Franchises – GatherUp

Trends & Challenges from the Emerging Franchisor Conference 2023

GatherUp — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:57:25 +0000

GatherUp was a sponsor at this year’s Emerging Franchise Conference hosted by the International Franchise Association (IFA). From a fun happy hour to a roundtable discussion to one-on-one conversations, we loved meeting and talking with growing franchisors and their partners.

"GatherUp was thrilled to contribute to this year's Emerging Franchise Conference. The event underscored the focus that successful franchise owners and operators have on building their online reputation, listening to customer feedback, and engaging customers with personalized experiences. We're committed to keeping GatherUp at the forefront of this through our software solution for franchise owners and their dedicated digital marketing agencies."

- Michael Yules, CEO, GatherUp

If you were unable to attend, or you’re curious as to our take on the conference and the topics discussed there, we’ve summarized our thoughts below!

Service is a key differentiator for customer loyalty

One major topic of discussion that came up in our roundtable discussion on Paving a Path to Customer Loyalty was customer service.

It’s no surprise that in the world of local businesses and franchises that service is paramount. Creating amazing customer experiences and providing reliable service is what sets many businesses apart from their competitors.

Exceptional customer service can create a strong and lasting impression on customers, making them more likely to choose your business over others. Secondly, it fosters customer loyalty and repeat business. When customers have positive interactions with friendly and attentive staff, they are more likely to return for future purchases.

Examples from franchises that are driving better service with personalized touches

Good customer service is one thing, but a delightful customer experience takes it a step further. And the key to delighting customers and driving customer loyalty usually comes from personalized touches.

One attendee of our roundtable discussion, Robert from Home360 mentioned recalling a unique experience at a car wash that showed his name and said hello as he entered and good-bye as he left. Even small gestures like that can make you feel seen and valued as a customer. Think little things that can go a long way.

Another roundtable attendee, Lauren, talked about how Millie’s homemade ice cream has a franchisee who is building a lighting system that will turn the lights to the favorite color of the person buying ice cream using their loyalty system. Talk about a fun way to combine technology with personalization in a way that brightens your customer’s day!

Balancing brand standards with local customization is challenging

Another frequently discussed topic at many IFA conferences is localization. And this conference was no different. Franchising can be tough for emerging franchisors as it requires you to relinquish control of some aspects of your brand. But franchisees have to have a certain amount of flexibility at the local level.

Localization of franchises involves adapting a franchise’s products, services, and operations to meet the specific needs and preferences of a local or regional market. This strategy is essential for franchise businesses looking to succeed in diverse markets and different geographical locations.

Localization can encompass various aspects, such as tailoring the menu or product offerings to cater to local tastes and dietary preferences without compromising on food quality or safety. Additionally, franchisors can adjust their marketing and advertising strategies to resonate with the cultural nuances and language of the local community, ensuring that their messaging is relatable and relevant.

One of the key benefits of localization is that it can help you build a stronger connection with the local customer base. By demonstrating an understanding of local culture and a commitment to supporting the community, you can establish a positive reputation and gain a competitive edge over non-local competitors.

Best practices for allowing localization

In one discussion we heard an approach that you can use to manage your brand standards while still allowing for localization. The approach uses three levels similar to the following:

Require: These are your brand standards that are non-negotiable and must be followed as part of the franchise agreement as they define who your brand is.
Recommend: These can be branding aspects that the franchise has had success with in the past that you recommend as a starting point.
Relinquish: These are certain branding aspects or materials that you give control to the franchisee to make customizations in order to allow for localization.

As one attendee, Saunda put it in regards to franchisees and collaboration in general, “facilitate, don’t dictate.”

Above all else though, effective localization requires thorough market research and a deep understanding of the target region to ensure that the adaptations are authentic and well-received. This is where reputation management at the local level can come in handy.

The Solution: Reputation Management

It shouldn’t be a surprise that our recommended solution to the trends and challenges above is reputation management.

Reviews have always been front and center when it comes to the success of franchise businesses.

And in case you didn’t know — GatherUp is about more than just reviews. In today’s world, we see reviews as a starting point. We believe the customer journey isn’t a straight line. Our mission is to help businesses transform every customer into a loyal advocate. Reviews are just the beginning of this loyalty loop.

GatherUp is a reputation management solution that can inform your business in a way that helps you improve your customer service, personalize your offerings, identify localization opportunities, and drive customer loyalty.

How does it work?

Customer feedback serves as a catalyst for business improvement. Positive feedback drives marketing efforts to attract new customers, while negative feedback triggers operational enhancements. These ongoing improvements contribute to a better overall customer experience.

What’s more, satisfied customers are then rewarded with customized text message campaigns, fostering loyalty. Increased loyalty results in higher visit frequency, greater lifetime customer value, and a higher likelihood of referrals.

GatherUp is a platform where you can centralize all locations of a franchise in one platform to make it easier to manage the reputation management process with top-down visibility while allowing for localized control. Want to see how it looks? Schedule time with one of our product experts!

5 Ways for Franchises to Utilize Customer Feedback Data

GatherUp — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 14:59:33 +0000

Gathering customer feedback gives you a wealth of insight you can use to make improvements to your franchise. Whether you want to gain an advantage over your competitors, grow the number of franchise locations or the volume of business at each location, or ensure your customers have a consistent and great experience at each locaation, look no further than the people who walk in your door every day.

You can solicit customer feedback through surveys — such as customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS). But the best kind of feedback is unwarranted — such as reviews. You can also collect feedback from Google and other online reviews that appear on third-party review sites, social media, or your website. You can even get valuable feedback during in-person customer interactions just by asking.

But what do you do with the data once you’ve got it?

Here are five ways you can strategically use customer feedback data to improve and grow your business.

1. Improve your product or service offerings

Take any negative feedback you might get — customer complaints, dissatisfaction with a product or service — along with requests for updated features and apply it to what your franchise sells. If you’re in retail, maybe you add a new popular brand to your product lineup or a new mobile app that makes delivery easier. If you’re a restaurant, maybe you improve the food quality or change up the menu.

Improving your product and service offerings makes your franchise more attractive to new and existing customers alike and helps ensure you don’t lose market share to the competition.

To learn more about about how Clean Juice, a juice and food bar franchise uses GatherUp to get customer feedback and insights that have grown their business to over 130 locations and counting — read it here.

2. Inform your content strategy

Figure out the types of questions your customers are frequently asking or the information they’re seeking, and turn it into content for your subscribers. You can create videos, emails, blogs, and social media posts, or even build out the FAQs section on your Google Business Profile with the specific knowledge and answers your customers are looking for.

Giving your customers quality, relevant content that establishes your franchise’s credibility and authority encourages more engagement from your customers and leads to more conversions.

3. Create an SMS opt-in list or loyalty program

Identify your satisfied customers and create an SMS (text) marketing list. You can ask them to opt in to get text communications with special offers, discounts, appointment confirmations, reminders, and more. You can also invite those same satisfied customers to join a loyalty program where they can earn points for making purchases and cash them in for a free product, service, or other reward.

Reinforcing customer satisfaction by providing convenience, relevance, and rewards helps build and maintain customer loyalty and retention.

SMS Marketing: Local Business & Franchise Guide

Getting started with SMS marketing is easier than you think!

Get the Guide

3. Build ad groups for customer acquisition

Segment your customer feedback based on different needs, preferences, challenges, and expectations, and then decide which customer groups you can target with ads. Then create ad copy that uses the customer’s own language and keywords to speak to the group’s specific pain points, barriers, and desires.

Using the customer voice to create highly targeted, relevant ads helps you gain traction with your target audience so you can attract and acquire new customers and grow your franchise.

5. Create employee training and retention strategies

Finally, take into consideration what your customers say about their interactions with your employees and use it to come up with employee training and retention strategies that address questions like:

Are your employees under-equipped to serve customers efficiently?
Are they empowered to answer questions or solve problems?
Are they overworked, burned out, and ready to quit?
Conversely, are there employees who are doing an amazing job and deserve more recognition?
If so, what are they doing right and how can it be replicated across all locations?

Properly training and encouraging your employees not only reduces customer complaints and creates a more positive customer experience, it also ensures that your franchise is well staffed with competent, empowered, happy employees who are capable of handling business volume and growth.

Gather feedback and get insights with GatherUp

To utilize customer feedback, you first need a reliable way to gather and make sense of it.

With GatherUp’s customer experience and reputation management platform for franchises and multi-location businesses, you can turn customer feedback into actionable insights that help spark innovation and ideas, expose much-needed improvements, and drive business growth.

GatherUp’s comprehensive tools and features enable you to survey your customers, request and collect customer reviews, and analyze the feedback in one place — whether you’re operating just a handful of franchise locations, or hundreds.

With the insights you get, you can take specific steps that reward your customers, increase engagement and loyalty, boost revenue, and even nurture happier, well-trained employees.

To learn how GatherUp can support your franchise, schedule a demo.

The Best Way to Set Up a Google Business Profile for Franchises

GatherUp — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 18:21:27 +0000

First off, before we talk about how to set up a Google Business Profile (GBP) for your franchise business, let’s talk about jus thow critical an optimization GBP is.

Why a Google Business Profile is Crucial for Franchises

If you think your GBP is just one more thing you need to manage that doesn’t actually matter all that much, think again. Turns out, it’s the top factor driving local search these days. That means when you have a multi-location business, each location needs an outstanding profile.

Regardless of the industry your franchise operates in, whether it’s a restaurant, retail store, fitness center, or service provider, a Google Business Profile (GBP) is an indispensable tool. A strong GBP enhances your franchise visibility but also serves as a virtual gateway for potential customers seeking information about your business.

From essential details like operating hours, location, and contact information to reviews, photos, and even a direct link to the franchise’s website, a well-optimized Google Business Profile offers a comprehensive snapshot of what the franchise offers. In an era where consumers rely heavily on online information to make purchasing decisions, having an up-to-date and engaging Google Business Profile is more than a marketing strategy – it’s a necessity for franchise businesses to thrive in the competitive landscape.

And how well you optimize your profile — per location — can make a measurable difference in search rankings and conversions. If you can properly set up your Google Business Profile, it’ll be sure to help you accomplish two important goals: improve your local search ranking and increase customer conversions.

Setting Up a Google Business Profile for Franchises: Step 1 — Bulk Up

Managing multiple GBPs for multiple locations is much, much easier when you get a bulk verified account through Google. This allows you to add, verify, and update locations at scale.

Here are some important things to know when setting up a bulk verified account:

The primary owner of the bulk account needs to be the same for all locations (you can’t have multiple primary bulk account owners). The owner requesting the account needs to have an email address with the business’s domain to verify their connection to the business.
You can organize it so that individual store managers can access and manage their own individual GBPs, if you choose.
Google may request photos that show external signage for some locations to verify your business.
Make sure to include a page on your website that lists every location and includes the correct address and phone number for each.
If you have any duplicate locations listed, remove those.
Google will ask for unique store codes for each location, but this is for organization purposes only and doesn’t impact search rankings.

Not sure how to set up a bulk account? Go here for step-by-step support.

When you’re able to easily set up and manage multiple business locations, then you have more bandwidth to focus on optimizations.

Setting Up a Google Business Profile for Franchises: Step 2 — Add Details

Pick your business categories

First determine the primary keyword you want to rank for, then choose the primary business category that most closely matches that keyword. The more specific you can get, the better.

Once you have your primary category locked down, add more categories so you can rank for each of those too. And if you’re not sure what to add, check out what your competitors have selected. There are a few tools you can use to dig into the keywords and categories of your competitors.

Bonus tip: If there are seasonal changes in the products or services you sell, try changing your primary category to reflect those changes. For example, if you have a plumbing business, you could change to “frost-proof faucets and spigots” in the fall and “leak detection and repair” in the spring. However, it’s a good idea not to change your primary category more than once a week to avoid raising red flags with Google.

Select predefined services

In the services section of your GBP, there’s an option to select predefined services. Check off all that apply to your business so you can start ranking well for those terms.

Include attributes

Another way to rank is when you include attributes of the business owner or the business itself. These can include things like “Black-owned business,” “women-owned business,” and many more. That way, if a potential customer is searching for those specific terms, your business has a greater chance of showing up higher in the search results.

Optimizing Your GBP for Multi-Locations & Franchises

For even more detailed recommendations about how to optimize your Google Business Profile, watch this webinar.

Watch on Demand

Then Get More Reviews

You may be aware that your star rating and the number of reviews you have can definitely impact search rankings. This is true across every location you have under your franchise business. But getting reviews across locations at scale can be challenging — this is where GatherUp can help.

GatherUp’s platform simplifies the review management process for you — allowing you to easily and efficiently gather, monitor, and respond to feedback and reviews and use them to inform your marketing campaigns (including SMS (or text) marketing), engage with customers, and improve the overall customer experience.

The platform also allows you to set appropriate user permissions to suit your organization’s needs. You can create multiple users and assign them access to certain locations — or all locations — empowering local teams to handle review management, or your corporate team to take charge.

To learn more about how GatherUp can support your franchise business, schedule a demo.

How Google Reviews Can Help You Successfully Launch a New Franchise Location

GatherUp — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 16:47:23 +0000

In 2022, there were an estimated 792,000 franchises in the U.S., with quick service restaurants and business services making up the largest and second-largest segments, respectively. Tech franchises have seen strong growth recently, as have health and wellness, pet services, and home improvement.

So, how do all these franchises hope to succeed in a sea of competition? The answer is dependent on many factors, of course, but one strategy that can make a measurable difference is utilizing Google reviews.

Though franchise marketing and SEO often rolls up under the larger corporate strategy, each location essentially functions as its own business, with its own unique employees, managers, customers, and quirks. So while your corporate office is focused on company-wide strategies and methods, your responsibility is at the local level to ensure your new location is visible online and able to reach new customers.

Gathering Google reviews for the new location is an important part of local SEO. When you build up a body of reviews, you can get a boost in your local search ranking. And appearing higher in search results helps your franchise get found by new local customers, increase conversions, and build trust within the community — all which can give you a competitive advantage.

Read on to learn the steps and methods for getting the Google reviews you need to help launch a new and successful franchise location.

1. Set up and manage a multi-location Google Business Profile

If you haven’t already done so, claim your business listing on Google by setting up a Google Business Profile. Use Business Profile Manager to create a business group where you can follow the steps to add multiple locations, including the new franchise location. Simply enter the details of the new location, such as the business name, address, contact info, and more.

Later, as Google reviews start coming in for the new location, you can sign into your profile account, click on your business group in the menu, and view or respond to reviews.

2. Ask customers for reviews

Though customers will sometimes leave reviews on their own, it’s better to ask them, since it can make the difference between passively waiting for a trickle of reviews to come in or proactively going after the number you have in mind.

When new customers make purchases or book services at the new location, be sure to get their email address and/or phone number along with permission to text them (if you plan to communicate with them by text).

Between email and text, you can quickly and easily start asking customers for reviews. Make sure to provide a link for leaving the review and that the process is as simple as possible. You can also ask for reviews in person, on your website, or through a variety of other ways that work best for your franchise.

3. Implement an ongoing review management strategy

Getting a few reviews and calling it a day doesn’t serve your franchise. You need an ongoing review management strategy that ensures you have enough reviews coming in to keep things fresh and reinforce with Google that your business is still functioning and legitimate.

Your review management strategy can encompass aspects of your corporate marketing and SEO strategy, too, and it’s important to make sure your local efforts align with corporate expectations. But at the local franchise level, your strategy should include, at minimum:

Actively listening to what customers are saying to figure out where improvements can be made to the new franchise location as well as the customer experience
Responding to all reviews — positive, neutral, or negative — to show local customers that you’re engaged, you understand their specific needs, and you’re willing and able to address any issues
Continually asking for and generating new reviews

4. Use a review management platform

Managing Google reviews takes time, especially if you’re trying to do it manually. One of the best things you can do when you launch your new franchise location is to adopt a comprehensive, automated review management platform at the same time.

That way you can hit the ground running with automated tools that help you get the reviews you need, monitor and reply to reviews, and gain powerful insights into your local customers — without expending huge amounts of energy or attention that need to be devoted to getting your location up and operating.

With an easy-to-use platform like GatherUp, you can combine review management with SMS marketing so you can quickly take the insights you get from customer reviews and turn them into personalized text communications for individual customers or for whole customer segments. You can send messages announcing special promotions, sales, or events, reminding customers of appointments or reservations, responding to customer service requests, and much more.

All your customer feedback, reviews, replies, and other important customer data can be found and managed in one place, with the ability to set user permissions however you need to, so you can hand over review management to the corporate office or keep it at the local franchise level if you prefer.

When it’s time to launch a new franchise location, making Google reviews a key part of your launch can go a long way toward ensuring its success.

To learn more about how GatherUp can support your individual franchise or multi-location business, schedule a demo.