You can take advantage of local event marketing to capture more market share and connect with the community. All kinds of businesses, from retailers to restaurants, hold marketable franchise events. Live local events are a powerful way to get customers in your door.
Keep reading to learn more about experiential marketing for franchisees.
Experiential Marketing for Franchisees
Franchise marketing enables you to attract new clients or customers. Overall, it serves two purposes.
One part of franchise marketing involves finding new locations. However, the second part of franchise marketing is about how you attract local business.
Often, it’s more challenging to market a franchise. There’s a lot to consider on a global, national and local level when it comes to franchise marketing. You must create a marketing plan that’s consistent and duplicable.
Experiential marketing is a straightforward but powerful marketing tactic that can help you to do the latter. More importantly, you can repeat a successful live marketing event across all your franchises.
Developing a Strategy
There’s a trend that’s occurring across most industries. A growing number of businesses are shifting toward digital marketing.
As this trend emerges, it may seem like traditional marketing methods are falling out of favor. These methods might include public relations, direct marketing, print advertising—and experiential marketing.
It’s true that it’s essential to build a strong digital marketing channel. Franchisees must have a robust online presence.
Furthermore, they must optimize that presence for search engines. All these tasks are a critical function of effective marketing today.
Yet, companies are forgetting tried-and-true methods of marketing that work, like live marketing, as they embrace new technologies.
Here’s where your franchise can stand out.
Every Market Is Different
Marketing is vital for the success of your franchise. It’s also vital for your success as an individual franchisee in a local market.
The franchise provides you with a blueprint for growth. They compose a structure for your marketing strategy.
However, you can create a heightened level of brand awareness with live marketing. Experiential marketing has repeatedly proven itself as an effective strategy for promoting brand loyalty.
It’s not that you should choose live marketing over digital marketing or vice versa. In fact, you ideally want to use a combination of the two marketing channels.
Eyes on the Prize
Experiential marketing can help you to strengthen your franchise marketing strategy. It can work seamlessly with your franchise blueprint for success.
A veteran experiential agency can help you to develop the perfect live marketing campaign that meets the standardization policies of your franchise. More importantly, an experienced agency can help you develop an effective live marketing plan for bolstering the image of your franchise in your local market.
The plan will revolve around telling your brand story. It will raise brand awareness and establish the market position of your franchise. Most importantly, however, it will deliver a significant return on investment.
Real People, Real Experiences
In recent years, some firms have recognized the power of experiential marketing. Live event experiences are especially important for millennials and Gen Z, who are just now becoming the top breadwinning demographics for marketers.
Over the years, consumers have become unpredictable. In a digitally powered world, brands need something extra to sway buyers’ opinions.
Without a doubt, experiential marketing has served this need. It effectively motivates consumers to take action.
A Framework for Experiential Franchise Marketing
Experiential marketing is all about creating experiences. More importantly, it’s about connecting with your audience.
Live marketing involves an experience of the senses. More importantly, it’s about creating a positive experience for consumers.
It’s a marketing event that’s a livable and memorable experience.
This kind of event triggers powerful emotions. It compels users to convert. In the end, it can help your franchise develop long-term, loyal followers.
Experiential Marketing Tactics
Even within experiential marketing, there have been innovations. Furthermore, they’ve delivered phenomenal results. New trends in experiential marketing include:
• Flash mobs
• Local event marketing
• Pop-up store marketing
• Shopping center marketing
These events styles are all innovations in experiential marketing. One or a combination of them can help you to generate positive experiences.
It takes a considerable amount of work to host an experiential event, let alone multiple events. It’s understandable why the amount of work involved to host a live event might raise concerns.
Think about all the things you must consider when hosting a personal holiday event. Now, imagine that level of planning tenfold.
Fortunately, you can choose your level of involvement. You can provide an expert experiential agency with your desired results, and they can take the reins.
A trusted agency can help you to come up with excellent experiential marketing ideas. You can also participate in the development and execution of a live marketing event as much as you’d like.
Experiential Marketing Is a Timeless Strategy
Today, we’re in a moment in time that will change society forever. Despite these dramatic changes, experiential marketing will continue to deliver positive results for businesses.
Now, the focus is on millennials. For this group, live experiences remain a critical part of the buying process. As a franchisee, it’s important to continue to innovate to reach the millennial market.
Moving forward, it’s likely that local event marketing will evolve. Brands will start to incorporate live streams into experiential events as part of their marketing campaigns. We’ll suggest ways that you can take advantage of this trend in a moment.
Standing Out from the Crowd
With this in mind, many marketers are already testing new tactics. In the process, they’re learning how technology can support them in creating buyer experiences.
In this new environment, there’s plenty of room for both live and digital marketing. In fact, digital marketing enables you to create more personalized and direct actions related to live events.
This trend is common in retail experiential marketing. It’s also becoming increasingly common in restaurant experiential marketing.
You can use digital marketing to create a more immersive experience for your local market, no matter what kind of franchise you operate.
Promoting Franchise Growth
More than likely, your franchise brand is growing. You may even have plans to open new franchise branches.
In these instances, successful local franchise marketing is an important part of that growth. It’s also essential to ensure continual profit.
You can facilitate this process by doing more at the local level. With experiential marketing, you can generate more leads and turn them into paying customers.
Here’s the perfect time to use a combination of live and digital marketing. This tactic can elevate your franchise growth from “acceptable” to “exceptional.”
Whether hosting a grand opening or customer appreciation event, experiential marketing helps to get customers in your doors. Your franchise will guide the event. However, you can also help to promote the event digitally and at a local level with social media.
Gearing up for an Event
The success of local event marketing today usually weighs heavily on one task—how well you execute local digital marketing about the event.
You should begin local event marketing well before the day of the event. The idea is to build a sense of urgency.
For instance, you could create a Facebook event page. You can also schedule a series of social media posts leading up to your event. You can also create an email blast containing messaging about the event.
All your event messages can drive traffic to an RSVP page. Alternatively, you can use your messages to send traffic to a lead capture page made especially for the event.
Event Execution
Effective marketing is essential for promoting event participation. However, you also want to keep the momentum going during the event. In this way, you can sustain engagement and brand loyalty.
Your event may last a few hours or a few weeks. In either case, a thoughtful digital marketing strategy can foster a sense of community. More importantly, it can increase brand loyalty and customer referrals.
Building on the Buzz
Eventually, your event will come to an end. Still, your work’s not done. What if you could keep the buzz going about your event, even after it’s ended? Well, you can.
With this point in mind, you can make good use of your email lists and social media accounts to promote event highlights. You can even publish articles and pictures about your events on your local franchise blog.
You can use these marketing channels to highlight the best moments of your events. Moreover, you can showcase your pride in the community in which you serve.
Managing Multiple Activations
You can take advantage of experiential marketing to promote all your current and future franchises. Experiential marketing is a simple and duplicable marketing strategy. It’s an exceptional way to build a sense of community.
Also, live marketing can encourage discussion about your brand. With a great live marketing event, you’ll give the community a reason to speak about your franchise branch on social media.
The images and stories that you capture during these events also add to your marketing arsenal. They serve as great locally focused content to promote future events.
Live Experiences Your Market Won’t Forget
We hope that our brief guide has helped you see the power of experiential franchise marketing. If you want to create a perfectly executed experiential event, we can help.
At Auctus Agency, we’re experts in creating experiences that connect your brand to the world. We can help you to create and execute the perfect experiential marketing strategy.Please feel free to contact us today to get the conversation started about successfully promoting your franchise in the community.
