franchise marketing Archives

Is your franchise live-streaming? 12 tips to look professional

During the COVID-19 pandemic, live streaming and video chat became not just convenient but critical mediums of communication and content delivery. And that continues today. Is your franchise live-streaming?

If not, it’s not too late to get started!

But before you dive headfirst into live-streaming for your franchise, the following are 12 tips to make your stream as professional and engaging as possible.

Choose your live-stream platform carefully

You have more options today than ever before to broadcast live. The key is to decide on the target audience of your live stream.

Are you trying to reach as broad of an audience as possible? Consider Facebook or YouTube. Is the content you’re sharing exclusive to paying customers? There are options to make a Facebook Live more exclusive (if it’s broadcasting within a closed Facebook group) or to limit permissions on a YouTube video. You might also consider a Zoom account, for example, for access and password control as well.

Facebook Live has the ability to reach a broad audience, while also allowing for a more informal video feel.

You’ll also want to keep music copyright permissions in mind if music could be part of your live stream in any way. Copyrighted music can get flagged on platforms, like Facebook. Copyright, in general, is a huge consideration to be aware of.

The key is to evaluate the features of each streaming platform you’re considering and decide on one first. It might be tempting to jump on multiple platforms to reach more people but commit to mastering one live-streaming platform first before expanding. That will allow your franchise to really hone in on what works for your audience without getting scattered or overwhelmed.

Live-stream formatting matters

You have the option of filming horizontally or vertically when going live. Horizontal camera angles allow for more of your surroundings to be in the frame, as well as give space for interviews. Vertical camera angles are more up-close and personal for the audience.

There is a time and place for either. But to look as professional as possible for your franchise, it’s best to stay consistent once you do decide on either angle. You also can set out consistent guidelines to determine if/when you would shift camera angles. This is helpful if you’re involving more members of your franchise team in live streaming.

Promotion is critical

Whether you’re informing your paying customers of exclusive content or trying to reach as many potential customers as possible, you have to promote your live stream.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?

The same idea applies here.

There is a lot of noise online. Everyone is trying to communicate about everything you can think of and get their message heard (including your franchise competitors). Not only do you have to get your message out there, but you have to cut through that noise to reach your target audience.

To cut through, ask yourself who would care and why would they care. Then, get specific about those answers in your promotion. Engaging visuals are more critical than usual. How can you catch someone’s eye? Then, don’t be afraid to over-communicate, over-post and overshare.

Granted, you’re not trying to blow up anyone’s inbox with daily promotional emails, for example. But you do want to spread your message across platforms and channels at a healthy pace starting about two weeks beforehand, perhaps even with a countdown to the day of your live stream. Everyone is dealing with a lot of digital communication, so the basic organic reach of any one post could easily be lost or forgotten. Be specific about why people should tune in, and be compelling.

Most-expensive equipment not mandatory

Don’t get us wrong. You will still want some basic live-streaming equipment, depending on the premise of the live-stream itself.

But keep it simple. Usually, a computer (or even a phone), a tripod, good lighting and a mic will do. And while we don’t believe you need the most expensive of any of those items, it is recommended to have backups. A backup tripod. A backup mic. Backup cords. Backup batteries.

Depending on the nature of your setup, you can create and use a checklist to make sure everything is ready by the time you go live as a franchise.

The last thing you want is to realize you should have silenced your cell phone (the simplest of things) before going live. But a cord not plugged into the right port for audio could be a worse oversight.

The stronger the WiFi, the better

Your broadband connection matters almost more than any amount of rehearsal for your live stream. The moment your video cuts out or freezes, you will lose viewers.

You can test a number of different ways depending on the platform you’re using. For instance, you can stream on Facebook Live privately on your profile. Then, watch the playback. You can give a colleague or friend access to your Zoom meeting for a quick test as well.

If the broadband connection is struggling, look at any background applications running on it, such as Google Drive (or even Netflix streaming on a different device).

This is also an opportunity to test any interactive features you’re considering, such as any graphics or online polls during the broadcast. If something doesn’t work, let it go.

High traffic times could also make a strong connection trickier. You can check your broadband speed at different times of day with speedtest.net to get a sense of when might be the best time to broadcast for your franchise in your area.

Focus while live-streaming

The idea of broadcasting anything live can cause plenty of anxiety, especially if you’re new to it. Set yourself up for success by limiting any distractions (like cell phones) and jotting down a few notes of what you want to cover in your franchise live stream.

A loose rehearsal is fine. But try not to over-rehearse or script out your entire stream. It will come off as less authentic to your audience and potentially robotic or even boring. Practice to the point of being comfortable at most.

Be aware of any possible background noises or any risk of shaky camera experiences as well.

And your lighting does matter. At the very least, do whatever you can to avoid being backlit. But a standing spotlight or even natural sunlight can make all the difference. If outside, try to avoid harsh sunlight. You’ll end up in the same bad-lighting distraction scenario.

Keep in mind the patterns on your clothing. Solid colors are best. Stripes, plaid or anything else that’s busy can distract viewers as well. An overall professional appearance that matches your franchise brand and content is ideal. If your franchise’s logo can be seen in the background, even better!

It may sound cheesy, but good posture matters. Your smile matters. Exuding confidence matters. Think about your likeability and how you appear on camera.

You can monitor how your live stream is going with an additional monitor or device. This is very helpful so that you can have a sense of what your viewers are seeing. Just be sure to keep your eyes on the camera, not the monitor.

Remember, keeping your live broadcast simple and focused will help it appear more professional for your franchise. Less is more in most instances.

Be responsive during your live stream

Live video is like a microcosm of what social media is all about. It enables you to interact with your audience.

Whether it’s as simple as greeting individuals as you see them join your stream or answering viewer questions during your broadcast or any other way, you want to engage with your audience naturally as much as makes sense.

Live streams differ from pre-recorded video in this way by enabling you to build relationships with your viewers. This is imperative for not just the success of your live stream but also your franchise.

Viewers can join at any time

During a live stream, viewers can come and go as they please. The expectation that your entire audience will watch from beginning to end is optimistic but not realistic.

You’ll want to regularly recap, re-introduce yourself and update what’s going on during the broadcast for any new viewers just joining. You can keep it simple with: “Hi! if you’re just joining us, welcome! We’re currently talking about [topic], and we’ve just covered [previous topic].”

Consider a guest for your live stream

Live streaming for your franchise can be a lot more fun with two or more people. The art of the conversation is that much more engaging than watching one person only speak.

If you’re interviewing a guest, it’s a great opportunity for true cross-promotion on both your and your guest’s channels and platforms.

Be sure to give your guest plenty of time and space to share their expertise, perspective and experience. Hold back from jumping in or cutting them off if you can.

Your live-stream title matters

Just like a book title, the title of your live-stream video can either engage or miss the opportunity to engage your target audience.

YouTube is where SEO (search engine optimization) is critical to reach more people. Everything from your title to your video tags, video description and video thumbnail can make or break your organic reach there.

YouTube video — On YouTube, your video has the potential to reach a broad audience with an SEO-optimized title, description and tags.

Measure your results

Success often depends on your goals. But even if your first few franchise live streams were mostly testing the waters, check in on your reach and engagement, especially on Facebook or YouTube.

Take note of what appears to be working and what doesn’t appear to be working. Could it be the amount of promotion (or lack thereof)? Timing of the stream? The content itself?

Every insight can help you improve your franchise live-streaming over time.

It’s not over when the live stream ends

Archiving your live stream for on-demand access afterward makes for great content that your audience can access anytime.

You can clean up the recorded file, of course, by trimming the beginning and end if necessary.

You also can take portions of any broadcast and repurpose those snippets for use on other platforms.

In addition, a transcript can be created after the fact for use in a blog, or the audio can be used in a podcast. The possibilities are endless.

In conclusion

In the end, the key to professional-looking franchise live streams is to plan, test, engage and measure. Remember that this is one of the best ways to reach your target audience, but that perfection is not required for success.

You can find more helpful insight on live-streaming from YouTube as well. And check out what we suggest is the best video platform for marketers.

While you’re exploring how to make your franchise live-streaming better, consider your digital marketing process. Is it everything it should be to serve you as a franchise? DailyStory provides custom-tailored digital marketing for hundreds or thousands of brand locations, in one central place. Learn more about how we serve franchises like you, and request a free demo.

8 steps for finding your franchise voice

You may hear it often these days. Your franchise voice is everything online.

It helps people connect with your brand, engage with you and (hopefully) come to trust you.

As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

But your franchise voice is nothing more than the personality of your brand as it pertains to your overall franchise, and while we largely view this as an online requirement, it transcends to any other medium (print and broadcast included) where your franchise may express itself. Check out our nine tips to help build a new brand from scratch.

The following are eight tips on how to find your franchise voice so that you can be consistent and engaging across all marketing channels.

Start with your franchise’s mission statement

The purpose of your franchise should drive the type of tone and voice you create. In other words, your personality should reflect what you care about.

For instance, self-esteem is a big part of Dove’s mission statement, making its voice empowering and uplifting to connect with its customers and potential customers. Themes of self-empowerment and body positivity can be seen in a lot of Dove’s messaging, but Dove also delivers it in a soothing, inspirational and friendly tone.

Review your current messaging

If you’re not starting from scratch and already have franchise content created, it’s a good idea to perform an audit. You’ll want to look over your website, any blog posts, social media posts, videos, etc.

Is there consistency between the tone and messaging? Or, is it a bit all over the place? Take note of the best-performing pieces because they could be a signal of what franchise content is already connecting with your audience.

Deep dive into your audience

Begin with the tools already available to you, such as Google Analytics (or any other website performance tool), social media analytics from the platforms you’re using and any customer database information you already have in-house.

How old are they? Mostly one gender or evenly split? Where do they live? Education? Occupations? How did they hear of your franchise? And whatever other data you have can be helpful.

While not all of those questions might be answerable, you’ll want to gather as much as you can to understand who you are reaching. Once you do, you should compare this to who you want to reach, your target audience. This will help you decide whether what you’re currently doing is on track with what you should be doing in regard to your franchise’s brand voice.

If you’re looking to reach more middle-aged women, this voice looks a lot different than if you want to reach more college-aged men. See our seven tips to help you determine your target audience.

Play the ‘We’re this, not that’ game

Okay, it’s not exactly a game. But it’s a great exercise to narrow down what your franchise brand is about.

Simply fill in the blanks: “We’re ________, but we’re not __________.”

You’ll want to do this at least a half dozen times to drill down to the essence of how you want to sound. For example: “We’re laidback, but we’re not lazy.”

You can and should take your audience research and most successful franchise content into consideration while working through this.

Choose three words to describe your franchise voice

If you let yourself go on the “We’re this, not that” exercise, there hopefully are a few keywords that now stick out to you.

If your franchise was a person, ask yourself which three words you would use to describe this person’s personality. And how do these traits make you different?

Make a ‘brand voice chart’

Once you decide on the three traits that best represent your franchise’s personality, you can build a chart so that you can flush out how each one should be used in your messaging moving forward.

Create a table with four columns. The first column is the list of brand characteristics you’ve already decided on. The next column is a description of how that trait relates to your franchise or brand. The third column is all the “Do’s” related to accomplishing that (such as using strong verbs if you’re passionate or being playful if you’re irrelevant, for example), whatever actions will reflect that trait. Then, the last column should have all the “Don’ts.” These are the actions you’ll want to avoid in the pursuit of reflecting that trait (such as using too much slang if you’re quirky or over-promising if you’re authentic, for example).

You’ll want to work through that chart for each personality trait, essentially creating your road map for your franchise’s voice and tone that can be referenced moving forward.

Translate your ‘brand voice chart’ into guidelines

While a “brand voice chart” is incredibly helpful and definitely an asset you can present to your team, consider taking it a step further. You can create clearly documented guidelines to help enforce consistency well into the future.

Because as we all know, it’s one thing if it’s just you communicating as your franchise. It’s a whole other world when bringing a team together to share and express a single brand voice.

It’s great if your guidelines can be boiled down into a one-pager (or have a Cliff Notes version that’s accessible on the fly), but it doesn’t have to be. This is especially true if you’re including:

A deep dive into your franchise’s core personality
A reflection on tone (how you’re communicating that personality, especially on different platforms)
A look at the specifics (that can be formatted as a “do this, not that” and even include recommended spelling, grammar and jargon use)
A description of multimedia use (ranging from videos to emojis)

The power of your guidelines does come from the time you invest in them to make them the “holy grail” of communication for your franchise marketing team.

Be ready to evolve as your brand does

Just like people, brands can grow and change over time. Be nimble about what this could look like for your franchise and be ready to adjust your “brand voice chart” and guidelines as needed.

On the flip side, you don’t want to change too many things too quickly. It could confuse your team and your audience.

In conclusion

As a franchise, you may already have direction from your franchisor on your franchise brand voice. But if it needs to be further explored, it’s worthwhile to work through the above eight steps. Remember that franchisors strive for consistent messaging across franchisees. On the flip side, it’s possible that your franchisor has not given you much direction on a specific franchise brand voice to use.

If you’re looking for a little inspiration from brands doing it right, take a look at Wendy’s, MailChimp and Red Bull. Check out their websites and social media pages. They’re all very different brands but extremely consistent, as well as creative, in how they project their individual brand voices.

And above all, know that discovering and conveying your franchise voice will be filled with some trials and errors no matter how much planning you do. Just keep an eye on your content’s performance across platforms and pivot as needed. While you’re examining your franchise voice, consider these seven tips to be more conversational and relatable in your marketing. In addition, see our 10 tips to build up your personal brand and grow your franchise. Plus, check out our Digital Marketing 101 Guide for Beginners to get inspired about your own brand’s marketing efforts and focus. As you begin to find your franchise voice, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, which includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help franchises specifically just like you. Schedule your free demo with us today and find out more about how we elevate franchise marketing.

How to evaluate your franchise marketing data

Gathering marketing data is a great first step to understanding your franchise’s target audience and ensuring your campaigns are effective.

However, after gathering data, you’ll need to understand that data by being able to read and evaluate it. Evaluation is key to ensuring you cut out ineffective strategies. That way, you can develop a successful marketing plan that helps your franchise earn more profits and build its reputation.

Here’s how to effectively evaluate your company’s marketing data.

Sales

Ultimately, you market and advertise your franchise and its products to increase sales and revenue.

You can use the data you get from your marketing and advertising campaigns to determine whether or not sales are increasing and by how much. Additionally, depending on the type of campaign, you can determine your return on investment (ROI). ROI is important because it can help you determine which campaigns are the most successful.

While you may get more sales from one type of campaign, you may also find it costs you more to advertise. That would give you a lower ROI.

In many cases, ROI can tell you how much it costs to acquire customers through one medium. It also indicates how much you’re earning from franchise advertising or marketing. For example, if you advertise on social media, you might have a higher ROI on a certain type of ad or within a certain region.

Check out our six tips to maximize your social media advertising budget.

Customer responses

Customer reactions to campaigns can help you determine customer sentiment as part of your franchise marketing data-gathering efforts.

You can provide your customers with surveys or general customer service feedback forms through email or text message to understand what your customers think of your company and your marketing campaigns.

Simple questions about how customers felt about specific campaigns can help you understand which initiatives are most successful and which customers are making the most purchases.

See our nine tips to improve social listening and gain customer insights.

Reach

Whether you’re implementing search engine optimization, social media marketing, or digital advertising into your overall franchise marketing strategy, one of your main goals is to increase brand awareness and reach.

Ultimately, you want to reach more people within your target audience who are more likely to purchase from you.

Expanding your franchise marketing reach can help you find new people who may not have heard of your products or services yet. This also grows brand awareness in your current markets.

When using digital marketing strategies, you can easily measure your reach. However, that becomes more difficult when you’re using traditional marketing. For example, if you do a billboard campaign, you won’t have exact numbers on how many people saw the billboard, but you can estimate based on data how many drivers use a particular stretch of highway.

Lead generation

Marketing is supposed to support your franchise sales by generating warm leads to give salespeople a higher chance of converting.

While some marketing efforts can lead to direct sales, others do not, especially in the B2B space. Lead generation comes in many forms, including appointments, form submissions and subscribers to mailing lists.

You can easily track lead generation as part of your franchise marketing data if you’re doing it through your website by counting the number of form submissions.

Additionally, you should always compare that data to sales data to ensure the leads you’re generating are quality leads that make a purchase at the end of their journey.

While you can’t expect every lead to make a purchase, your lead generation efforts should be increasing overall sales.

Check out our 12 strategies to capture more email leads without annoying everyone, and level up your franchise website pop-up ads with our eight tips to get more leads from them.

Website traffic

Your franchise website is a valuable sales tool, even if people can’t make direct purchases on it.

Building a website can help you generate leads and increase brand awareness for your franchise, but only if you’re getting website traffic. Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

For example, whether you do a traditional marketing campaign or a digital marketing campaign, you should see more traffic to your website. This is because effective marketing makes people want to look for you online to learn more about your products and services.

marketing-data-website-traffic — Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

Additionally, all digital marketing strategies should lead back to your website. For example, if you’re doing affiliate marketing that is relevant for your franchise, the goal should be to get an influencer’s audience to click on a link that leads them back to your website. If you’re not seeing an increase in traffic, your campaigns are ineffective.

If you’re not sure how much website traffic you’re getting, you can use Google Analytics to learn more.

Check out our eight tips to increase organic traffic to your website.

Testimonials

Testimonials are essential for all franchise marketers. Consumers rely on the opinions of their peers to decide whether or not it’s worth it to purchase from or work with a business.

Of course, testimonials and product reviews can help convince potential customers to trust your franchise based on others’ feedback.

Learn more about social proof, as well as nine ways to use it in your digital marketing.

Unfortunately, measuring the impact of testimonials can be difficult. However, you can experiment by putting testimonials on different pages of your franchise website and checking your web stats, such as views, clicks, and generated leads to see if adding testimonials has made an impact.

Reviews can be easily measured because your customers can provide you with a star rating. That average star rating can tell you how much your customers enjoyed their products. Allow customers to make comments on their reviews to explain why they gave you a certain star rating.

By learning about your customer’s experiences with your product, service and/or franchise, you can find ways to improve both. You also can leverage that knowledge for better marketing initiatives.

See 17 of the best social proof tools to boost your sales.

Customer retention rate

A customer retention rate tells you how many customers you retain over time.

It’s easier and more cost-effective to keep your customers returning rather than constantly finding new ones.

In addition, your retention rate impacts revenue. It also can help you determine which marketing campaigns work best to keep customers coming back. For example, many franchises use email marketing to ensure their current customers don’t forget about them.

Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty.

In conclusion

Collecting franchise marketing data is important if you want to learn about the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. However, you should always determine the most important statistics to you and your franchise.

Instead of measuring everything and deciphering tons of data, look at the most important metrics first. This will help you determine which strategies are performing well and which are costing you money.

From there, you can start digging deeper into each campaign. Use franchise marketing data to learn more about how to make them better.

Learn more about franchise marketing and how DailyStory can help you level up your efforts.

About the author

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a contributing writer at 365businesstips.com where she shares knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, or financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.