Franchising businesses rely on a strong brand to attract franchisees and get customers through their door.
Customers rely on brands to deliver positive experiences, and expect those experiences to be consistent between franchisees.
Whether it’s a fast-food chain or an auto service franchise, customers expect the same products and services across county, state, and even national lines.
Efficient franchise operation demands the ability to establish and secure your brand in a comprehensive way.
Digital asset management (DAM) technology is the engine that drives value for franchisors that need to communicate branding materials to franchisees. It also gives franchisees on-demand access to crucial branding and training materials.
The benefits of digital asset management go beyond secure video and image hosting. The ability to deploy online courses and perform video analytics enables new, value-driven content management benefits on a global scale.
Digital Asset Management safeguards brand reputation
Franchisors cannot look over every franchisee’s shoulders. There is a degree of trust shared between a brand’s owner and the organization representing that brand in a particular territory.
Reputation damage is one of the biggest risks that franchisors expose themselves to when licensing their brand to franchisees. This often happens because the franchisee does not have access to the appropriate branded materials – and simply decides to make their own.
Digital asset management prevents this kind of miscommunication from happening. On its most fundamental level, your DAM solution is a centralized library for image and video hosting. It is the place where franchisees go to obtain pre-approved promotional images, document templates, and marketing video content.
A comprehensive DAM solution makes it easy for franchisees to find the right digital content when they need it. Enabling franchisees to find and implement the content they need makes it unlikely they will risk your brand’s reputation, by creating their own without franchisor approval.
Digital Content Management for employee training: Consistent online courses
Products and services are not the only things that franchise customers expect consistency from. Employees also need to follow consistent guidelines, creating a unified customer experience for every visitor.
There is no way to ensure consistent employee behavior without consistent employee training. DAM solutions make it possible for owners to leverage online courses on a brand-wide scale. This ensures new employees have access to the content they need, localized to their preferences and delivered in the language they understand best.
Franchisors can use video analytics to enforce compliance, too. Video engagement heatmaps can show DAM administrators how much of a video individual users have interacted with.
If employees only watch 50% of a training video, franchisors have a responsibility to act. It’s vitally important that employees benefit from consistent training in order to guarantee positive results for customers.
Franchises that don’t enforce comprehensive training expose themselves to serious risks. Imagine a customer informing a fast food employee that they have a specific food allergy. If that employee was never trained on how to handle food allergy requests, they could easily send that customer to the emergency room, and expose the brand to an expensive, brand-damaging lawsuit.
Franchise owners must also give the same consideration to kitchen safety, heavy equipment usage, and a broad range of potentially dangerous employee activities.
Franchises that leverage online courses and video analytics lower average training time and improve compliance across the entire organization. Giving employees direct access to the franchise owner’s branded training materials ensures consistent, scalable results that can expand across borders.
Branded promotions and merchandising content for franchisees
Franchise owners don’t make ad-hoc marketing decisions. When they provide their franchisees with materials to create new, branded experiences for customers, it is the result of analyzing hard data. Their marketing teams glean customer data, perform interviews, and verify their insights in test markets before rolling out brand-wide promotional initiatives.
Once the franchise owner greenlights a promotional initiative, it’s up to franchisees to implement it. This is another area where having a clear path of communication between franchisors and franchisees pays off.
It’s vitally important that no franchisee is left behind. If operators don’t understand the details of an upcoming promotion, or are unsure of how to implement it, it exposes the brand to risk. That franchisee may make their own materials, or copy them from another franchisee rather than getting them directly from the source.
Franchisors need to implement solutions that maintain stable lines of communication and control for managing and monitoring promotional initiatives. New products and seasonal offers need to be consistent in order to drive growth for the brand. Mistakes can be costly.
Franchises that utilize a centralized digital asset management solution are able to gather and analyze data in granular detail. Marketing experts can rate the performance of localized content in an organized way, while providing ad-hoc assistance to franchisees whose performance seems to be lagging behind.
Without a DAM solution in place, it falls on franchisees to communicate their needs to franchisors. This does not always happen in a timely manner, leading to situations where the franchisor only steps in once it’s too late, and brand damage has already been done.
“Digital marketing is essential to any franchisor trying to grow their brand. Franchisors have had to quickly up their game and become experts in social media, using digital assets and creative marketing material in order to keep up, and above all to stay relevant. Having a system that helps franchisors manage this activity ensures their message is consistent across all marketing platforms.”
-Melanie Lyons, Digital Marketing Coordinator at Franchise Direct
Make content creation scalable and organized
Digital asset management empowers franchisors to direct content creation on an organization-wide scale. Beyond connecting with remote working graphics and video creators, the DAM also enables local franchisees to contribute to the brand. Franchisees can send media in bulk, on the fly, back to franchisors whenever needed.
At the same time, franchise owners require telecommuting infrastructure to make their presence felt throughout diverse territories.
Franchises cannot leverage consistent growth without deploying a purpose-built solution for communicating media between content creators, brand owners, and franchisees. A centralized, data-centric solution for content management enables on-demand compliance and gives franchises the security they need to expand safely.
