social media and customer support, and they're tasked with creating and fostering a community.

Some of their key tasks include:

• Replying to comments on social media
• Interacting with customers internally
• Sharing resources to answer customer questions 
• Gathering target audience feedback
• Helping tailor content to audience needs
• Tracking performance
• Planning events
• Building relationships with influencers
• Managing the community during times of crises

Since they're in touch with your followers and potential customers in real-time, you must ensure they act according to your guidelines. Otherwise, you might risk an unwanted crisis.

Make sure to set a clear set of rules and editable template responses they can use to always stay on top of the brand messaging. This will allow them to maintain a creative and tailored approach to creating those unique, personal relationships with followers while not risking your brand's reputation.

Community management has become one of the essential digital marketing tactics, so make sure you learn more about it with our extensive guide to being a community manager.

How to create an effective social media strategy for franchise marketing?

Creating a unified franchise social media strategy can be challenging if you're active in multiple markets around the globe, as each local audience has its preferences when it comes to social media channels.

This is why you should allow your local social media marketing teams to experiment and determine the best social media channels to achieve marketing goals for the particular market they're in charge of.

So instead of burdening your central digital marketing team with creating a super detailed social media strategy, create an easy to implement a strategic framework that includes:

• Mission statement
• Core objectives
• Strategic objectives
• Target audience
• Customer service and crisis management
• KPIs and expectations

With the content governance system, you'll be sure everything is coordinated and implemented in the best possible way.

Just take the example of Barilla, the world's most famous pasta brand. Their USA Twitter profile proudly celebrated National Meatball Day with a graphic illustration while inviting users to check out pasta recipes that include meatballs. Not only did they engage Twitter followers and reach new ones with a holiday hashtag, but they also directed traffic to their website set up strictly for English-speaking users.

Bonus: 4 tips for franchises to scale their social media efforts and boost their social media presence

1. Decide who should control your social media platforms

Who controls social media depends upon the structure of your business, franchise locations and the homogeneity of your products and promotions. Your central brand provides the backbone to local franchise success, so you need to leverage it well.

Our subscription plans are built to help you and your team not only create content at scale but also draft, edit, approve, and distribute with your franchisees.

Our top-tier plan has a unique feature called merge tags. These custom tags and fields are ideal for franchises and multinational businesses that can quickly tailor content for each social media account they own.

2. Create guidelines for posting and responding

Once a control mechanism has been established, you must create posting guidelines for your franchise social media marketing. These range from which platforms are used and how often to what kind of imagery is acceptable and who will respond to enquiries.

Sendible can help with the customer service side, whilst our approvals workflow will ensure that your franchisees remain compliant.

3. Enrich your content strategy using RSS feeds

Subscribing to RSS feeds on relevant websites and blogs is a quick, easy and costless source of content for your franchise social media marketing. New posts from the feed you subscribe to will be delivered automatically, saving you time and effort in creating relevant content.

If you are lucky enough to have a social media management tool like Sendible, the RSS publishing can be automated too. For example, local franchises could subscribe to a corporate blog as well as local publications and businesses to further strengthen their position locally.

4. Save time and resources through planning and automation

Your local social media marketing teams can save time by just taking an hour a week to write messages in advance and assign them to the content owner for approval. Once approved, social media managers can easily schedule them across various social media platforms.