Brand image is everything in today’s cutthroat business landscape. Regardless of your industry, you need a consistent and recognizable brand to stand out from the competition and boost your perceived value.
Successful brands, however, aren't built overnight. They are developed and nurtured through a continuous brand management process that involves communicating, protecting and improving your brand identity.
Strategic digital brand management is an essential aspect of franchise development. It reinforces your unique brand personality at every touchpoint.
More importantly, a growth-driven brand strategy helps you build recognition and affinity among consumers to generate a consistent lead and sales pipeline.
Unfortunately, as technology advances and customers’ needs evolve, franchises often face several strategy brand management roll-out and scalability challenges.
How do you maintain brand consistency across locations and keep control of your digital assets?
Online brand management requires hard work, tenacity and consistency. Without focused and persistent efforts, you can expect strategy brand management challenges to multiply.
"To ensure campaigns are managed as effectively and methodically as possible, you shouldn't cut corners," said Jacob Wulff, Thrive's senior PPC manager. "Keep location data organized, and strong communication amongst teams is vital to maintaining positive growth."
Manage your brand effectively and provide seamless, personalized brand experiences across multiple channels and locations. Discover how to execute a winning strategy brand management process and create a unique, lasting image in this saturated digital marketplace.
When we consider the concept of a brand, we often think of logos, products, designs, color schemes and elevator pitches. But your brand is much more than these components. It is a combination of language, imagery, experience and perception that completes your brand personality.
Brand management involves handling these tangible and intangible properties of your franchise in order to reach your audience with the right message, match their expectations and breed trust.
Done right, online brand management allows you to cut through the noise and provide positive brand experiences consistently across platforms and demographics.
Brand Management vs. Marketing
For many, the line between online brand management and marketing can be a little blurry. While these are related concepts, there are considerable differences between the two.
Brand management serves as the blueprint of your marketing strategies. It focuses on actively shaping your brand identity to drive recognition and loyalty. Digital branding services ensure all your content, communication and stylistic elements align with your desired brand image.
Brand marketing, on the other hand, is where your plan is put into action. Brand marketing companies use your brand guidelines to create social media marketing materials, write franchise business review responses and launch digital marketing campaigns that will get customers to transact with your brand.
In a nutshell, marketing drives sales while brand management delivers positive brand sentiment. Together, brand management services and marketing solutions enable you to create more impactful campaigns that make your franchise stand out.
Why You Need To Prioritize
Digital Brand Management
Your brand is your enterprise business’s biggest asset, and the importance of brand consistency across franchisees cannot be overemphasized enough.
Brand management services ensure you connect with your target audience on an emotional level and establish credibility in the marketplace. More importantly, the right digital branding services provide you with performance insights to improve your brand experience and guide your business to long-term success.
Once you have well-defined branding, you can zero in on the right marketing strategy for your company and grow a highly-engaged community.
Consider:
Nearly 77 percent of consumers make purchasing decisions based on brand recognition (Crowdspring).
Seventy-seven percent of B2B marketers admit brand management is crucial for their companies’ growth (Circe Research).
Fifty percent of employers consider branding the core of a successful HR strategy (Beamery).
Brand consistency, quality, experience and cost are the top four qualities that keep consumers returning to a brand (Facebook).
Companies that prioritize brand consistency are 3.5X more likely to gain excellent brand visibility than those with inconsistent branding (Demand Metric).
Presenting a consistent brand image across platforms increases revenue by up to 23 percent (Forbes).
Digital brand management can make or break your franchise success. No matter how great your brand is, if you do not portray brand consistency on your service quality and customer experience, you won’t solidify your place in this competitive market.
Investing in strategic brand management services from a trusted brand management agency can help you define and maintain a brand that drives success.
Top Online Brand Management Challenges
Brand management can be a lot to handle, but by putting in the work and managing your brand effectively, there are endless opportunities that await you. It’s why it’s imperative to have a properly structured strategy brand management process in place.
Unfortunately, roughly 50 percent of businesses don’t have a concrete brand strategy. For this reason, instead of focusing on value-added brand marketing tactics, franchisors have to deal with plenty of barriers to productivity and efficiency.
Lucidpress, in partnership with Demand Metric, surveyed more than 200 organizations to understand the importance of brand consistency in business growth. They found that:
75%
90%
60%Besides challenges in implementing digital branding services and maintaining brand consistency across the board, businesses also deal with:
- Creating a long-term branding strategy
- Increased demand for personalization
- Consistently enforcing brand guidelines
- Unwanted asset changes
- Balancing consistency with local adaptation
- Allocating budget across corporate and local accounts
- Locating company assets
- Demonstrating brand credibility
As a result, many companies struggle to build a strong brand image. And without a solid brand identity, achieving franchise-wide success is difficult.
Today’s most successful companies embrace brand management as part of their overall business strategy. Capitalize on growth-driven digital branding services and arm your franchise with a stronger online representation.
Digital Brand Management
Overcoming franchise brand management challenges demands a proper system. First, you need to understand what tactics can help you develop brand visibility and take your franchise to the next level. Additionally, it’s your responsibility to organize your assets and ensure branding processes are under control.
Even though you may already have a solid brand, getting too comfortable and neglecting digital brand management best practices makes your company susceptible to common pitfalls that leave you behind the competition.
The best way to build and maintain a compelling brand image is through a holistic approach that combines the following key strategies:
Social Media Management: Improving Your
Customer Journey at Every Touchpoint
Social media management is the practice of utilizing social media and marketing channels as a customer experience enhancement tool. It combines social media marketing and social media branding strategies to protect your reputation and grow your audience base.
Given the high percentage of people who encounter new brands on a daily basis via social media and marketing platforms, social media management services are essential to establish a unified brand and manage your online community.
Social media management companies help you capitalize on the surging popularity of social media marketing platforms by overseeing your branding, engagement and marketing campaigns.
3 Key Elements of Effective Social Media Management Services
No matter how you approach social media brand management, it’s essential to get these core elements right:
Listening and Monitoring
Social listening pertains to analyzing industry-related trends and conversations across social media to gather valuable marketing insights and power your brand management efforts. Social media monitoring, on the other hand, is keeping tabs on your social media and marketing channels for any brand mention or customer feedback directly related to your brand.
As key components of social media management service, it’s important to get these strategies right to keep track of your brand’s growth as well as identify pain points and improve your social media branding tactic.
Analyzing
Once you’ve collected the most valuable data from your social media marketing channels, the next step is to draw actionable conclusions. This part of social media agency services involves analyzing your previous posts, interactions and campaigns to give you a general idea of what works for your social media branding and what doesn’t.
Engaging
Finally, a vital social media management service component is engagement. Successful social media management agency services depend on creating a consistently positive customer experience across platforms. To achieve this, social media management agencies deliver quality content that aligns with your branding and facilitate interactions aimed at creating a positive image of your brand.
Why Invest in Social Media Management Service
Online brand management entails many moving pieces that work together to generate interest, nurture leads and close sales — and social media management is one of them.
According to Alyssa Tear, Thrive’s organic social media senior manager, social media management services are key to telling your unique story, creating a local presence and improving client retention. With help from the right social media management company, you can:
Establish a Consistent Brand Voice
From your tone of voice to your visual aesthetics, you need to be recognizable to gain traction among your target audience. Social media agency services are designed to help you maintain consistency in both design and voice across all locations and platforms.
Deliver a Clear Message
Inconsistency creates confusion among your prospects and followers. To avoid this, social media management agencies create consistently trustworthy content that represents your values and conveys your brand’s unique selling points (USPs).
Create a Unified Brand Personality
Social media marketing agency services ensure everything from your messaging to the emotions evoked on your marketing materials communicate a cohesive social media branding. In doing so, social media marketing agencies help you safeguard your brand and reputation.
Strengthen Your Brand Recall
Positive brand exposure and customer experience are essential in developing trust and improving brand recall. By implementing coherent social media marketing agency services, you create a strong brand story that customers can relate to and easily recognize across locations.
Build an Authentic Brand
Studies show 86 percent of consumers consider brand authenticity a critical factor in trusting a brand (Stackla). Social media marketing firms help you build an authentic brand experience by creating a professional image that captures your brand and makes a great first impression on prospects.
Increase Brand Reach
Any social media marketing company would agree that having a unique, consistent voice and personality across franchisees makes your brand more relatable and trustworthy in the eyes of consumers. And the higher your audience trust, the greater your chances of gaining more followers and customers.
How To Build a Unified Social Media Branding
Audit Existing Social Media Strategy
Conducting a social media strategy assessment is the first step in any social media management company’s branding checklist. Evaluate your current social media efforts across franchisees to identify outdated local profiles you need to revamp and ensure they align with your branding.
And although the goal is to create a cohesive brand experience, Tear highlighted that your social media presence for your franchise location should not be an identical replica of the franchisor's. Calibrate your social media agency services to create localized content, reach local consumers and create a loyal social media community.
Keep Your Social Media Pages Active
Use your photos, banners and posts to showcase the impact of your work and communicate your unique brand story.
When setting up your content calendar, pull in some key campaigns across the franchise that you can piggyback on. While you do this, you can also sprinkle in local promotions, news and valuable content targeting your distinctive audience.
Additionally, you should provide a brand guide to help franchisees create a consistent brand image. An essential practice that every social media advertising agency implements is ensuring the content delivers a message aligned with your core values, brand promise, customer experience and brand identity.
Engage With Followers
Trusted social media marketing firms would agree that an engaged following on one or more major social networks is one of the best ways to spread the word about your brand and new initiatives effectively.
Be proactive in listening and responding to your online community. But when doing so, social media marketing agencies advise that you stick to your brand guidelines. Create a system for providing franchise business review responses and answering customer concerns. More importantly, be clear about the value of your local brand offerings.
Track and Analyze Campaign Metrics
Campaign monitoring and evaluation enable you to determine what people are saying about your brand, identify ways to improve your branding and implement appropriate social media marketing services on different channels.
For experienced social media marketing companies, this strategy goes beyond typing your name into the search bar. Leverage social media tools to track and analyze your brand mentions, shares, post reach and impressions. Further, evaluate your audience growth rate across franchisees and identify how many people are mentioning your brand on social media compared to your competitors.
These practices allow you to fill the gap in your social media marketing agency services and ensure your audience finds value in your social channels moving forward.
Use Social Media Management Tools
From creating and publishing content to monitoring your social media growth, it can be pretty overwhelming to complete these tasks manually. Thankfully, there are various social media tools like Hootsuite that you can use to streamline the implementation of your brand management and social media marketing services.
Social media management tools help you manage your digital assets across franchisees and simplify the review and approval process of all your content. Be sure to consult with a reliable social media marketing company to determine the best social media management software for your franchise.
An experienced social media advertising agency invests in state-of-the-art software to provide professional analysis of your campaign metrics and maximize your budget.
Grow Social Reach
Every aspect of your social media profile can be tweaked for better visibility and audience reach. Optimize your corporate and local social media profiles with recognizable photos, brand logo and keyword-rich descriptions that highlight your brand values and unique story.
To maximize organic potential, social media marketing agencies recommend that you cross-promote your social media profiles and post the right balance of promotional and useful content. When implementing these strategies, remember that your content and interactions should embody your brand and align with your style and principles.
Why Hire a Social Media Management Agency
Running a multi-location business is already challenging. Add reinforcing brand guidelines across franchisees, and it can be daunting to manage everything on your own. The good news is you don’t have to handle social media brand management alone.
Enlisting social media marketing services from experienced social media marketing companies arms your enterprise business with the ability to implement strategic brand management processes, structure your campaign per location and accurately track success.
Here are more reasons hiring a social media marketing firm can be the best move for your enterprise business:
Save Time and Money
Social media management companies boast years’ worth of knowledge and experience in social media brand management and digital marketing. By partnering with the right social media marketing firm, you can focus on other vital areas of your enterprise business while the agency maps out your social media branding strategy for your corporate and local accounts.
Get Access to the Right Tools
Managing your social media profiles can be challenging, especially if you don’t have the right tools in your arsenal. Once you hire a social media management company, you’ll have access to resources, such as post scheduler, analytics, content management system (CMS) and photo and video editing software, which enable you to stay on top of your brand interactions and create good content.
Gain Market Expertise
As more social media platforms emerge, you’ll need the professional expertise of social media management agencies to adapt to these changes and ensure brand consistency across franchisees. Social media marketing companies stay on top of trends and constantly update their skills and knowledge to provide you with top-notch service.
Launch Targeted Strategies
A social media marketing agency can help you define your branding and identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Using this data, social media marketing firms are able to develop brand strategies that highlight your strengths and help you stand out from the competition.
Additionally, a social media company considers the local needs and demands of each location while keeping your mission, vision and values in mind. These practices help you create the balance and consistency needed to market your franchise successfully on social media.
Stay Relevant
Through the help of a social media marketing firm, you can ensure your brand stays relevant and up to date. Social media management companies continuously research your market and study the competition to take your branding strategies up a notch. Most importantly, brand management companies teach you how to think outside the box to communicate your unique brand value and retain your audience effortlessly.
Get Peace of Mind
Social media management takes great work and commitment to achieve success. By handing this task to a social media marketing company, you’ll gain the peace of mind that your brand strategy and campaigns are well taken care of by specialists. Social media management companies bring their A-game to every project to safeguard your reputation and keep your business stable and profitable.
CASE STUDY
Our social media company was tapped to manage the social media branding of one of the most popular gaming companies in the United States. The client needed help in online reputation repair and social media campaign management.
Initially, our social media marketing agency ran extensive social media audits and market analyses to determine the best approach for the client. Once we collected and analyzed the data, our social media company implemented an assortment of social media branding and advertising campaigns to boost the company’s brand recognition, website traffic and follower growth.
We also systematically monitored and managed social media reviews and interactions to increase engagement and create a positive image of the brand. Additionally, our social media advertising agency launched strategically-targeted ads to move prospects down the funnel.
Over the course of four months, our social media marketing agency solutions resulted in:
+10
Average Purchase
Return on Ad Spend
+118,177
Facebook Post
Engagements
+773,674
Facebook
Impressions
+12,282
Website Link Clicks
Reputation Management:
Put Your Best Digital Footprint Forward
Your brand reputation is the culmination of emotions and ideas that the public associates with your brand.
A favorable brand reputation gives you higher chances of earning lifelong customers and brand advocates. A tarnished brand image, on the other hand, puts you at risk of losing customers and sales.
Every business has a reputation. The question is: What does your brand reputation imply about your enterprise business?
Online reputation management (ORM) combines brand management, marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to take control of online conversations and shape public perception of your brand.
Business reputation management focuses on actively monitoring your brand mentions and interactions across digital channels to address negative or false information about your brand and portray your company in the best possible light.
Given the sheer number of social media and digital platforms where your brand might be mentioned, capitalizing on growth-driven online reputation management services from a multi-faceted online reputation management company is a smart move to protect your enterprise business’s digital presence.
Best Online Reputation Management Services for Franchises
Enterprise businesses face unique challenges in maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction across franchisees. With many locations to account for, you need to set high standards and provide clear guidelines in implementing your online reputation management strategies.
Reputation management agencies provide online reputation services designed to ensure your business emerges from any reputational crisis in a strong, competitive position.
Learn more about the franchise reputation management services pivotal to your online growth:
Review generation services empower your best customers to share their unique brand experiences through local business reviews. Reputation management agencies launch personalized email and SMS drip campaigns to request reviews for business from your clients. This online reputation management strategy enables you to gather valuable customer insights and ensure only positive information shows up when customers research your brand online.
Video testimonials allow prospects to see honest, unscripted opinions of real people about your franchise. It’s why many online reputation management companies promote video reviews for business. A flexible reputation management firm can work closely with your team to enable video review collection and optimize the quality of video testimonials if necessary.
Another key component of a credible online reputation management service is franchise business review monitoring. Reputation management companies leverage advanced review management software to streamline multi-site and multi-location review monitoring. This online review management strategy allows you to stay on top of customer sentiments and take the necessary steps to provide the best possible customer experience.
In today’s digital world, many companies struggle to maintain the public’s confidence. A single negative review from a disgruntled customer can cause serious damage to your brand reputation. That’s why it’s imperative to manage reviews. Reputation repair specialists implement combined online review management and SEO best practices to help you reclaim control of your brand identity.
Keeping your online business information accurate and consistent across platforms is vital to building a reputable brand image. From your Google Business Profile and social media channels to other directories, an online reputation management company can help you secure and manage your listings to increase your franchise’s discoverability and fuel your business reputation management campaigns.
Your audience base is one of the key factors that drives your brand reputation management success. The more loyal followers you have, the higher your chances of acquiring positive social media reviews. Trusted online reputation management companies offer social media follower growth service as part of their customer review management solution. It involves crafting engaging social media invites, engaging with your audience and launching review request campaigns concurrently with other marketing initiatives.
A strong survey campaign is invaluable to brand reputation management. It helps you understand your customer sentiment, acclimate with your niche and gain useful insights to improve your customer experience. With help from a reputation management firm, you can launch various customer survey campaigns based on your intent, including visual rating and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys.
If you’re in the eCommerce industry, you already know how valuable reviews are for business. Product reviews give consumers a clear idea of what to expect from your brand offerings. More importantly, they shape your brand image and encourage trust among customers. Reputation management companies help you manage reviews from multiple eCommerce platforms, including Walmart Marketplace, Target Plus and Amazon, by integrating customer review management software to these channels.
Online and social media reviews are valuable tools for achieving franchise success. Handle them incorrectly, however, and your brand can face a reputation crisis. A strategic online reputation management service involves a review response strategy, which allows you to create a meaningful exchange with customers across franchisees. Reputation management companies help you create a review response template that each location can use to ensure brand consistency.
Why Is Brand Reputation Management So Important?
Studies show a company’s brand reputation dictates at least half its market value (Zignal Labs). This means no matter how hard you try to market your brand offerings across locations, your market value and profitability will significantly decline if you do not have a robust online review management system in place.
According to Tim Clarke, Rize Reviews’ senior reputation manager, a reputation management service can make or break your whole enterprise business’s reputation. Without a clear review management system, it is nearly impossible to build and maintain a consistent, professional brand image. “A single negative response will affect the corporate reputation and 100 percent of the locations,” he said.
Fully-managed online reputation management services allow you to:
Generate More Positive Reviews
Reputation builds credibility. And the more people believe in your brand, the more followers you can tap to provide you with favorable local business reviews. An online reputation management agency leverages multiple customer touchpoints to get more online reviews from your customers.
Dispel Malicious Rumors
Rumors and misleading information about your brand can quickly circulate online if you don’t have a reputation repair strategy. By partnering with trustworthy providers of reputation repair services, you can prevent inaccurate information and fake negative reviews from destroying your brand image.
Rank High in Search Engines
Local business reviews are among the most important local SEO ranking factors, and the more positive reviews you have, the higher your chances of great rankings. Reputation management agencies integrate SEO best practices into their reputation management services to help you maximize your digital presence.
Gain Customer Trust
A whopping 94 percent of consumers avoid businesses with a bad reputation (ReviewTrackers). To protect your brand image, you need a tailored review management service that enables you to keep negative comments at bay. If your brand is already tainted with bad reviews, reputation repair services are your best option to regain consumer trust and gain more votes of confidence.
Build a Successful Workforce
A successful franchise image is necessary for building the foundation of your workforce. Statistics show 83 percent of candidates are influenced by local business reviews when making application decisions (Glassdoor). By implementing structured online reputation management service across franchisees, you can maintain a professional corporate image that attracts the best talents.
Improve Your Bottom Line
According to a Harvard Business School study, companies that rank high in search results gain around 5-9 percent better revenue than their competition. With consistent and properly implemented franchise online reputation services, you can effectively boost your search rankings, expand your brand reach and have the opportunity to generate more leads and revenue.
6 Business Reputation Management Tactics
To Protect Your Professional Image
Ensure All Listings Are Accurate and Up to Date
Allocate a significant amount of time to monitor and optimize your business listings across online directories. Doing so makes it easier for customers to find your local franchisees and leave reviews for business.
A reputation management agency can help you maintain an accurate listing and make the necessary adjustments should you change your local business information. Providers of business review services leverage citation management tools to run regular NAP (name, address, phone number) audits and perform manual optimization for you on the backend.
Require All Locations To Ask for Reviews
Getting all franchisees on board with your customer review management strategy can be challenging, especially if the locations are more focused on their daily operations. To push all franchisees to prioritize their review volume improvement, Clarke suggests turning it into a competition and incentivizing the top-performing locations.
By making the local employees push hard for good reviews, you proactively cultivate a brand with higher online visibility and an astounding reputation. Hire the expertise of a reputation management agency to test different tactics that will motivate your whole enterprise business to participate in the implementation of your reputation management services.
Leverage Reputation Management Software
Successful online reputation management companies invest in innovative review management software to monitor your local business reviews efficiently.
When looking for a reputation management tool to manage reviews across locations, test its different features and ensure it has the capacity to support multi-site and multi-location brand monitoring. More importantly, choose reputation management software with CRM-enabled point of sale (POS) systems. This feature enables automated data-gathering and backend processes, simplifying your franchise review management.
Any reliable online reputation management agency would agree that these functionalities are essential in the strategic implementation of your enterprise business review services.
Develop an Active Review Response Tactic
Executing a standardized review management service is part of providing good customer service. Studies show nearly 50 percent of consumers anticipate a response to their negative reviews within one week (ReviewTrackers). By addressing customer concerns as quickly as possible, you show that you care for your audience.
A golden rule followed by every reputation management company is to be polite and professional and never be combative with the customer. You can certainly point out inaccuracies if it's a bad review but not in a hostile manner.
When responding to positive reviews, use the customers’ names and thank them for the favorable feedback. Clarke also advises that you try to respond within one business day to every negative review and within one week to every positive review. “The sooner, the better, with the timing,” he said.
Report on Reviews by Market, Region and Location
It’s critical to treat each location as its own business with unique strategy needs. In this way, you ensure the online reputation services you implement are tailored to each franchisee’s target demographics.
Separate the accounts and track each location separately. With help from a reputation management agency, review tracking and reporting per location and market segment should not be so complicated. Providers of business review services have reputation management tools and proven reputation repair and management strategies up their sleeve that you can use to streamline your processes.
Schedule Campaigns by Location
Your local customer database plays a crucial role in the successful implementation of your reputation management service. To get better reviews and review volume, be sure to keep your customer database up to date.
Additionally, use local time zone settings to schedule automated review requests to your local target audience. Review management service agencies follow this tactic to ensure you reach customers at an optimal time where they open their devices and are most likely to respond to review requests.
Online Reputation Repair Best Practices
Reputational damage often results from a gap between customer expectations and a company’s ability to deliver on commitment. Some businesses are unfortunate enough to amass negative reviews from online trolls or competitors.
How you respond to the crisis determines the severity of its impact on your enterprise business. With data-driven reputation repair services, you can protect your brand image from negative reviews and reclaim your brand control.
Our reputation management firm listed the best practices to help you fix your digital reputation:
Take Responsibility for Your Actions
Do not avoid difficult conversations with your customers. If you’ve made a mistake, own up to it and offer resolutions. Any reputation management company would agree that taking responsibility for your mistakes is critical to regaining customer trust.
Be Professional
A common error that a business owner may commit is responding based on emotions. Don’t make the same mistake. Be polite and professional when responding to negative reviews. Remember, the way you express yourself online is directly tied to your brand values and reputation.
Apologize Publicly and Address the Issue Privately
Admitting your mistakes in public shows people you value your customer experience. However, responding to the customer review is not enough. Our online reputation management agency advises that you take the conversation in private to understand your customer sentiment and provide appropriate resolutions. Done right, this strategy could turn a dissatisfied customer into a loyal brand advocate.
Launch Data-Driven SEO Campaigns
Finally, invest in quality SEO services to take appropriate actions towards negative content from search results. An experienced digital branding agency works closely with you to ensure your enterprise business is represented fairly and consistently online.
CASE STUDY
A multi-location home restoration firm reached out to Thrive to improve its review generation strategy for nearly 200 locations across the United States. Our reputation management company, in partnership with Rize Reviews, implemented a targeted reputation management service per location to meet the client’s goals.
One of our top priorities was to embed a custom review widget on the corporate website to streamline the review acquisition process. In less than one year, our reputation management firm significantly improved the client’s review volume and quality:
+20
New Positive Reviews
for Suffolk County Home Services
in First 8 Months
+44
New Positive Reviews
for West Denver Home Services
in First 5 Months
Branding Consistency:
The Secret to Creating a Recognizable Brand
Brand consistency pertains to the practice of delivering messages that are in line with the company’s core values, identity and brand promise.
Besides your color scheme, branded fonts, taglines and logos, providing a unified experience across franchisees is also a big part of digital brand management. By giving your target audience a dependable brand experience no matter the location or channel of communication, you instill brand recognition and trust.
No business gets far without branding consistency. Achieving success in this area, however, requires a deep understanding of your corporate brand’s strengths, values and unique selling points. Brand marketing companies can guide you in creating a cohesive brand identity.
The Importance of Brand Consistency
Your brand is the summary of how people perceive your enterprise business. As such, you cannot afford to have an unstable brand image.
“In the customer's eyes, they believe they should receive the same service or product quality no matter which location they choose,” said Jimi Gibson, Thrive’s director of operations. “If there are differences in the brand from one location to another, a consumer may question whether there will be a difference in the quality of the product or service. If the brand is drastically different, the consumer may not even realize the location is part of the parent brand.”
For your target audience to trust your brand, you must work closely with a digital branding agency to establish brand-wide benchmarks that promote brand consistency. In doing so, you can:
Differentiate Your Brand in the Market
Successful brands have a solid identity and maintain regularity in interacting with their intended market. When you focus on building a consistent brand image, you generate more interest in your brand. A branding and marketing company can help you grow your customer base while staying true to your brand promise.
Establish Industry Authority
Running a steady, profitable franchise business requires a commitment to keeping up with your mission statement. As such, it’s crucial to partner with a reliable digital branding agency to guarantee the level of consistency you want and need for your digital branding across franchisees.
Elicit Positive Emotions
Your franchise branding is your opportunity to create a positive brand association. By maintaining brand consistency across locations, you help consumers get to know your company on a personal level. Digital branding companies work closely with you to put out a dependable brand image that resonates with your target audience.
Create Customer Loyalty
Branding consistency is part of building customer trust and loyalty. Brand management companies witness how today’s consumers expect a similar experience every time they interact with a brand regardless of location or channel. With a unified approach across every touchpoint, your brand appears more trustworthy in the eyes of consumers.
5 Ways To Keep Your Branding Consistent
Create Clear Brand and Content Policies
Having clear brand standards for graphics and the visual representation of your brand through signage, advertising and location appearance is critical in scaling your franchise to greater heights.
Digital branding companies create and implement branding guidelines to provide a standardized way of how each location should represent the brand to their target audience. A clear brand guideline includes visual (logo, color palette, fonts and imagery) and narrative (tone of voice, messaging, POV) elements.
Communicate With All Entities
In managing a multi-location business, there is no room for communication silos. Maintain active conversation with your franchisees to ensure all employees maintain awareness of consistent branding and the right use of your digital assets.
If you’re having difficulty engaging with all entities, a branding and marketing company can help you determine the right approach for your franchise. Enlist the services of a professional brand management agency to lay out clear expectations and guidelines for each location.
Execute Consistent Messaging
Your brand image should be consistently tied to your core values to send the right message to your target audience. To make this possible, brand marketing companies advise that each franchisee should understand where there is room for individualization and personalization based on location or the service approach.
Additionally, a clear process to address any variations in your brand messaging should be documented. Brand management companies can help you set up a solid approval process to ensure all marketing materials across the board capture your unique brand message.
Create a Positive Image
According to Gibson, service standards should be established, followed and frequently reviewed to ensure locations are compliant. This practice allows you to build a favorable brand image that mirrors your unique values and work ethics.
Capitalize on online reputation management solutions to stay on top of conversations about your brand and gather valuable insights to create a strong brand strategy.
Use Caution When Rebranding
At some point in your company’s history, you would need to switch things up to keep up with market advancements and maintain audience engagement. Rebranding your enterprise business, however, is a big step that requires careful planning and strict branding strategy implementation.
To successfully launch your rebrand, our branding and marketing company recommends you create a detailed plan that outlines the changes that must be made and identify key deliverables expected from each location. Most importantly, stay consistent with your tone and language to help your audience with the transition.
CASE STUDY
One of the biggest property restoration companies in the U.S. partnered with our brand management agency to handle its brand management campaigns across more than 180 locations. The client needed help balancing brand consistency and local relevance in its marketing campaigns.
To ensure each location was given proper attention, we created personalized optimization strategies tailored to each franchisee’s local page. Our digital marketing team also implemented combined SEO, paid advertising, reputation management and web development solutions to ensure branding consistency across the board.
Thrive’s brand management solutions resulted in:
+24.9M
Impressions
+276,457
New Website Users
+107,614
Organic Traffic
+89,422
Total Leads
Corporate and Franchisee Levels
Maintaining branding consistency is one of the keys to a successful franchise business. Done correctly, you can lure potential franchise investors, attract more customers and retain your existing client base. Digital brand management, however, is easier said than done.
Consistency in brand presentation, messaging, look and feel requires strict implementation of brand guidelines and adherence across locations. Partner with a reputable brand management agency to create a cohesive online and offline brand experience that will move your prospects closer to a sale.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is one of the trusted digital branding companies that provides full-service digital marketing solutions to local startups, franchises and multi-location businesses. Get in touch with one of our marketing specialists today to improve the level of consistency across your service locations.