How To Franchise Your Restaurant? Part 2

Charu Sharma • Jul 15, 2022

As of June 2021, Subway had 37,540 locations in more than 100 countries and territories.

When asked in an interview with the QSR magazine about Subway’s international success with respect to their franchise numbers, their director of development said- “The secrets to our success are probably not secrets. I think they’re really obvious and it has to do with the fact that people want something that tastes good, that’s a good value, and is something that is hopefully good.”



But, what is the real deal here? One of the most important things here is the right marketing strategy. 

Does your franchise have what it takes to become the next Subway?



Well you are in great luck today because we are here with the second part of our Franchise blog. We are going to take you through the basics and the most important aspects of franchise marketing- what it is, types and how you can market your franchise effectively.



Types Of Franchise Marketing



Before you even consider marketing your restaurant franchise, you must first understand what franchise marketing is and the numerous sorts of it. 

Franchise marketing is basically all those activities that you do to grow as a brand. Franchise marketing might involve pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, SEO, trade exhibitions, content marketing, commercials, and other activities that a franchise engages in to expand.


Franchise marketing can be broadly divided into 2 categories,
Operational marketing and Franchise development marketing. Operational franchise marketing is used by both franchisors and franchisees. It entails attracting new clients, keeping them engaged so that they become loyal patrons, and raising brand awareness. Franchise development, on the other hand, refers to all of the activities that you, as a franchisor, engage in in order to sell more franchise locations. If you're a franchisee, you don't have to worry about the latter, and we've concentrated on the former in this post.



Now that the types are sorted, let's quickly hop on to the marketing strategies required to marketing your restaurant franchise.



How Do You Market Your Franchise Restaurant?



Marketing your restaurant franchise might seem like a lot of work, but trust us, with careful planning and implementation, it’s not that hard. Here, we'll walk you through some best practices for a smooth and effective approach.



The first stage in planning any marketing strategy, let alone franchise marketing, is to conduct thorough research on your customers, their interests, geography, demographics, and other factors, as well as to define the personas you will be targeting. Following that, you'll need to choose the channels through which you'll put your message out.



Franchise Marketing Channels



Website



77% of the diners visit a restaurant’s website before placing an order. 88% of online website visitors are less likely to return to a website after a poor experience [Gomez], losing you a wealth of potential customers. Numbers speak for themselves, hence you need to consider creating a quality website, that is fast, easy to navigate through, and the most important thing, it should be mobile friendly.

Also have a properly optimized and easy to understand menu, with proper descriptions for your customers to easily place orders. Make sure that you have proper contact information and popping CTAs (order online) for you to not lose a single customer to the fact that they didn’t know where to place an order on your website!



Social Media Marketing



One of the most effective ways to raise awareness has been through social media. People spend an average of 1.4 hours every day on social media sites, sharing their thoughts and opinions and conversing with others.



This is the time to make a good first impression and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. The goal of the plan is to present your brand to customers by producing material that catches their attention. The benefit of incorporating social media into your marketing strategy is that it allows you to reach a much larger audience without requiring a significant marketing spend.



Optimizing the customer experience at each of these touchpoints is critical to converting a cold lead into a profit-generating customer. Developing a social media funnel attitude may assist you in fine-tuning your approach, increasing audience engagement, and, most crucially, increasing conversions at each stage of the buyer's journey.



Online Reputation Management



Restaurant franchises have long relied on word of mouth to reach out to their consumers and establish their brand, in addition to traditional marketing techniques and paid advertising. While the internet's expansion provided chances to promote your company to a larger audience, it also brought a number of obstacles. 


Maintaining an online presence isn't enough; you need to monitor and update your listings on a regular basis. Customers are attracted to a restaurant based on online ratings and reviews. A negative review is no longer limited to a disgruntled customer's personal circle of friends; instead, it can reach millions of potential customers. As a result, managing your restaurant's online reputation is critical.



SEO



According to research based on more than 80 million keywords and billions of results, 28.5 percent of searchers click on the first Google result, 15.7 percent on the second, 11% on the third, and 24.8 percent on the fourth to tenth. Many people rely on Google to discover the appropriate answers to their questions, with little over 3.5 billion searches per day. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play in your franchise marketing plan. The difference between a continuous flow of leads and no visitors can be determined by optimizing and ranking for the right keyword.



Local Marketing



Local restaurant marketing is more than just handing out flyers. Contributing to causes that are important to your customers and match your company's beliefs is, in fact, the best approach to generate goodwill with your customers. Collaborating with local companies can provide your restaurant with a number of advantages, including increased brand recognition and revenue.

In fact, most well-known restaurants, such as Chipotle and Pizza Hut, have regular fundraisers with public schools, sports organizations, libraries, and youth community groups.


Working with local groups such as animal shelters and non-profits, you can organize charity events, fundraisers, and Spirit Nights for your franchise businesses. The collaborating organization receives a percentage of the traceable sales revenues.



Email Marketing



  1. According to Marketing Sherpa, 72 percent of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses via email.
  2. Every day, at least 91 percent of consumers check their email.

Sending emails to promote your business is known as email marketing. Restaurant Email marketing has been around for a long time and is still being used by businesses to send out brand updates, promotions, coupons, and to stay in touch with new and existing customers.


Emails are an excellent way to communicate with your consumers and stay in touch with them on a regular basis. In fact, there are a plethora of inventive methods to use emails to communicate the proper marketing message to your restaurant's patrons.



Birthday Clubs And Loyalty Programs



Restaurants had been successfully using punch cards to create a regular client base long before the switch to mobile platforms. The entire landscape of loyalty programs is undergoing a revolution as a result of the introduction of simple mobile platforms. 

With nearly 30% of restaurants offering a customer loyalty program and 69 percent of consumers reporting that where they may earn rewards influences their restaurant decision, it's clear that a loyalty program is a great way to market your franchise restaurant.

Birthday clubs can be a fun way to interact with your clients.

Customers who had not planned to visit your restaurant may decide to do so after hearing about the deal.



Wrap Up



Now that you know how to promote a franchise, you can pick and choose which strategies to employ and get to work.

We can be of great assistance to you if you're wanting to market your franchise restaurant. Know more and request a demonstration of our marketing platform today!


By Suchitra mKonnekt 04 Dec, 2023
In the fast-paced world of restaurant marketing, email campaigns remain a powerful tool for engaging customers and driving conversions. However, success lies in the strategy.
By Suchitra mKonnekt 31 Oct, 2023
In the competitive world of the restaurant industry, marketing plays a pivotal role in attracting customers and staying ahead of the competition. However, not every restaurant has a substantial marketing budget to work with.
By Suchitra mKonnekt 20 Sep, 2023
In the competitive world of restaurants, boosting profits while maintaining affordability is a constant challenge. Fortunately, there are creative menu hacks that savvy restaurateurs use to increase revenue without resorting to price hikes.
By Suchitra mKonnekt 30 Aug, 2023
In today's digital age, visuals play a pivotal role in attracting customers. This has led to food photography becoming an essential skill for restaurateurs.
By Suchitra mKonnekt 16 Aug, 2023
Have you ever imagined a world without the internet? We live in an entirely digital world where online marketing channels are the optimal sources of increasing business growth.
By Suchitra mKonnekt 09 Jun, 2023
In today's digital age, the rise of food bloggers has transformed the way we discover and experience restaurants. Their unique ability to captivate audiences with tantalizing food imagery and engaging content presents a remarkable opportunity for small to large restaurant owners in Dallas, Texas & all over the world.
By Suchitra mKonnekt 10 May, 2023
Have you heard about these 10 awesome steps that can totally crush it for your restaurant marketing plan? It's true, by following these steps you can easily dominate the competition and attract more customers to your eatery. So why not give it a shot and see the results for yourself? And every restaurant, regardless of size, can benefit from a given restaurant marketing plan. Let's break this down step-by-step to make sure we don't miss a beat. We definitely don't want to risk losing out on the chance to win big with our restaurant marketing plan! So, let's take it one step at a time and make sure we cover all our bases.
By Charu Sharma 18 Jan, 2023
What is Social Media ROI? With social media getting used as a great device in enterprises to grow, it's been more and more vital to track the effects of your social media efforts. The most pressing question now is how to comprehend the consequences of your social media strategy. Are you on the right track when it comes to your content strategy? To understand this you would want to see what is called as “Return on investment”, or ROI.It is nothing more than the returns a company would expect from the time, resources, and minds invested in the company's entire social media strategy. In terms of math, it boils down to: Revenue-Costs/Costs*100. Now imagine you were running a grocery store and you purchased the groceries for $100 and sold them for $150, then you'd get: 150-100/100*100= 50% by plugging these numbers into the formula. Isn't it easy enough? But, in terms of social media marketing, how do you apply this concept? The return on investment (ROI) on your social media campaign is the amount of money you've made.But not all social media efforts are directly attributable to monetary benefits. As a result, all marketers must be able to extract and apply relevant data, as and when required. Why is it important to measure social media ROI? It's crazy how many marketers have no idea what kind of ROI they're getting from which channel or how their social media practices are impacting their enterprise. Since every step, every effort you put into your business has repercussions, this underestimation of social media can cause havoc for your business. As a result, it's past time for you to start treating your social media sites with the respect they deserve. If you've figured out which social media activities are yielding the best results, you can start planning strategies in that direction. For example, you will discover that posting stories on Instagram or running competitions on Facebook generates more momentum on specific days, resulting in increased monetary benefits to your company; as a result, you'll know what you need to do in the future. That’s the power of studying ROI. How to measure social media ROI? Step-1 Identify your goals: Always determine the goals you want to achieve from your activities before calculating returns or even thinking about analyzing the consequences of your social media efforts. Do you want to increase your following? Do you want more people to sign up for your newsletter? Do you want to increase your sales? Following that, you should consider calculating the ROI. Step-2 Understanding marketing funnel: After you've figured out your marketing objectives, you should move on to understanding your marketing funnel. Understanding how social media metrics connect to the customer journey is a crucial first step. Engagement with the consumer, which translates to reach in social media terms, is the first step in the customer journey, as it is in the early phases. Similarly, while learning about your audience in the middle stage, it translates to CPC, or cost per click , and CTR, or click through rate . Finally, at the last stage, encouraging your audience to purchase equates to conversions like sales, subscriptions, downloads, etc. Step-3: Calculate! Now that you have targeted your KPIs and understood what to calculate, now comes the tricky part, calculating them. In order to determine your ROI, you'll need the correct tools. Many built-in technologies, such as Facebook insights, Instagram insights, and LinkedIn insights, provide granular information on how people interact with your material. With these, you can keep track of all of your engagement. You can observe when your audience is active, where they are from, what demographics they have, so on and so forth. You can check how your audience reacted to your ad using Facebook Ads Manager. Another significant tool is Google Analytics. To find out how much traffic and conversions your social media marketing efforts are producing, add Google Analytics UTM parameters to the URL of your social media ads. Why is measuring social media marketing ROI difficult? Due to a variety of factors, social media managers and executives are finding it increasingly challenging to measure social media marketing ROI. Executives are unsure about what to measure. Many people believe that if their content gets a lot of likes and shares, their strategy is good enough; however, this is not always the case. We need to see if our efforts are yielding any quantitative results. Is your product being purchased? Is the quality of your online orders improving? Is your ebook gaining popularity? Always measure all the relevant KPIs and do analysis accordingly. Wrap up: Social media marketing ROI is a parameter that should never be overlooked, if you are putting in genuine efforts in it, and want good results out of it, keep measuring and keep analyzing!
By Charu Sharma 11 Jan, 2023
The year 2022 has been nothing less than a rollercoaster ride! We've been through a lo of things, experimented, struggled and got through them all. Is safe to say that we at least tried to go through all of these, whether it was inflation, supply chain challenges, or labor shortages , and guess what was constant in all of them that helped us get through? Guess what was common in all that helped us get through? It's tech! Technology has always been by our side for us to improve and get through the difficult times that we faced. And let's face it, all these issues are not going away anytime soon, hence it is important, not only for the restauranteurs, but people in every industry to be familiar with the tech trends before planning out their strategies for the next year. Here, we have talked about the top 5 tech trends to watch out for in 2023. #1 Online Ordering- Not only because of the pandemic, which forced numerous restaurants to discontinue dine-in service, but also because of the convenience of online ordering, it is expected that online ordering and delivery will grow even more. People nowadays want their favorite foods delivered right to their door. To begin, a decent website and app provide a firm foundation to build. Allowing customers to pay for online purchases directly on your website would simplify the process even more. Customers will love the convenience of ordering and paying for food from their computer or mobile device. According to a report by Statista , the revenue of online food delivery is estimated to expand at a 13.68% annual rate (CAGR 2022-2027), resulting in a market volume of US$1.45 trillion by 2027. Restauranteurs should focus on taking help from in-house online ordering platforms, such as Foodkonnekt, which minimize the high margins charged by the third party delivery platforms and also enhance the customer experience. #2 Ghost/Virtual Kitchens- According to current data, meal delivery orders increased by more than 150 percent from 2019 to 2020, and UBS predicts the food delivery company to rise more than tenfold in ten years, from $35 billion to $365 billion. More restaurant operators and food entrepreneurs are turning to cloud kitchens as a feasible business solution as the demand for meal delivery develops. Restaurants rent space in virtual or "ghost kitchens," which are centrally located, licensed commercial food production facilities, to create menu items that are best for delivery. They are essentially kitchens without a dining area; food is only prepared for delivery. Under one roof, a single restaurant may manage multiple brands or virtual eateries, or the kitchen may serve as an incubator for other suppliers. As the demand for meal delivery grows every day, many restaurateurs have turned it into full-fledged businesses, and this trend appears to be continuing into the next year. The market for ghost kitchens is anticipated to reach $1.05 billion in value by 2023. #3- Loyalty programs- The next trend that we'd like to discuss is the technology that goes into establishing and implementing loyalty programs. We are all aware that the oncoming recession will make life more difficult in the following year. Consumers are spending less and less on products they don't necessarily use in their daily lives as costs rise. As a result, as a restaurant owner, you must choose how to optimize revenues despite the possibility of a recession. And here is when a loyalty program comes into play. In monetary terms, it is a well-known fact, and all marketers emphasize it, that new clients are more difficult to target than regulars. The cost of acquiring new consumers is significantly more than the cost of retaining existing customers. As a result, now is the ideal time to target your loyal customers. And that can be easily done with a proper loyalty program in place. Freekwent is a digital loyalty program that we at mKonnekt operate for our clients across several locations. It is an excellent approach to treat your regulars to fresh deals and discounts that you may choose to run. In these difficult times, it will help you retain those extra dollars. #4- Automated Inventory Software Management System- The marketplace is getting more competitive. Those who identify present demands and react accordingly will thrive in the long run. The world is becoming more frantic and digitally dependent. Customers want better efficiency, prompt service, and high-quality products. An automated inventory system is a modern solution to the myriad challenges associated with human inventory systems. Because inventory systems are automated, they are more efficient and straightforward to administer, allowing management to manage activities more effectively and at a faster pace. It helps restaurants manage their ingredient purchase orders, stock levels, menu, and recipes expenses. The best inventory management software systems for restaurants integrate with or are built into point-of-sale (POS) systems, minimizing administrative time. These services cost between $99 and $129 per month. Some tools, on the other hand, are free and have limited functionality. Furthermore, to enhance restaurant operations, says Dirk Izzo, President and General Manager of NCR Hospitality, they are using data for more accurate forecasts. #5- Restaurant Marketing Automation and Smart Tech- Customers and restaurant businesses are embracing AI, from robots that flip hamburgers and make salads to those that handle order taking. McDonald's acquired AI company Dynamic Yield in 2019 with the goal of enhancing the customer experience at drive-thrus with the help of the business' automated personalization offering. The menu choices are shown according to the time of day, the weather, the volume of customers dining now, and what's trending on the website. Additionally, it makes meal suggestions based on the decisions each customer makes. The need for third-party delivery services increased as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced individuals to remain at home. Although companies like UberEATS and DoorDash have adapted to the challenge, restaurants still have a chance to enhance delivery even further. So this is the food part of AI. There is a much more pressing need, and we are already seeing the increasing likeability on the marketing front of the restaurant industry as well. Everything is now digital. And there are numerous ways for customers to interact with a business. Everything from social media to chatbots to websites. And all of these contacts are a direct source of what we refer to as "first party customer data." This data is a gold mine, if you ask us. An astute marketer can do so much with this information. And this is where technology and analytics come into play, which will be a clear and prominent trend in the coming year. For example, in order to conduct a successful email campaign, order data can be segmented so that targeted messages can be sent to consumers who haven't ordered in a specified length of time, say three months, and another section can be developed for people who are regulars. We have a team of incredibly smart marketers here at mKonnekt ; contact us if you want to see the mKonnekt magic! Wrap up- Those who are in tune with changing conditions are the clear winners in any industry. Here, we addressed the biggest restaurant innovations that will come to power in the following year, so get ready!
By Charu Sharma 29 Nov, 2022
Guess what any social media manager or content creator would say if you asked them today, for the key to growing your Instagram? You guessed it right! Instagram Reels. Creating and posting reels on Instagram is the secret sauce to increase your reach and engagement massively. If your social media and content strategy doesn't have reels in it, you are missing something very important. For one of our pizza franchise clients, we at mKonnekt started making and posting reels four times per week, and one of the restaurants witnessed an of increase of 1100% in IG reach and 1300% increase in engagement. Therefore, we will wish to preach what we do! Now, many people who want to boost their Instagram handle as novices find it quite challenging. Small business owners, personal brands, and everyone else may have difficulty developing an Instagram content strategy. Because, trust us, growing Instagram is no stroll in the park. We are here to save the day. We have come up with what you might refer to as a comprehensive guide or solutions to the top and most often asked questions about Instagram reels. Without further ado, let's go! Table Of Contents Q.1 What are Instagram reels? Q.2 How to make and post an Instagram reel? Q.3 What are some tips to make my reel viral? Q.4 What is the best time to post an Instagram reel? Q.5 How to track the top most important metrics? What Are Instagram Reels? Reels are brief, video-style pieces of content that may be produced to engage with your audience, grab their attention while educating them about your company story, and also be used to draw in potential customers. You can leverage reels to make entertaining videos to share on Instagram with your 15-second multi-clip films can be recorded and edited using new artistic tools, audio, and effects. Reels can be shared on Feed with your followers, and if your account is public, a new section under Explore will allow users from all around Instagram to access them. This wonderful video feature is accessible in the US and 50 other nations. On August 5, 2020, Instagram unveiled this fantastic feature. You can read the official announcement here . Instagram Reels have been a fantastic tool for brands and companies to exercise their creative muscles and provide a visual experience beyond a grid post ever since they were first introduced. How To Make And Post An Instagram Reel? Step 1- Open your IG profile’s homepage or what we also call as feed, and navigate to the top right hand corner. You will find a “plus” icon, beside the messages/DMs’ button. Another option is to click on the “Reels” icon, situated in the middle of the five buttons at the very end of the page. Both options will take you to the same interface. 
More Posts
Share by: