Welcome to my blog where I’ll be writing about some of the risks, challenges and solutions to managing a brand online when you have more than one website using the brand. I’ll also be writing about our solution,
webtreepro, and offering some best practices that our customers are using to keep their sites fresh and relevant in an increasingly crowded and competitive space.
Website presence offers some particular challenges to franchisors, dealerships and associations. These types of organization need to preserve their brand and speak with one voice. But this often conflicts with the benefit of having multiple, locally relevant sites for a greater footprint on the web and better visitor experience.
Virtual Presence = Physical Presence
If you’re operating a franchise or dealership model, you go to great pains to make sure there’s a store everywhere you can put one, and that they all reflect your standards. So why wouldn’t you want the same for your online presence?
You should have a site for every location (to make sure it’s locally relevant) and they should all maintain your standards. Seems simple enough, right?
The Catch-22
On the one hand. . .
You can control your brand identity by having one, monolithic site, but you may miss out on having a bigger footprint with multiple sites. Plus, your local franchisees, dealers or association chapters have limited, or no local voice. This doesn’t make them happy, and doesn’t serve the site visitor with local relevance.
On the other hand. . .
If you deploy individual sites for each local unit, you run the risk of your brand being compromised on each local edition. In fact, the bigger your franchise, the more risk you assume. You size should be an asset, but on the web becomes a liability since there are so many more “versions” of your brand.
Using both hands. . .
If you wanted it both ways, you could retain publishing control over all your sites. This means that all local updating must be submited to, and published by, headquarter staff. If you have just a handful of sites, this is d0-able, but inefficient. If you have many sites, it becomes highly impractical and costly. In fact, two hands may not be enough.
So what’s a brand or organization manager to do?
You’d think in this era where technology and marketing/communication is merging, there’d be a better way. We did! As software architects with deep ties to the franchise industry, we couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a better solution. Beyond what we already knew about franchising, we asked franchisors what would make a real difference in their online presence.
Here’s what they told us:
- We should be able to deploy an unlimited number of sites and then maintain electronic control of all the look, feel, branding and messages that appeared on them.
- We don’t want to manage all the local content, so we need to enable each site’s “owner” to add some local color too. Many businesses promote differently by region/season, and our franchisees want to be able to promote the goods and services that do well in their communities.
- We must retain control over how much a franchisee or local owner can do, and we need to be able to access their sites so we can take care of anything that’s out of bounds
- Our users have a wide range of skills, so it’s gotta be pretty simple to use–but we also need to have sites that look and act modern, so it must be powerful
- We need the ability to change a message, promotion or other content so that it instantly appears on each site in the network, without having to do this manually on each site or depend on the local owner.
- We absolutely must have sites that are search-engine friendly and let us take advantage of tools and analytics that improve our chances
Really, is that asking too much?
After looking around and seeing no purpose-built solution, we did learn that a few organizations had taken the approach of purchasing a traditional content management system (CMS) and customizing it to support this parent/child relationship. It can be done. . . but at huge initial and ongoing expense. Why? Because the CMSs aren’t built with this unique parent/child site relationship in mind.
What we came up with is a product that’s purpose-built for franchises, dealerships and associations. You build, edit and host your sites on a single platform that’s in the hands of the communicators. It’s add-water-and-stir.
The implementation model is simple. . . we set up an organization “Parent” site using their design. Once that process is done (usually a week–two at most), we conduct initial online user training, and the business people take over. . . adding pages, content and even instantly creating child sites for each local unit. We find the learning curve is about a week, because all editing is done truly inline–you’re creating and editing content just as it appears on the page. In other words, you don’t need to learn a lot of new process because it’s a lot like what you already know.
Pricing is scaled to the size of the organization and the number of sites they’ll have. But most of our customers are pretty surprised with how low it is.
To keep it simple, we decided to make it available in the SaaS model (Software-as-a-Service), so it’s completely web-based. No hardware, no software, no maintenance releases and no “reaching back into your pocket” by forcing you to buy upgrades.
On a recent (and rare) day off, I got an email from a brand new customer asking if I could help them with a need for their site. They had just signed up for some third-party content and forgot how to make it appear on their pages. Fortunately, I was at the library with my kids, and they were engrossed in their books. So, I logged into their site, made the necessary settings and had their content showing within two minutes. This was something they could have done just as quickly, but we’re always there to help out too!
Does everything have to be so complicated?
Anyway, the point is that marketing and other communication needs to happen in real-time if it’s to achieve any sort of results. For too long, this process has relied on too many people and too many moving parts. To quote a former colleague from my time in franchise, “Why does it have to be so complicated?”
We say, “It doesn’t.”