What Marketing Support Does Winmark Offer Franchisees?
Whether you’re a first-time franchisee or seasoned professional, Winmark, the Resale Company, offers a multitude of options for marketing support – from marketing education to one-on-one consultations and webinars. We want our franchisees to be able to maximize their presence within their local communities and marketing is a fundamental component of community engagement. Here are just a few aspects of the marketing support we provide Winmark franchisees.
Social Media
In today’s market, social media plays an integral role in each brand’s strategy. With new platforms being introduced and features on each platform continuing to evolve, it can be challenging for franchisees to stay on top of what’s important, best practices and how to maximize their efforts on each one. That is where we come in!
Franchisees have diverse backgrounds and interests, and every owner has varying degrees of expertise with executing a successful social media strategy. With that in mind, we offer appropriate strategies for each platform in place, focusing on ongoing franchisee education, sharing best practices and tips and providing access and education on social media management tools.
Creating a social media presence for your store requires a limited investment and has a positive impact on generating sales and awareness of your store while quickly reaching your target demographic. Due to the highly visual nature of the retail industry, social media helps showcase in demand products each store is looking to purchase and latest arrivals, especially for resale business owners who receive a constant stream of unique, new products every day.
Additionally, nearly 47 percent of consumers cite social media as a driver of purchases, so many franchisees have created an additional ecommerce component to their business via social media offering customer the opportunity to reserve products online and available for pick up in stores.
Ecommerce
As business owners continue to navigate their way through the challenges of a global pandemic, many have adapted their strategies and added ecommerce to their repertoire.
Running an ecommerce site can be incredibly tedious and can mean long hours of updating your website daily to accurately reflect your inventory. However, we’ve created a centralized system that syncs with each franchisee’s point-of-sale (POS) system and automatically updates online catalogs – taking away the stress of having to constantly manually update your ecommerce inventory.
Not only does our centralized system automatically update online catalogs, but it also provides each franchisee the ability to select which items they are willing to ship or sell in store, as well as adding images and product descriptions to boost search engine optimization (SEO). This centralized system also creates a convenient, streamlined shopping experience for consumers by combining all items into a single shopping cart, even if their purchases are made through different physical stores.
Having an ecommerce site helps franchisees build a more robust online presence and remain visible and competitive through digital channels. But, more importantly, it showcases available products that drive consumers into brick-and-mortar locations, where shoppers can bring in their items to sell or find additional items when they come in to pick up their orders.
Events
Whether virtual or in-store, events are a great way to connect with your target demographic and local community. Holding events helps enhance the overall marketing strategy due to sneak peeks of new products, demonstrating the breadth of in-store inventory. Events also help franchisees maintain communication with their customers and highlights everyday value pricing.
To keep customers interested, franchisees have focused an event around specific brands or consistently marketed specific items – ensuring the local community will be excited to come back and visit your store and increase customer count. Since the pandemic hit the U.S., Winmark franchisees have held virtual events and capitalized on ecommerce and have marketed their events on their social media.
From events to social media, our marketing tools hold the capability to help franchisees see their business flourish – even in the face of economic challenges. Our franchisees can trust that we’ve tested each of these strategies and can help them maintain a consistent presence within their community and online.
Looking to join a franchise that offers a wide variety of successful marketing support to its franchisees?
Contact us today!
