One of the challenges of marketing within a franchise or multi-location business is that sometimes you can’t reach consumers effectively through one uniform marketing campaign, but rather have to alter based on location of business. This blog post discusses a key trend within the franchise social media marketing space, and how it deals with the challenge of reaching all of its consumers effectively.
Social media has produced a newfound intimacy between the business and the consumer, and evidence of this is how consumers are voicing their complaints about a business’s product or service. Before the rise of social media we saw customers voicing their complaints by sending an email, using the phone, or in person. Nowadays, consumers are feeling that the most effective medium to reach the business is through its social media profile. Sproutsocial.com reports that 47% of people would use social media as their first choice to voice their complaints towards a franchise. This creates a very important problem. Corporations with hundreds or even thousands of locations are receiving complaints via their company wide social media account. This leaves them fielding issues that they have no connection too. Because of that, they often can not properly handle the issue, and a long time customer could be lost.
The solution to this problem is simple. Create individual accounts for every franchise. This allows both the franchise to interact directly with their customer base on a local level, as well as the customers being able to interact with the particular location they are attempting to reach. This not only leads to complaints being properly addressed, but the maintaining of sales that otherwise would have been lost.
