You need to look at your outreach as an orchestra of influence, with each instrument adding to the emotional impact on your customer.  Study what happens when you send an email without the radio ad, and try to correlate whether the combination of channels leads to better outcomes.  Modern ‘big data’ systems give us the tools to perform multi-channel analysis; and while even it is not a perfect predictor of human behavior, it’s a lot better than the fallacy of single-channel attribution.  

Naturally everyone wants their website or business to be the best possible answer to virtually any associated search query, but Google has to prevent people from ‘cheating’ their way into prominent position.  If a website proprietor can ‘game’ the Google search algorithm, Google ceases delivering the ‘best possible’ answer to our questions and we (the audience) disappear – and with us Google’s main source of revenue!  Many have tried, and most have been penalized for trying to cheat their way into page position.

Successful franchisees want to be rock stars of local marketing, writing, playing, and performing to earn fans (customers) that will fuel their success.  They’re not rebelliously breaking away from the franchisor; but, they own and operate an independent business and they suffer the consequences of failure personally.  They can’t afford to be complacent and hope that a national strategy pans out, they have bills to pay and they need to acquire customers by whatever means necessary to serve that end.  Sometimes, however, as with any rock star, success leads to excess, and the customers start to hear five songs or more layered on top of one another, five messages from five franchise locations or more clashing and weakening each other.

There’s a difference between meaningless and purpose-less, and every name should have a purpose, especially as your audience shrinks from ‘everyone’ to a specific type of buyer.  You may have noticed a lot of businesses that take on a family name, which is meaningless, right?  True, but most of these businesses add a descriptive suffix so that you know what they do; i.e. “Alex & Sons PLUMBING”.  Getting found without people being able to instantly know what Alex and his sons actually do would be difficult.  Why add an unecessary layer of abstraction to people knowing what your business does? 

Each franchise market is unique, offering and emphasizing a different set of service or product offerings than others based on the tastes, needs and competitive influences of their individual market.  This can make it seem almost impossible for the franchise owner to craft a coordinated, brand-consistent, yet locally-relevant online strategy for each franchise location.  A problem only exacerbated in a market where the technology advances so rapidly that just keeping up at a corporate level is almost impossible.

With the focus of marketing shifting to scientific performance, many businesses have forgotten to acquire talent that can create A, B, and subsequently C, D, E etc.  Meanwhile, as the tools to automate measurement and testing improve, the creative talent is actually more important, because no computer can yet simulate the spontaneous synthesis of one random concept to another concept to CREATE something new.

If you don’t have the tools, staff or marketing know how to operate a scientific conversion rate optimization process, be sure to at least take the time to put yourself in the customer’s shoes on occasion, or have a friend/neighbor test the path to and through your website.  Sometimes we rush to blame the product, pricing, quality of leads, or other factors for the loss of customers, when it’s as simple as putting your blades under lock and key.

Whenever approaching how to properly position a brand, product or company, I construct a mind map, placing the core purpose of the business in the center and methodically building out a hierarchical structure in support of that value proposition.  Above the core purpose is the NEED - the market factors, weaknesses in older solutions, challenges and problems encountered by the potential audience and more that create the need for someone to provide the expressed core value of the company.  Below is the PROOF that the company in question is capable of fulfilling their promised value. 

It isn’t a product, or even a category, it’s an IDEA. And that idea gives Apple the freedom to step into new markets any time they think they can simplify technology to enrich people’s lives. Whether that be with a tablet that artists can draw upon, or a TV service that makes it easy to find compelling entertainment, or syncing files in the cloud so you always have access to the information you need. Apple is free to build anything in the tech space that might require a dose of simplicity and design in order to free people to live and work in a better way. Having a core value that open-ended ensures that Apple doesn’t live and die with the latest technology trends.

The product(s) you make today might be irrelevant in a few years, is your purpose greater than making the best widget?