Adam Blackford-Mills suggests three ways to use analytics to boost your franchise’s performance
If you’ve bought a franchise, or are in the process of starting one, Google Analytics is a great tool to help you manage your digital marketing.
Analytics gives you a bird’s eye view over all your franchisees, giving you the tools and the data you need to make effective business decisions. At the store level, franchisees can isolate their specific data, so they can measure their own performance at a level that makes sense to them.
As a franchise, it’s important that you have a consistent business model. This ensures a reliable level of quality and service.
It also presents the business as having a single voice on a single issue. This is particularly important in today’s social media scandal-filled world.
Analytics gives you a view over your franchise that is aggregated and telling a single story. For those at the top of a franchise, this is what you care about: the big picture.
But as you go down to the regional level and then store level, the data you need becomes more and more selective. Fortunately, Analytics is flexible enough to handle this tool. And what’s best is that it can do it from the same account, with specialised dashboards and reports, so everyone can use the data, but you stay in control.
So, if you want to know how to manage your marketing budget or how to track your conversions, Analytics could be the tool for you.
1. Manage your marketing budgets
Having access to referral channels and customer interactions allows you to prioritise your marketing budget. It allows you to reduce funding in your weaker performing areas and reinvest it in marketing channels that are performing well.
For example, if your social media traffic is doing well, but PPC is struggling, you can redirect that wasted PPC budget into more favourable social media advertising.
Attribution modelling allows you to follow the path your customers take.
You can assign specific values to your attribution channels depending on your business model. This is to tell you which marketing channels are most effective overall.
At the franchisee level, the data they collect might not be enough to be statistically relevant to make a business-wide decision, but by tracking all your franchise sites, you are better informed.
2. See what your customers are doing
Tracking is essential if you want good data. By putting a single tracking code across all your franchise websites, you can easily collate the data you need make powerful marketing decisions.
Analytics allows you to track average time customers are spending on pages, as well as their bounce rates. This insight tells you which parts of the site are most popular and where people are leaving. A high bounce rate tells you that customers aren’t getting what they expect, or are having trouble navigating the site.
This allows you to modify the content and structure of sites to help reduce bounce rates on your franchise sites. You can also discover what devices your customers are using, so you can further personalise your offerings.
This data also gives you an interesting picture of what certain people like in certain places. Your franchise may have the same broad demographics, but local stores may have customers with unique quirks.
Tracking codes allow you to see things like this and allow you to create better experiences for every customer.
The ability to track customer journeys and interactions allows you to build a picture of what your remarketing campaigns will look like. If you see lots of people abandoning baskets in your franchise e-commerce sites, for example, you can roll out a special campaign.
Targeted specifically at people who abandon their basket, you can target personalised deals to encourage people to come back.
This doesn’t just help your business as a whole, but allows you to support your franchisees without having boots on the ground. While one tracking code doesn’t work for every business model, franchises are well placed to exploit the benefits for this very reason.
3. Provide the right reports to the right people
Franchisors have to communicate data insights to their franchisees regarding the behaviours of their customers on both a micro and macro level.
Custom reports give all stakeholders the data they need when they need it.
Using Analytics, you can create custom reports that specifically cover the franchise in question.
Their keywords, conversion rates and traffic can be isolated via filters. This gives your franchisees the data they need to make their local marketing a success.
All of the reporting data is delivered in real time, which has two big advantages. Firstly, you don’t have to wait for results, like some Google Ads strategies. You get the data you need, up to date, when you need it.
Secondly, you can actively track the effect of changes and monitor performance proactively.
Analytics is a powerful tool in any digital marketer’s tool belt. But for franchises, its ability to interpret data from multiple perspectives makes it particularly effective.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Blackford-Mills is Digital Sales & Marketing Director at MRS Digital. Adam has over 10 years of experience in sales and digital marketing. Adam works tirelessly to develop digital solutions that expand online marketing potential for businesses and delivers results. Using innovative and actionable thinking, Adam crafts a unique digital experience for every business. http://mrs.digital
