6 Tips for Marketing Your Fast Food Franchise

Marketing holds the keys to your future business’ successes. What fast food you’re offering, how it looks and how it tastes will all need to be communicated to potential customers in a way that gets them through your door, and not your competitors. But marketing can be a complex field to navigate, so if you’re wondering how to market your fast food franchise, here’s what you need to know.

If coming up with the right marketing strategy for your fast food franchise sounds like a daunting prospect, you might be surprised to learn there are some already tried-and-tested solutions on-hand to help to get your business up to speed. 

Marketing doesn’t need to be difficult, so here are our top 6 tips for marketing your exciting fast food franchise and how to do it right. 

How to market your fast food franchise? 

Check out the following tips to make sure that you’re well on the way to starting a successful and fast-growing fast food franchise. 

1. Social media

When it all comes down to it, there’s one thing that sets fast food franchises apart from any other: food that looks good! There’s simply no better way for fast food franchises to start luring in new customers than by making sure your customers have eyes on your delicious dishes. Once your food is sitting pretty, it’s time to get your socials in order.

Instagram in particular is a food franchise’s marketing dream. Whether you’re using photos or videos to show off your food business, social media has quickly become the key to making sure customers are pouring in through your door. 

Making food look tasty can be fairly easy. Great visuals are one of the first tips for restaurant management and marketing. It doesn’t require so much work, but rather a lot of dedication. Besides promoting the food and showing how delicious it is, you should also transfer emotion and tell a story.
- Brand Mentions

2. Videos

But not everything that goes onto your social media is the same, so if you’ve uploaded any videos recently, you’re likely to see how much better it is performing than most other things. This is because by almost all metrics, videos are the most consumed piece of marketing content on a business’ profile. 

Facebook, for example, achieves over 8 billion video views each day, making them 135% more effective in reaching new audiences [Social Media Today]. That kind of growth is nothing to be sniffed at, so when it comes to running your accounts, make sure you’re posting lots of well edited, professional videos. 

It has been proven that videos shared on Instagram and Facebook outperform every other piece of content … Whether that means engagement, views, or overall reach, this piece of content does better than any other. There are a number of reasons why that is.
- Volume Nine

3. Be responsive 

Businesses need to be responsive to what their customers are saying and doing. Whether your customers are talking about a well-known trend or are getting ready for Christmas, consider whether you could be offering special seasonal discounts or marketing your business in response to what they’re saying. 

4. Time-limited exclusives 

Few sales strategies are better at creating demand than time-limited exclusive offers and flash sales. When it comes to marketing your signature dish, consider offering it at a discounted price for a limited time and seeing how much more business your fast food franchise suddenly starts attracting. 

Limited-time sales work well for encouraging urgency and compelling customers to buy while they have the chance. When hosting a flash sale, you don’t typically want them to last for any longer than a week. The shorter the duration of the sale, the more urgency you will create.
- Digital Hill

5. Have a good loyalty programme

Retaining your existing customers can often be better for your business than gaining new ones. Customers that already know and love your food are more likely to return and spend more money per transaction than new ones who aren’t yet sure whether they like your food. So, when it comes to keeping customers returning time and time again, have a good loyalty programme. 

Whether you’ll be offering discounts on every fifth meal or something else altogether, incentives are excellent ways of keeping your key demographics hungry for more. 

It could mean free combo meals, upgrades or add-ons, or even free delivery depending on what your business model happens to be. Your program doesn’t have to be purchase-centered to be effective either. You could offer items based on the number of visits too.
- Brandon Gaille

6. Play your part

Today’s customers don’t just want business to open, sell and close again. They want to shop from businesses who care about the environmental and social goals and who share their values. 

To make sure your fast food business isn’t caught on the wrong side of changing consumer habits, ensure your business is operating to the best possible standards, and think about whether you could be sponsoring community schemes and other social projects to demonstrate your values in action. 

Market your fast food franchise correctly and reap the rewards 

When it comes to running your fast food franchise correctly, having the right marketing strategy is one of the most important things you need to do. Thankfully, when you’re choosing the right fast food franchise for your needs, many franchise businesses will be on-hand to help you every step of the way.

While there are lots more resources on Point Franchise to help you run your dream fast food business correctly, if you feel better suited to another sector, you can still find lots of exciting franchises on the UK franchise directory.