Community marketing is one thing you want to get right for your franchisees. While you may have a marketing team, branding agency, or vendor updating social media, you can never outsource community marketing completely.
There is no shortage of vendors selling a supposed marketing shortcut. The reality is that marketing is a step-by-step process where you learn, adjust, and build momentum over time.
For a more realistic look at how to build community marketing into franchisees’ day-to-day processes, consider these principles.
Build Meaningful Connections
“Within a three- to five-mile radius of every store or restaurant there are dozens of other businesses, hundreds of homes, and thousands of potential new customers,” said Jim Sullivan in Multi Unit Leadership. “Connect with community ‘influentials.’ One American in every ten tells the other nine where to eat, what to buy, and how to vote.”
Connecting with the movers and shakers of your community — whether they work in local government, businesses, schools, or community organizations — can make a meaningful difference. You don’t always have to go straight to the top. Think about the people who regularly talk with others: hairdressers, hotel bartenders, receptionists, concierges, religious leaders, and civic leaders.
Sometimes, the best opportunities are right in front of you. Every week, dozens of “invisible” customers may walk through your doors: delivery drivers, vendors, sales reps, or event promoters. They have friends, families, and networks of their own.
Your own team can also amplify local reach. If each employee has a personal social network and recommends the business to even a small number of people, the cumulative effect can be substantial.
Always Be Marketing
Marketing should be part of everyone’s day-to-day work, whether they are servers, managers, trainers, or hosts.
Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing, said: “Marketing is not an event, but a process. It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it. But you never stop it completely.”
Event-based promotions still have a place, but they should sit inside a consistent, ongoing local marketing rhythm.
Training Solidifies Marketing
According to Sullivan, “The more that you invest in training, the less that you spend on marketing.”
If your team provides excellent service, customers are more likely to return and leave positive reviews. Those reviews often carry more credibility than anything the marketing team can create.
Training should also reinforce the promises made in marketing campaigns. The old advertising principle still applies: great marketing can expose a weak customer experience faster than anything else. In a social-media environment, a gap between promise and delivery can quickly become a public brand problem.
Manage Moments of Truth
Jan Carlzon, in Moments of Truth, described marketing as any moment when a customer comes into contact with a company’s brand, people, or services and forms an impression of the quality provided.
Take a step back and ask what marketing really is. Increasingly, it is cleanliness, service, teamwork, and every individual touchpoint. During a field audit, view the location from the customer’s perspective and consider the impression each detail creates.
Marketing is a core part of a successful team’s DNA. It should never be treated as someone else’s job.
The legacy community-marketing graphic was hosted on an external HubSpot asset rather than in staging Media, so that fragile image dependency has been removed while the article’s underlying example remains intact.
