Promoting your franchise on Facebook for success
When it comes to modern-day marketing, Facebook is one of the most important channels you can use. It has nearly 45 million users in the UK and more than 2.7 billion worldwide. On average, a user will be on Facebook for about one hour and 15 minutes.
This is a huge opportunity for you whether you operate one of the many possible home-based franchises, education franchises or another UK franchise. However, there is one problem: Facebook isn’t good at giving away free promotion.
The scenario on Facebook
When you have a page following, you would expect that everyone who has ‘liked’ your page would see your content. The problem is, there is an algorithm that prevents this. Only about 5-15% of followers will see the content you publish. So, say you have 100 followers, only 5 to 15 people will actually see any content that you publish.
To get more people to see your content, you will have to increase your engagement rate. The more people who comment, like or share your content, the greater your reach will be.
And it is important to note that Facebook isn’t a great sales tool. In fact, research has shown that the average ROI of Facebook is about £8 for every £1 spent on Facebook. In comparison, email marketing has an ROI of £38 or every £1 spent.
However, there are some great ways that your franchise can make use of Facebook. Here are some tips and tricks.
Why not also read: 4 Things All Franchises Should Make Time For
1. Promote your page
The first thing you should do is to promote your page. The more users that like your page, the more people you will have that see your content organically. This will increase engagement across your content and draw more people in.
The important thing to do is to target your page promotion to only those who are suitable. For instance, you want to make sure that you aren’t promoting your page to people who aren’t in your territory. You should also target those who are interested in your niche. A great example would be someone running an automotive franchise should market to those with an interest in cars and vehicles.
This can increase the cost per click or action on your Facebook page, but these people are more relevant to your business and therefore, will be more worthwhile in the long term.
2. Promote key content
When it comes to ensuring your messages are viewed by more people, there is the possibility to promote your key content on Facebook. This is when you pay for a post that has been published on your page to be promoted on the feeds of Facebook users.
There are two options here: promote to those who already follow your page, or promote to those who don’t follow your page. The former is great because you can guarantee more interaction with people who see the advert because they should recognise your brand. However, it might not lead to long-term positive results and if you’re not publishing the right content, your franchise might not receive any benefit.
The latter, promoting to new people, can have lower engagement, but it can also help reach new audiences who might also want to follow your page. Likewise, you might get a few leads from this strategy.
3. Email marketing
One of the great advantages of Facebook is that you can use it to push other content. For instance, using a video to attract audiences to your brand can be very popular. Video often has higher engagement rates and is consumable across many different platforms.
Another option, which can have long-lasting impact on your brand, is getting people to sign up to your mailing list. This can work really well as you get people to subscribe to your mailing list and the ROI on email marketing is very effective.
4. Share
As well as sharing the content on your Facebook business page, you should be sharing your Facebook page content on your personal profile. This promotes your content to your friends and family, who may or may not follow your page. However, it will naturally expand your reach. And it is often your friends and family who will buy from you first.
Make sure that you share your Facebook page and invite those on your friend’s list to like your page too. This can lead to a quick boost to page likes and this can impact how much of your regular content is seen by customers.
You should also tell those liking your page to change the notification settings on Facebook. If more people set the notifications settings to ‘see first’, the greater the organic reach of your content.
Conclusion
For anyone running a franchise in the UK, Facebook is going to be a very important channel for marketing and sales. However, to get the most out of your activities, you have to follow some of the tips above. These will get you the highest ROI for time and money and will help you make any UK franchise a success.
