Tag: facebook for franchises

Christmas In July: Planning Q4 Digital Marketing Now

Christmas in July

 

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of 4th Quarter sales for retailers, restaurants, and many other small businesses or multi-location businesses. While operations and other parts of your organization have had the rest of the year mapped out since last year, your digital marketing activities may not even be finalized for back-to-school promotions, let alone holiday shopping.

In the past, too many marketers have waited until the summer was over to gear up for the holidays. But now that’s too late. It’s now Christmas in July or at least planning your digital marketing tactics for Christmas during July.

Also, is 2018 the year your big idea explodes? If next year is your “hockey stick year,” then Q4 better be solid. To get started, here are three questions to ask yourself during July:

 

1. What are you going to do now to have a great Q4?

What will compel customers to pay you a visit and make a purchase? Do you have a killer promotion ready to roll?

 

2. How are you getting people into your stores or onto your website?

Facebook (organic) posts? Forget it. Tweets? Unless your name is Donald, forget it.

You’ve got to hit large numbers of people or smaller numbers of the right people using:

  • Facebook ads
  • Pay Per Click ads
  • Display ads

Blog posts and other forms of content marketing are great for awareness and long term branding, but you need to guarantee traffic soon.  Find what advertising and promotions work now and pour some fuel on it. And when I say fuel, I mean ad dollars.

 

3. Are the customers you had last year coming back, or are they buying from Amazon?

This one is very important for retailers – all boutique shops, specialty stores, chains, or franchises. We think we have a loyal base, so why would they not come back in this year

I’ll tell you why … there are an estimated 80 million Amazon Prime customers. Many of your customers are part of that. Use digital ads to reach them and give them a reason to get off their big fat lazy Amazon and come into your store!

 

What Should You Do with Rogue Facebook Pages?

duplicate facebook

 

Most Franchises, retail chains, or multi-unit restaurant systems have multiple Facebook pages that are not under the control of the brand or the local operator.

Maybe that former night manager set one up a few years ago. It could be that a customer wanted to check in, but that location wasn’t on Facebook yet so she just created her own location page…complete with a logo from 1982. Perhaps a dismissed employee took revenge by creating a phony page with nasty images.

It’s typically not as malicious as that last example; we usually find pages that were set up then innocently forgotten when the staff member left and now no one remaining can access the page.

We also find, at some point, the CMO who is suddenly haunted by these ghost pages. He or she is terrified by the thought of a customer or stakeholder discovering this abandoned page and thinking poorly of the brand.

 

Have No Fear

My advice lately to such marketers has been simply: have no fear. Don’t worry about it. In some cases, you may be able convince to Facebook to take down some pages, but for most of these, you will hit a dead end.

The good news is that no one is looking at those pages! What many people still don’t realize is that unless someone is driving traffic to a page, no one really sees it anymore. Very few Facebook users look up pages just to see what’s new on them. If there’s no new content being posted, there’s no new content showing up on anyone’s newsfeed. And, let’s face it, our own newsfeed is all any of us notice!

That rogue page is not really a haunted house that a customer may see as they walk down your brand’s street. It’s more of a junk drawer in a house that no one will see from the sidewalk.

 

Focus on What You Can Control

Spend your resources – your time and ad dollars – on driving traffic to the pages or places that you want to people to see. Frequent posting of quality content and purchasing of ads coming from your “real” page will far outweigh any ugly, off-message, or duplicate page.