The not-so-secret mission of all marketing managers is to be able to quantify their marketing budgets into revenue dollars. Proven to be an elusive ambition, Marketing Managers from all industries are frustrated when their efforts fall short.
With the advent of online marketing and social media, that goal seemed destined to remain a dream. However, in the midst of this plethora of new advertising avenues a number of companies have emerged to make sense of this new frontier. They serve to distill the noise down to coherent feedback and help marketing professionals, according to Jennifer Christian, “make data-driven decisions for future editorial content.”
Jennifer is the Vice President of Sales for Cadence9®, a social media and content marketing firm that has found its niche in servicing the online marketing efforts of franchisor systems. Services focus on maintaining the Content Marketing Lifecycle™ and social media activities of brands. Cadence9® is a part of the larger vdR Group, a cluster of diversified technology companies.
The Content Marketing Lifecycle™ is the proprietary verbiage of Cadence9® and defines a seven step process for an effective content management strategy. Content Marketing is the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. The aim is to create interest in a product or service through educational or informational material. For Cadence9® the center of this product offering is the franchise 360™ report.
“The franchise 360™was born out of our work with the Content Marketing Lifecycle™ tools. So many times the question at the front end for clients is ‘What content should I create?’ Until you answer that question and know where you are starting from, you can’t tell a client what to do next. It is about finding where you are so you can know where to go,” says Jennifer. Essentially the franchise 360™ Report is a 90-day diagnostic report for social media and content marketing. It is a snapshot of real-world data, published by you, your customers, your competitors, the market and/or analysts. Its reach is boundless and covers the entire company on all existing social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and YouTube to name a few.
It is a time management tool, saving the client hours by aggregating the data into a graphical report. It tells the franchise story; whether their content marketing is effective and whether it is worth sharing. The goal of marketing teams is to publish content and have it spread by loyal customers, customers that Jennifer refers to as ‘brand ambassadors.” The franchise 360™ reporting features test to see if you have any of these customers by measuring a number of key performance indicators that include post to engagement ratios, average post frequency across all platforms, total engagement across all social & content platforms, most engaging content in the last 90 days, number of active and inactive channels and competitor post and engagement comparison.
franchise 360™ is an annual subscription service with a tier-based fee structure. Packages denoted as Bronze, Silver and Gold give customers differing options based on metrics, reporting options, brand audit analysis and data. Fees range from a complimentary first report to per-channel pricing with a one-time set-up fee. Both the Silver and Gold packages include monthly phone consults for ongoing analysis and actionable recommendations.
Filling a void in the market Cadence9® honed in on the franchisor/franchisee relationship. Jennifer, who works closely with a wide variety of franchisors in a variety of industries, says the value proposition of franchise 360™ is best realized by the system as a whole. Whether it is a system of tens of locations or hundreds, a franchise system needs scalability and efficiency. Our report offers easy to interpret graphical data denoting details about every location. Marketing Managers can easily see what worked and what did not.
The franchise 360™ report has been in beta for the last eight months and its launch coincides with the publication of this article. “During the trial phase, our research has proven that franchise systems for the most part have no idea what is happening. They don’t have the internal tools to quantify results. We have found dormant channels and areas of dilution and mixed messages. By establishing an existing footprint, we can create the path forward; clients can then decide where to devote resources.”
Offering insight into some of the common pitfalls of franchise clients Jennifer notes that often the task of regional or local content is delegated to individual locations. We advocate for administrative ownership because we are seeing that social media channels are becoming a new form of intellectual property or goodwill. With Cadence9® helping franchise systems circumnavigate these vast new marketing channels with franchise 360™ – look to see these intangible assets present on more and more balance sheets.
For more information visit:
www.cadence9.com