Social Media Can Be a Powerful Tool for Local Franchise Marketing

More franchisors are realizing that not only is social media a powerful tool for promoting their brand, but it can also be very effective for local franchise marketing when owners know the right way to market through these platforms. As a result of this realization, many franchise operations are making significant investments to help train and educate their owners about using social media for local franchise marketing.

Whether you’re a franchisor or the owner of a local franchise, if you’re interested in learning more about social media marketing, let’s take a look at how to get results, social media’s role in PR and how to measure the effectiveness of a social strategy:

Getting Results from Social Media

One of the most common hesitations business owners of all types have about social media is being able to generate real results. Many business owners are worried that they’re not going to generate any tangible results from the time and effort they invest into social media.

While that is a valid concern, the good news is there are proven ways to ensure that social media usage will lead to actual business results. The first step in this process is to identify the most important social networks for a specific business. While it’s useful to have a presence on all the major social sites, chances are that one or two will drive the majority of results.

Once you determine where to focus your efforts, the other most important component is to stay consistent. The most common reason that businesses fail to see the type of results they want from social media is they don’t stick with it. Although it can take a little time to start building momentum, consistently posting and engaging will lead to measurable results.

What’s the Connection Between Social Media and PR?

Local franchise owners know just how much they can gain from targeted local media coverage. What’s great about social media is it can work very well for supporting traditional PR efforts. Not only is social media a great way for a local franchise to promote any news coverage they get, but it can also be very useful for reaching out to local media contacts and building relationships that lead to coverage.

How to Measure the Effectiveness of a Social Media Strategy

Although it can be a little tricky to attribute exactly how many leads or new customers you generate through social media, there are still plenty of ways to measure the effectiveness of a social media strategy. One of the best is to look at what kind of traffic different updates drive. By using an analytics program to see what visitors do once they arrive at your website from a social media channel, you’ll be able to see what kind of content does the best job of attracting engaged visitors. This information will be very useful for guiding your future social media efforts.

If you are a franchisor or local franchise owner who’s interested in developing and executing an effective social media strategy, contact us to arrange a free consultation.

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at https://www.webstrategyplus.com/social-media-for-local-franchise-marketing/

5 Tips for Optimizing Your Facebook Page for Product Sales

As people continue to spend more of their time online directly on Facebook, it makes sense to provide a variety of ways for your target customers to interact with your business on this platform. The specific interaction we want to focus on in this post is selling products directly through your Facebook page. Whether you’re already getting some sales but want more or are new to the idea of this type of selling, we’ve got five actionable tips to ensure your page is optimized:

1. Be Sure You Have the Right Page Type and Category

Facebook provides a variety of page templates for different types of businesses. Their current options are services, shopping, business, politicians, venues, nonprofits and restaurants & cafes. Choosing the category that best matches your business will give you a template that Facebook has optimized based on the incredible amount of data the platform collects. While the services and shopping templates already include a shop section, you can add this section to any template by clicking Edit Page, scrolling down and then clicking the Add a Tab button.

2. Optimize Your Call to Action Button

The call to action button you use will directly affect how potential customers interact with your Facebook page. You can choose from a wide variety of CTA buttons. As a rule of thumb, if the analytics data from your website shows that many customers buy after just one or two visits, it makes sense to use the Shop Now button. But if you have a higher-priced product that tends to require some consultative selling, Learn More or Get in Touch are the two best options for getting people into your sales pipeline.

3. Fill Out Your Shop

Just as an empty website isn’t going to do much for your bottom line, you need to have your Facebook shop fully filled out for people to take notice. You’ll want to do this by taking the time to add multiple photos for each of your products, along with having a great description. The other decision you need to make is whether you want customers to check out on your website or Facebook. While many businesses default to the former, it’s worth at least running a test to see if letting customers check out directly on Facebook has a positive impact on your conversion rate.

4. Regularly Tag Your Products

One of the really cool things about selling through your Facebook page is you can tag photos with the product they feature. Since this is a great way to drive people to your store, be sure to make tagging a standard part of your workflow.

5. Let Customers Leave Reviews

Social proof is one of the most important elements for establishing the level of trust that someone needs to make a purchase from you. Letting customers leave reviews directly on your Facebook page is an easy and effective way to get this social proof. If you don’t currently have many reviews, you can build them up by emailing some of your top customers and asking them to leave a review directly on Facebook.

If you want expert help implementing these tips or would like additional guidance with your Facebook efforts, be sure to take a look at our social media marketing services.

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at https://www.webstrategyplus.com/5-tips-optimizing-facebook-page-product-sales/