How to Level Up Your Franchise’s Website Content
As a franchise executive, one of your biggest challenges is maintaining brand consistency. This includes everything from the look and feel of your physical locations to the messaging and imagery used in marketing materials. And if you have multiple subsidiaries under your corporate umbrella, you need visibility into all online communications and marketing campaigns.
While your franchisees may operate in different spaces or sell a variety of products, they should all reflect the professional standards your parent company represents and leverage the shared best practices you promote.
Three franchise website content goals to work toward
Brand guidelines are the corporate standards that stipulate how a brand should appear to customers. They include everything from the company's logo and color scheme to its tone of voice and messaging.
When a franchisee ignores brand guidelines, it can have serious consequences. Customers may become confused by the lack of consistency, leading to a loss in trust that affects your company’s bottom line. By solving for central oversight issues in online communications, franchise executives can help ensure their brand appears as desired across affiliate websites.
Here are three key goals to pursue when increasing your support of subsidiary website production.
Goal #1: Instant brand identification
When customers visit your affiliate websites, they should be able to identify the brand immediately. Color schemes and design styles should be consistent across landing pages that target various regions or demographics or that even promote different marketing initiatives. Consistency builds trust and loyalty with your customers, ultimately leading to increased sales and revenue.
Goal #2: Franchise-wide adherence to best practices
As a parent company, you're responsible for imparting any brand guidelines your affiliates need to thrive. These may include design specs, writing style guides, and any preferred images and logos they need to accurately reflect your parent company’s standards. Their marketing communications should always adhere to these directives, especially when it comes to website production. The Squarespace Enterprise dashboard can help you standardize your subsidiaries' websites and oversee all production activity from a single place.
Enterprise templates empower your team members to quickly launch site content with brand-approved assets and formatting, making certain every website accurately represents your corporate standards. You can create exclusive templates according to your desired specs and then release them for franchise teams to access and modify.
Before each subsidiary website goes live, review it and identify any deviations from brand standards. You can then work with that site’s team to correct these issues (and prevent future ones) before impacting customers. Be sure to use a website platform with page drafting capabilities, so your team can securely review web pages before their launch and collaborate on changes. Tagging and filtering also help you label websites according to their development status and limit your dashboard view to projects that require review or extra attention.
Goal #3: Effective content
With a clear view of your subsidiaries’ online communications, you can provide more robust leadership when directing their marketing content development. By providing guidance to franchisees about what content performs best, or by repurposing content already proven to be effective across your subsidiary websites, you can drive more coherent and successful marketing campaigns across the business.
Download the Squarespace franchise report to learn how having the right website can improve your franchise’s customer experience and reinforce your brand.
Three challenges franchises often face in website development
Successful franchises need secure and collaborative systems to support their growing networks. Level up your website content by addressing these three main pitfalls of franchise web development:
Challenge #1: Improper security
Building new websites from scratch can be a daunting task, especially when your brand is growing quickly. Security should be the top priority, and breaches can deal a reputation blow to your business that’s hard to recover from. You need to make sure that the proper team members from your franchise have the proper role permissions for collaborating on site builds. Squarespace Enterprise offers SSO functionality that integrates with your company’s OAuth2 or custom SSO provider, automatically assigning employees the right permissions when they log into Squarespace.
Challenge #2: Arduous website development
Franchisors often face a lack of resources to build and maintain websites at the pace business demands. Duplicating pages and sections allows your team to add new content or update messaging quickly and efficiently, without changing the existing structure of your site. If you want to test changes before going live, page drafts help your team safely experiment with site updates and share them for approval before publishing.
Challenge #3: Cumbersome and opaque analytics
Website analytics can be difficult for franchises. Many franchise teams may use multiple tools and plug-ins as well as manual support to understand website performance. Franchisees need performance feedback to grow their businesses and understand consumer trends. Squarespace Analytics gives you insight into how your sites or individual pages are performing. With analytics, you can get a clear picture of your site visitors and their behavior through visual reports on statistics like pageviews, conversion, sales, referrals, and bounce rates.
Growing a business under the franchise model is exciting, but it comes with its own set of challenges. Franchisors must maintain consistent brand identity across their rapidly growing network, and this requires secure and collaborative workflows. Squarespace Enterprise helps you address these challenges by providing secure systems, consistent branding tools, scalability, and analytics.