Are you a franchisor who’s having trouble with getting your franchisee microsites up and running? Have you been working on mobile optimization for too long and can’t get it straight yet? Or, maybe you’re still having trouble figuring how to get your franchisees to update the promos on their site?
A strong brand presence online can be a great push for your business, but what good is it if you just can’t get it right? If you’re feeling like you’re stuck, frustration can start to build up and it can take a toll on you, your franchisees and your company.
So let’s get your franchisee sites and your online marketing strategy moving! In this post I’ll go over one step that you may be currently missing from your strategy and that may be delaying your franchise’s launch into the world wide web.
The Problem is in the Approach
It’s great that you’ve made the decision to represent your brand online but with the overwhelming amount of options out there to do it, it may be difficult to figure out which one is the right for your franchisee microsites.
After a lot of deliberating, you probably came up with one of two solutions: building the sites in-house (in case you have an IT department or by hiring a web design agency); or to use one of the MANY generic website builder options out there. This is where franchisors miss the mark:
Building Your Franchisee Microsites In-house:
If you have an IT department or you’ve decided to hire a web design agency, the problems will start to show up slowly but surely. A project like this is HUGE (specially in a franchise with lots of units) and it will be extremely resource consuming (both in time and money). It can take up to 6 months or a year to do and the project will still be going nowhere!
This is a complex project in on itself but, if you add the factor that you’ll need to manage a lot of people to get the franchisee sites up, it becomes a nightmare.
AND! once they’re up, it will be a pain to maintain because you’ll have to resort to a large group of people to make a simple edit! That’s no bueno!
Picking a Generic Website Builder:
It happens time and time again: franchisors with the need of a multi-site franchise website builder, resort to popular tools like Drupal, Joomla or WordPress to fulfill their marketing needs. And this is where they get it wrong and why they fail. Sure, they have multi-site plugins, are free and are well known, but they won’t work for you.
Why? Because they’re not built to manage multisites and allow brand compliance. They’re great tools for other use cases: it’s not a problem in their system, they’re just not the tool for the franchise market.
Plus, they may be free at first, but they take a long time to set up just the way you want them to be, which will consume precious resources like time and money.
The Solution: A Franchise Website Builder
What you need is to work with a franchise website builder, like Empowerkit, to get your franchisee microsites up in the web! You require a multi-site cms that has a delicate balance of time sensitivity and ease of use to catapult your brand into the world wide web. A tool that will let you concentrate on lead generation and an online strategy rather than on irrelevant details for you like plugins and codes.
We understand that, to start off, you’re probably a franchisor who doesn’t have time or the ability to make this kind of projects a success, so we’ve prepared for you the answer to all your problems: a franchise website builder.
Empowerkit is a franchise website builder that has the ability to manage multi-sites; the ease so you can intuitively create, edit and maintain complete franchisee microsites; the control you need to ensure brand compliance across the web; and the flexibility so you can work with your franchisees on localizing the content and marketing themselves online.
Plus! It will save you time an money!
Conclusion
So, think about it this way: what happens at the end of a 1 year period working with the wrong choices? You end up with a super scaled back version of what you wanted because you or your creative agency was way over their head and didn’t have expertise in this particular subject.
You need a specialized tool in this area rather than using your traditional web agency or website builders for projects of this complexity. It’s clear that you’ve spent a lot of time building your brand offline, so why wouldn’t you consider using the right tools to represent it online? A franchise website builder is the way to go!
If you have any questions about this post or Empowerkit, feel free to ask!
Please leave a comment