Local marketing is an essential part of gaining new customers at your business. While your franchise may have national brand recognition, it’s important to let your community know you’re open for business. Learn four ways you can get started marketing your education franchise.
Get Social on Facebook
If it feels like everyone is on social media these days, that’s because a majority of people are. Facebook alone has 1.84 billion active users scrolling their feeds every day. As an education franchise owner, this fact means you have an opportunity to reach potential customers where they’re already spending their time online.
At iCode, our customer demographic includes parents, oftentimes moms, interested in helping their kids explore their interest in tech and engage in productive after-school activities. Many of these parents use Facebook to keep up with friends, review businesses, and get recommendations.
To utilize this platform for local marketing, we suggest making a Facebook business page for your education franchise location. Your franchisor, like iCode, may even provide guidance and access to creative to post on your page.
Partner with Schools & Children’s Franchises
One of the best local marketing strategies you can use as an education franchise owner is to partner with schools and children’s franchises within your community. Since you’ll be serving grade school students, elementary, middle, and high schools will provide you with a pool of potential students.
Schools love iCode. Our franchise owners find it easy to partner with schools to market to kids and their parents. The schools see immense value in a children’s franchise that can provide students with an education in coding and computer science, classes often missing from many schools’ offerings.
Children’s franchises and groups like trampoline parks, go-kart tracks, tutoring services, and sports leagues can also give you opportunities to market your business. Since your customer pool overlaps, many of these businesses and groups are willing to enter partnerships that enable you to market to one another’s customer base.
Optimize Your Website for Local Search
iCode provides our franchisees with a location-specific website that enables them to rank for local search and provide customers with accurate information about the business. These sites include multiple pages that can be optimized for local keywords.
To increase the visibility of your website, it’s important to link your site on all business directory listings, such as Google My Business. Many people searching for local information will consult Google directories first. If your website is listed, your potential customer will be able to easily navigate to your site for more information.
Don’t Forget About Your Current Customers
An often-overlooked source of revenue is your current customer base. Your customers have already shown interest in your education franchise and may be open to putting their other kids in a program, referring a friend, or enrolling in additional classes.
Let’s say you have a student that comes to your education franchise for summer camp. This student may benefit from weekly classes, but his or her parents may not know about all the other programs you offer. This would be an ideal audience for an email campaign focused on getting customers engaged with other offerings.
Start an Education Franchise
Interested in learning more about owning an iCode? Reach out to our team for more information.