In the age of big conglomerates, consolidation and globalization, most marketing messages these days are as bland as can be. “Sterile and safe” seems to be the mantra.

We have the priveledge of representing a food franchise with less than 20 locations as one of our clients. We develop, deploy and integrate an overall quarterly marketing plan but also take great efforts to work with each franchisee (that wants the help!) in developing unique campaigns and outreach efforts that takes into account the unique opportunities and problems for that individual market.

One of the marketing efforts that we are giving more weight to, moving forward with this client, is online marketing. There are many reasons for this including low upfront cost, high ROI, word of mouth and many others. As the first prong of this effort, we developed unique restaurant “microsites” within the main corporate website where customers could go and find unique menus, comment cards, directions and unique store promotions and coupons. Aside from giving each franchisee their own “localize and personalize” medium, it’s had a great effect on that store’s “Search Engine Optimization” helping that microsite come up on the first page for search results related to specific keywords. The next phase of this online outreach is a targeted effort towards the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. and some franchisees have already embraced this.

One restaurant franchise that has really embraced this effort, whole-hog, has been Smokey Bones. Smokey Bones appoints an actual employee to manage the store’s microsite which includes a blog function for upcoming events, facebook pages and more. Not only have they have embraced the localize and personalize effort in the online medium but they have also ensured that the effort is managed, not by some faceless corporate employee, but rather by an actual employee with a stake in the game.

We will be testing some online initiatives with the client mentioned above in July and August and I will keep you posted.

Harold Henn

Chief Marketing Officer

Endeavour Marketing and Media, LLC