What to Know About Optimizing Your Franchise’s Ads for Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram

With more than 4.48 billion active users as of July 2021, social media is one of the fastest-growing channels you can use to market your franchise. But first, you need to determine who your audience is. Are they socializing on Facebook and Instagram, networking on LinkedIn or scrolling a food blog on Instagram? Whatever the case, it’s important to tailor your ads for each platform so you’re reaching prospects effectively. 

Content Optimization

For the most part, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn advertisements serve the same purpose, but you need to be consistent with your content across all platforms. Make sure you establish your brand’s voice on each platform, including in tone, images, customer replies and social media posts.

The key to proper branding and content comes from understanding your audience and how they want to be engaged by content. 

Understand Your Audience and Know Where to Reach It

The first step to understanding your audience is knowing who your ideal franchisee is. Are they a young and up-and-comer in their career, are they seasoned business owners or are they coming out of corporate America looking to take charge of their career? Once you’ve nailed the demographics, then you can start advertising.

If you’re looking to recruit a younger demographic, Instagram is likely your best bet. As of July 2021, roughly 32% of global Instagram audiences were aged between 25 and 34 years. If your demographic is a more professional crowd, you may have luck reaching people networking on LinkedIn. Facebook presents the opportunity to have a further reach with demographics across the board — making it a good place to start advertising and seeing who is interacting with your ads.

Social Media Advertising is Pay-to-Play

When it comes to advertising on social media, it’s best to proceed with caution and with a very specific budget in mind. Never forget that spending more money doesn’t necessarily equate to greater success, and it’s quite easy to waste money on social ads.

Try to determine what your pay-per-click budget is based on the goals of your ad — engagement, click throughs, impressions and lead conversions. Several factors impact the performance of your ad, including click-through rate, relevance, the target audience size, time of day and where you’ve placed your ad. All of these factors will help inform your cost-per-click and can help you determine how to better budget your ad spend in the future.

Organic Posts Should Inform Your Ads

Your ads seek to motivate people to franchise with your brand and click through to learn more about what that opportunity means for them, but paid-for ads shouldn’t be your only efforts to reach prospective franchisees. You should have a regular stream of organically posted content that informs them on who you are, what your brand does and what products or services it offers.

Getting results from social media with only organic content is a massive challenge due to the algorithms powering the platforms. Some of your organic posts will resonate with your audience and others won’t, but tracking which posts get the most likes, clicks, shares and comments will help you curate stronger ads. Use what you’ve learned from organic posts to refine your ads to maximize potential leads.

Measure and Report Results

Measuring whom you’ve reached, how many people clicked on the ad and how many leads it generated is a key part of proving the value of your ads and the time spent creating them. Taking the time to review the analytics from your ads will also help you learn more about what worked and what didn’t. Perhaps people clicked through on more video ads than they did static images, or maybe you thought your ideal franchisee was on Facebook when really you had better luck on LinkedIn. Whatever the case, knowing where your most effective ads are and what they look like can help you direct your budget towards better campaigns that will generate the most qualified leads.