What is franchise advocacy?

Getting every franchise to contribute to your social media activities can be challenging. One of the reasons is that not every franchisee has a marketeer or content creator in their staff, which means they may not have the time or knowledge to post on social media. But even when you suggest ready-to-share posts on an internal platform, your franchisees don’t always copy and share them on their regional corporate pages. How do you make sure your franchisees share relevant content on social media? And how do you maintain a consistent brand image? Meet franchise advocacy!

Franchisees as your brand ambassadors

With franchise advocacy, your franchisees become your brand ambassadors. This means that they share relevant content about your organization, on their corporate social media pages. To help them, you can create and suggest content for them at your marketing department. But they may also share their own content. Franchise advocacy is a great way to improve your reach and local visibility online. Why is that so important for you as a franchise marketeer?

Reach a new target audience

Well, local online visibility is important because 91% of shoppers first search for information online before buying a product or service. And what’s more, 46% of these online searches are local AND 78% of a brand’s followers visits their local store at least once. So with up-to-date social media channels for every franchise, you’ll reach these target groups more effectively. That’s where franchise advocacy comes in. Through your franchisees, you’ll reach a completely new audience and easily share locally relevant content. 

Save time on social media marketing

You may think that sharing social media content through your franchisees is too time consuming. After all, you have to log in, create a post, share it on multiple social media platforms, and log out again. And that on repeat for every franchise. Luckily, there’s an easier way! 

With franchise advocacy through a tool like Apostle, you’ll save a lot of time. You can schedule posts in advance for all your franchisees’ corporate pages, and check out your results in one convenient dashboard. You can even set up automatic approval workflows for your franchisees, to save even more time.

More control over your brand expressions

Franchise advocacy also helps you to keep an overview of all your social media expressions. And when you suggest content for your franchisees, you’ll have more control over what they share. This helps to ensure a consistent brand image, as well as relevant content for each region, country, or culture. With a franchise advocacy tool like Apostle, you can vary your content with easy-to-use translation and AI features, and schedule posts for specific groups of ambassadors.

Benefits for your franchisees

But why should your franchisees join your ambassador program? That’s easy: there’s a lot in it for them too! First of all, your franchisees may not have the time or knowledge to keep their corporate pages up to date. Through franchise advocacy, you can help them with professional, relevant, and ready-to-share content. That way, your franchises will have great social media pages - without the effort. It will only take them about 10 minutes a month.

Second, franchise advocacy strengthens their regional visibility online, which helps to attract a greater number of customers to their stores. Lastly, by being active on social media together, your franchisees will stay informed of what is happening in your organization. This increases the connection they feel with headquarters and other franchisees.

Get started with franchise advocacy

Franchise advocacy gives you more control over your brand expressions, increases your regional visibility online, and helps you to reach new target groups. Want to know how others starting a successful ambassador program? Check out Autohopper's success case or the success case of De Hypotheker for franchise advocacy.