Consumers desire a sense of community and an emphasis on local connection. Succeeding in a new market means franchisees must take a creative approach to captivate the right audience and stay above the local competition. That’s why we’ve broken down five powerful types of localized social content for franchisees.

Overview:

1. Local Promotions or Events

2. Highlight Local Team Members

3. Local Success Stories

4. Stand Out Content

5. Authentic Imagery

1. Local promotions or events

There’s immense value in leveraging local events or promotions to generate business and drive social media engagement. Especially when a franchise first enters a new market. Take advantage of opportunities to host events at the franchise location and get creative with it!

Create and schedule posts promoting the event weeks or days leading up to the event. Create posts and Stories during and after the event. And use messaging that targets local communities who would be willing and able to join. This can be an extremely effective approach to driving people to your location and, if executed properly, can also boost social media engagement.

When creating posts about the promotion or event, encourage users to engage with the post in the form of a share, Like, or comment. Leverage loyal customers, friends, and family to share your content and spread the word to make the promotion or event as effective as possible.  

2. Highlight local team members

Create content posts that highlight the people behind your brand. Make your franchise brand as personable, credible, and approachable as possible by showcasing the people who interact with your consumers daily. This doesn’t necessarily need to be limited to only images of the business’s employees, but can also include:

• New hires
• Customer reviews highlighting an employee
• Team accomplishments
• Team updates
• New franchisee owners (for corporate’s brand page)

For example, Floor Coverings International’s social content uses on-brand graphics that leverage positive client reviews of local employees and services. 

3. Local success stories

Happy customers attract new customers, so showcase those success stories! Highlighting customer success stories are undeniably beneficial, and this type of content can hold even more value for franchises than one might expect.

One of the greatest challenges of expanding a franchise to a new location is learning how to effectively attract and gain the trust of the new local community. By creating content around local success stories, franchisees open up the opportunity to build credibility and relationships with their local customer base. What makes your business stand out from the local competition?

Pestmaster Services franchisees use client testimonial graphics to highlight the success of their services with local consumers. Check out the Pestmaster Services social media marketing case study for more information on their social media strategy! 

5. Authentic imagery

Using authentic imagery in your social media content is an effective way to connect with your local audience. Your customers want to know what to expect from your business, understand the brand, and build trust around it. What better way to help customers establish a connection with the location than by showing off your franchise location, the people behind it, and what it has to offer? Don’t get me wrong – Stock photos have a clean, professional look and can be quite effective as well. There’s no need to abandon stock images entirely. Just implement a healthy balance of both authentic and stock imagery when creating social media content to successfully demonstrate what your brand is all about.

Check out what SocialMadeSimple’s team has to say about creating the social content for franchises – the favorite part of the job!

Video Transcript

Ryan: What would you say are some of your favorite things about the job?

Trevor: Honestly, I love just having the creativity to make content. It’s really cool to be able to make something that someone actually enjoys. Especially because with a lot of the concierge accounts that we have now, we’re creating graphics for them. It’s been really fun to get into the graphics, working on their content, and if they’re happy with it, it’s even better! It’s truly an awesome feeling when a client is happy with a piece of content that you’ve worked hard on. I think that’s my favorite part of the job!

Ryan: Yeah! Which programs are you guys working out of right now, in terms of content creation?

Trevor: Usually we do Canva. That’s the big customization for graphics and it’s super easy so it’s been really helpful. We do that for a lot of our social media too so it’s great!

Ryan: Yeah, I think it’s crazy how we’ve really tried to make almost a triple threat effort with our social media going forward. With doing these shows, adding content through the platform, doing a lot more creativity with our content as a whole, etc. So it’s really been great to see in that respect.