Adaptable Web Template Marketing for Franchises

One of the most successful business models in the world is the franchise model. A company creates a branded image and an associated product or service. If this singular business proves to be prosperous, it replicates itself, becoming available for purchase by eager capitalists. Franchises are pre-established, come with a set of operating instructions, and may already have a customer base in your area. The growth of the franchise benefits not only franchise owners, but also the central corporate entity which spawned it. Essentially, successful franchises are templates of the original model with slight variations in local parameters.

How can we take advantage of this business model on the web? Is their a parrellel paradigm for web design that we can follow? An already established market exists for website templates, but what if we could tailor the template to a specific brand image and resell it to eager franchisees? With thousands and thousands of franchises percolating throughout the United States at an incredible rate, an enormous opportunity presents itself to web developers.

Fragmenting the Web

The World Wide Web has traditionally been a medium with a vast global audience. This generalization and centralization of information has enormous advantages for corporations like Microsoft, Adobe, or Intel, but lacks effectiveness for multi-regional companies such as Moe’s Southwest Grill, Pizza Hut, or Wendy’s. With the franchise model, the business mutates and adapts to suit its local market, and this can create problems when trying to represent every franchise within a single web site. A central corporate website may be helpful in providing core brand ideals and information, but fails as it attempts to maintain speed with its own replication and mutation into different market segments.

By segmenting websites into a flurry of local, franchise specific nodes, we can more efficiently serve the disjoint set of local consumers. This empowers individual franchise owners to operate more independently, build a closer relationship with local customers, and still maintain a central and consistent brand image as defined by the corporation.

Since national groups of customers form a disjoint set based on region, the illusion of uniqueness of the website is preserved. Essentially, a person living in Albuquerque would have no reason to visit a franchise website for a location in Minneapolis . In my experience, franchise owners are very pleased that content, design, and backend are already completed and ready to ship before they decide to buy. Franchise owners get their website in less than a week, can start collecting customer feedback immediately, and only have to submit a basic set of business parameters to get started. They now also possess their own email addresses, their own domains, and house and administrate their own databases.

Permissions, Brand Consistency, and Copyrights

There are many things to consider when designing a website for a franchise, whether or not you plan on marketing to other franchise members. First of all, corporations are very concerned about such design constraining concepts such as “brand consistency”, logo trademarks, and copyright issues. In order to be better safe then sorry, always request written permission to use copyrighted materials. Since you are designing a website to promote a franchise location, and ultimately the corporation itself, corporate will probably give you its blessing to continue development. Legal documents may be overbearing and laden with over verbose language, but they are a necessity to stay on the right side of media law.

Static and Dynamic: The Yin and Yang of Template Design

When designing the template, make sure to differentiate between static and dynamic elements. Dynamic elements are things that change from franchise to franchise, address, phone number, even menu items. Static elements are things that remain fixed throughout the franchise tree, logos, buttons, and taglines. The most effective and time saving way to make your template as “plug ‘n’ play” as possible is to make dynamic parameters of the site store and load externally, either from an XML file or a small database table. Besides making your template more modular, it also adds the capability of allowing franchise owners to manipulate simple data on the website in the case where something changes. This frees the designer from tedious maintenance updates while also freeing the franchise owner from unneeded maintenance charges.

Getting Your Foot in the Door and Keeping it Open

The hardest part of this type of web marketing is getting your foot in the door. Once you have one franchise site up, you’re golden. There are several ways to increase sales from here. Web design has an inherent property that marketing is self perpetuating through the ever so important “word-of-mouth” sales referral. This combined with some simple solicitation, cold-calling, or web advertising can build you a vastly profitable template empire with only small amounts of development work in between sites.

Tapping into the exponential growth of the franchise industry and the viral, word-of-mouth sales element of web template design can lead you into a very successful, sustainable web design business with little to no overhead costs. The profits from this segment of your business can be channeled back into your company, allowing your company to grow in reputation and assets for years to come.