Tom Feltenstein

Today, social media is heralded as the end all be all to help grow your business. It seems that endless opportunities abound for anyone who has mastered this revolutionary practice. Once your Facebook and Twitter accounts are active and videos posted on YouTube, with the wave of a wand and an utter of the magic word – Abracadabra – you’ll have more customers than ever before and you can sit back and watch your bank account grow. As if! Social media can’t and won’t magically build your business. What most people don’t realize is that building your friend or fan list on this type of media is not the same as developing an effective marketing strategy.

The number of views or followers doesn’t determine your actual success. Fans, apps, tweets, or videos don’t constitute a solid marketing strategy. How much money are you making with social media? Can you make a direct correlation to internet sales and the number of fans you have? Have your YouTube videos demonstrating how great your products and/or services are increased the number of new customers?

While I’m not discounting the value of social media, which for small businesses or ones with a niche product or service is a great way to get your name in front of a large customer base for a relatively low cost, the problem is that the majority of companies focus too much on the latest social media trends rather than on their customers. When it is all said and done your customers don’t care about how many fans or video testimonials you have. They want to feel valued and be treated with respect. While I believe social media is valid and has its place, I know from experience that social media will never replace the personal touch.

Are you aware that 93% of local store marketing dollars are wasted on ineffective or poorly executed programs with little or no ROI? This dire situation, which has wreaked havoc with franchisees all over North America, has haunted me for a decade.  I finally came up with the solution! And at the International Franchise Association’s national convention on February 7, 2010, I rolled out my innovative plan for franchisees called Precision Marketing. Here it is…I want to take 2% of the franchisee marketing budget, allocate it to a national fund that is spent proportionally back every month in all the franchisee locations.

After merging local and national-fund marketing dollars, we create a 12-month marketing plan that includes a tightly integrated approach of promotions, incentives and tactics customized to each franchisee’s operation.  Through the pooling of all marketing dollars, franchisees get to see a huge economy of these promotions.  This enables franchisees to have programs working on their behalf that they could never do themselves; now these programs are done for everyone!

The real eye-opener for franchisees is when they see that the dollars they send into the franchisor are now being proportionally sent back to their location. For example if the franchisee makes average unit sales of 700K, if your fund becomes a total of 4%, that is $28,000 spent effectively back in their own store!

This is a bold move for a franchise to take, but I’m confident that implementing this system will allow franchisees to provide better service, increase sales, and enjoy the freedom to really focus on what’s important, without having to worry so much about marketing.

I’ve put more information about my Precision Marketing on my website, so click here if you want to read more plus get the five most powerful reasons franchisees are getting on board with this system. Post a comment if you have any more questions or call my office at 561-6501-1315.