Social media presence becomes crucial for businesses in such an era. At the same time, building this presence requires a certain level of digital knowledge and skills. For franchises and multi-location brands, it means expanding the skills and resources across locations. And taking responsibility for brand consistency. Let’s take a look at how it works in real life in our franchise marketing guide for social media.

• What franchise marketing & franchise management is
• What opportunities a franchise gets from social media marketing
• What risks social media marketing conceals for franchises
• How to build a franchise social media marketing strategy with no risks
• How the tool can help to implement a localized social media marketing strategy

What franchise marketing & franchise management is

The very definition of franchise management presupposes head office has to organize processes at the local level. When it comes to franchise marketing, this definition gains even more specific meaning: the head office has to take control of both global and localized marketing strategy.

The marketing team or the agency head office works with has to come up with an idea or message targeted at potential customers on the Internet, choose the most suitable form to deliver it, create visuals for it and launch the campaign at the right time. The place makes a difference, too. As the paradigm has shifted and people value localized content much more. Everyone should consider this while building a marketing strategy for franchises. It’s the way to enhance the brand.

What opportunities a franchise gets from social media marketing

It’s hard to overestimate the role of localized social media marketing in franchising. The biggest franchises in the world know that. There are brilliant examples of franchise social media management which led to a boosted engagement.

Multi-location wellness brand CrossFit has 972K followers on Twitter. They built their content strategy around the idea of bonding and motivation, sharing real stories of local community members. Everything they post is not so much about competition, more about mutual encouragement. It brings them 240.6K average engagement daily.

WeWork adjusts its franchise marketing strategies to certain audiences. They get additional clicks because they attach location-oriented images to their Facebook posts and ads.

Successful marketing strategies for a certain location increase local brand awareness and give franchisors the opportunity to spread their message and gain new customers.

Now you know the benefits, which is half the battle. Let’s analyze the risks of social media marketing for franchises.

What risks social media marketing for franchises conceals

Franchisors know one inappropriate, offensive, or just meaningless post can bring irreversible damage to the brand. Especially in a digital world where sexism, racism, ageism are at gunpoint. And there are many great examples of that. The following stories have happy endings just because they happened to really strong brands. But note: even they can fail on social!

A North American chicken sandwich brand has become pretty famous lately. Even Forbes wrote about them! Thanks to one of their team members who aren’t so great at geography. He politely responded to the person asking to open a place in Alaska that the company doesn’t have plans of expanding beyond North America. Because of this gotcha the company is currently associated with this funny story, not with its great product. Undoubtedly this isn’t the online reputation they would have wanted.

While Starbucks became associated with racism and sexism after their failed campaign on social with a tagline «Blonde breaks rules». They just wanted to share the idea that espresso doesn’t always have to be so intense, but the wording was ambiguous. The comments they got were at the best funny. But they obviously didn’t influence the brand in a positive way.

Don’t let the risks scare you away, though. There’s still a way to eliminate them.

How to build a franchise marketing strategy on social media

There are several options of how to implement a franchise marketing strategy on social media for multiple locations. You can use built-in tools, like Facebook Locations, and cascade on-brand content to local pages. Or create a separate page for each location. Both options have their pros and cons, but the basis is the same. Here are the main aspects of being in control of your brand reputation on social.

Give clear instructions

Local teams should know the main concept of your brand. Which wording, colors, style work for it. They need exact benchmarks. It will make work easier for them and at the same time secure your brand from inconsistency,

Control content quality

Franchisors need to make sure the locations have on-brand content that will drive engagement to their pages and help them in promoting the business. Multi-format content, announcements of promotions, discounts, and local events works best.
Employees don’t always have enough time to create content. It can prevent them from posting, To neutralize this, the head office can deliver editable templates to them. In this way, locations will always have something to post.

Control the posting schedule

Posting time also matters. And it should be adjusted to local time zone and conditions. For example, if there’s a local holiday, there should be topical posts for the date. And some posts can be irrelevant in certain circumstances.

Track the performance of every location

A franchisor needs to stay aware of franchisee’s social media success and make sure the efforts bring results and his business is going in the right direction. It can be achieved by analyzing the statistics of the page and checking metrics for each post to find the most engaging and work on a content strategy.

Educate your franchisees

The local team can definitely benefit from proper social media marketing, you just need to show them the way and show how they will earn more. When they see how it works and become motivated, it’s time to take the next step.

How the tool can help to implement a localized marketing strategy on social media

The market of social media management tools in franchising is truly immense. Some of them can work for franchisors and give them a golden opportunity to complete content delivery, posting control, and performance analysis in a way that will save them both time and nerves. And PromoRepublic is exactly the tool designed for this. That’s why including this software to your franchise social media toolkit is the way to eliminate pain and open new opportunities for your enterprise.

It’s truly a universal tool to coordinate your brand and marketing efforts across locations. It helps enhance your brand’s social media presence, distribute content and report on performance.

Content distribution tool

Provide locations with on-brand and mandatory content. Give them editable templates to customize. Keep your strategy consistent across locations delivering posts right to their social media pages.

Scheduling tool

Don’t give franchisees a chance to miss any important posts. Let them automatically publish ready-to-go content to multiple social networks. Manage posts in a single interface, reuse the most successful by setting a repetitive period.

Content сustomization tool

Built-in Graphics Editor is your opportunity to get absolutely unique content in a few easy steps. Utilize 200+ fonts, shapes, and banners to announce discounts, contests, or promotions. Let franchisees add a dash of local touch to their posts.

Content bundle

If content creation is not really your thing, and hiring people for that doesn’t make sense for your business, we can take care of this and provide you with content relevant for your brand. Our team of professional designers and copywriters will create 20+ of multi-format content for your franchise.

Inspiration & Education

Make sure your employees use the tool in a proper way. Help them become successful and grow their social media efficiency with our onboarding program. It includes custom training and webinars by PromoRepublic experts.

Reporting tool

Supervise how locations perform on social. Get all the essential metrics (reach, engagement) and page statistics designed in an understandable PDF report. Work on localized marketing strategy to achieve better results.

To sum up, when you use PromoRepublic, the whole system streamlines social media management and limits risk for the brand so the franchisor can sleep easy at night. It makes the brand stronger and earns more revenue not just for a single location but also for the entire franchise. You have your own social tool, featuring constant innovation.

The post Social Media Marketing for Franchise: A Guide to Success appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

Today, the dream of creating a successful franchise business from beyond an abstract idea in the mind is about to be reality. However, there are still difficulties the independent business owners may struggle with. Among them, franchise owners usually highlight such factors as the financial and legal requirements for hiring franchisees, frequent investing of a substantial sum of money, must-stick hard and fast rules, and a risk of insufficient support.

The truth is, hard work is still necessary to be able to not only launch but also provide optimum quality of services, bearing in mind that all the internal and external business development processes have to be maintained and kept up-to-date. Yes, it takes time. And, yes, it takes effort. But face it, no one is born with enough knowledge and experience to become a big successful franchisee. Although our genetic predispositions to a variety amount of activities and congenital characteristics, success is the result of a tremendous amount of work.

In a nutshell, the movement from a starting point to a final goal can be less painful to learn from the mistakes of franchises which have succeeded.

Jutty Mottle, an editor from Retail Customer Experience, carried out a study on the common missteps and situation addressing three franchise leaders came across. And it’s all ambitious. Keith Levenson, owner of ClimbZone, Rocco Fiorentino, CEO of PrimoHoagies and David Mesa, chief development officer at PJ’s Coffee shared their stories on a panel discussion at the International Franchise Expo that took place at the Javits Center in New York City on June 2.

Here are the three highlights of the premier annual event for existing franchisors and industry suppliers.

It’s Hard At First

Photo: exhibition of iLoveKickboxing.com’s local fitness kickboxing

You may even have no idea about what franchising is. For instance, ClimbZone founder Levenson couldn’t give a proper answer when someone was asking him about the starting point of becoming a franchisee.

He confesses, “I had to Google it, as I didn’t know what it meant,” and then adds “It [franchising] sucked me in.”
Speaking about success, Levenson stresses, it’s tied to making a good franchisee decisions. ClimbZone hasn’t had to spend much in marketing to find franchisees as a good number were longtime customers.
Then he continues, “We are picky about who we bring in”.
CEO of PrimoHoagies Fiorentino thinks that all franchisees are like siblings and are very, very different. He noted that the biggest problem that is often happening is not having necessary funding at the very start.

The main piece of advice from him is, “Don’t go into franchising undercapitalized”.

Onward and Upward

No matter how great experience you may have it and how smart and expert your surroundings are, it always will be something unknown, unclear, – the think worthy deeper investigation and profound research.

According to Rocco, named as “the most experienced franchisor on the panel”, all the experience he is proud of now was gained by the never-ending process of trial and error.

“Once you begin to stop learning,” he notes “You limit what you can share. Learn from the mistakes.” He puts emphasis on the fact that all we’re in for a great ride and there are a lot of signs so pay attention.

The rule of PJ’s Coffee Mesa is hiring for what’s needed. He recommends finding out where your talents are and then hire those who have the skills you don’t. Sound like to find a missing part of the puzzle.

He prefers hiring entrepreneurial people as starting a franchise requires entrepreneurial skills.

When it comes to giving the definition to the word “brand success”, he isn’t lost in thoughts, but explains that it is not only knowing the brand but defining how the brand differentiates from the competition.

About the Customer Experience

Fact: every franchisee wants to better connect with their customers. Understand their needs and wishes with no harm to business.

The franchise leaders mentioned above shared their philosophy of customer experience, which was built on real use cases as well as personal experience.

Rocco Fiorentino, CEO of PrimoHoagies offers, “Don’t mix up service and experience [in terms of ensuring a good customer experience]. How does the customer feel? You need to build loyalty, and customer experience is key.”
“We focus on customer experience to match our quality of food. The customer experience is as important and as good as the product.”
Keith Levenson, owner of ClimbZone, shares, “We call customers ‘guests,’ as we want it to be a family experience.”

The Final Word

While considering becoming a franchisee, first off you should understand that your franchise is based on a proven business idea which is full of rules to be followed, although, at the same time, you still have to make your particular franchise work in your area. No doubt, you’ll get a course of training, guides, and, maybe, a mentor. However, all these things will neither ensure rapid success nor keep you from the unexpected denial of your franchise.

*All photos are taken from an official International Franchise Expo Facebook page.

The post International Franchise Expo Roundup: The Main Points appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

?Spoiler alert! We’re introducing two new products

Hello Dear Promo Republicans!

TLDR, right? We know you’re busy entrepreneurs. So here’s a summary…

PromoRepublic has great news, and we want to share it with you right away!

We have become the World’s First Social Commerce Platform for Small Business. What this  means is that we will help you maintain a presence on social media and build communities for your brand. We will also help you sell your products and services in a smart, automated way.

We have raised $1.5 million, and we plan to invest these funds in improving and helping launch your products which will help Small Businesses drive more sales from Social.

We have turbo boosted your favorite Smart Calendar with an Autopilot feature, AND you now get access to our NEW product: Social Monitoring! Last but not least – we are announcing the first version of Intelligent Ads that will be rolled out in the Fall.  

Why we believe in Social Commerce so much?

Social Commerce has become mainstream. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest introduced Shoppable features across their platforms.

PromoRepublic believes in the Social + Commerce approach, one that helps you build a trackable funnel that converts your social media following to your customers. In other words,  your followers are turned into repeat customers and your customers are converted into engaged followers and brand ambassadors. Whether you’re selling goods or services online, offline or vying for bookings to your beauty salon or restaurant – it’s all Social Commerce

If you want to achieve sustainable and incremental business results (and I know you do), not only do you need to attract future customers, but you also need to provide them with relevant promotional content on Social to motivate them for repeat purchases and seasonal promo’s.

To effectively track which promotion works and which does not, it is recommended to have complex analytics connecting your social media with your shop (Facebook + Shopify, for example)

Social Commerce is when you start attributing your ROI, essentially your sales to social which is done by tracking links and asking your customers how they found you, for ex., using unique telephone numbers on your social profiles.

Some may say that Social Commerce is when you post Social content on your website (UGC content), setup your shop on a Facebook tab or list your items for sale on Instagram.

For PromoRepublic, Social Commerce is best defined with these 3 steps:

1. Create and post awesome content
2. Engage with your audience on social
3. Attract new and repeat customers

We have asked Gary Vaynerchuk, what he thinks of social commerce. And he says, it’s awesome!

How PromoRepublic product updates will affect your business in a positive way?

Imagine you’re an online retail business owner – the most important objective for you is to sell more products and increase awareness of your brand. To achieve this, your product visuals must be appealing, your website should be both attractive and easy to use, your customer support needs to be accessible and courteous, and your stock must always be available.

It’s understanding if you feel overwhelmed when it comes to Social, i.e. building your visibility and brand on social, answering product reviews and learning about online advertising. But at the end of the day, you still need to attract new visitors to your online shop.

This is where PromoRepublic comes in. Our products save time when it comes to creating qualitative content on social and promoting it to get even more clients to your online shop.

And specifically for E-commerce shop owners, we’ve developed Intelligent Ads that shows you the ROI and ROAS of your product ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Content Ideas Calendar -> Smart Calendar [NEW]

Smart Calendar has already saved a lot of time and resources for tens of thousands of PromoRepublic users, and has become an everyday tool for social media professionals.

What’s new:

Smart Plan is HERE. You no longer need to come up with the best time and frequency of posting your social content for more engagement. The calendar automatically generates an optimal content plan that includes posting time and frequency, as well as showcasing the recommended posts for your social pages. Here some suggestions of engaging posts:

You can choose between Autopilot which saves you time or Manual modes where you have full control of your content plan.

To provide you with the best recommendation for your content plan, the Content Intelligence system analyzes your business according to its type, along with your company’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages and the activity of your followers.

All weekly calendars are verified by our content quality team in order to make sure that they really coincide with the interests of your followers and industry specifics.

PromoRepublic AI Enabled Content Intelligence engine is trained by analyzing the effectiveness of over 3,000,000 posts, so it can easily make increasingly personalized and effective recommendations for your content.

[NEW] Introducing Social Monitoring!

Posting impressive content is a great start, however, you can not build your brand community on social without engaging with your followers. Why is that?

Imagine a scenario where an angry customer has posted unfavorable feedback, and you are not aware of it. New negative comments are appearing and as a result, the number of shares and angry emojis is increasing. The situation is heating up ?and you don’t even know about it.

When you finally see the post, it will obviously be too late to fix your reputation. However if you had viewed the post from the one dissatisfied customer, you could have resolved the issue before the social media mess debacle.

Or, imagine the opposite situation.

Someone has posted a favorable review of your brand or product/service. You can immediately see it in PromoRepublic Social Monitoring feed, and respond promptly with a sincere thank you. This takes ten seconds of your time, but will definitely be a very important moment for your customer. This is how you build your social capital and loyalty.

In both situations, PromoRepublic’s Social Monitoring will help you. The product will automatically track all mentions of your brand/product and inform you when you should respond to customer’s questions, offer them a product they are looking for, or just thank them for their loyalty and positive feedback. This is how easy building a brand community begins!

[Coming Soon] Intelligent Ads.

Why do you need Facebook Paid Ads if you are a small business?

Without paid advertising, your Facebook posts won’t be visible even to your subscribers. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the reality. Once you start using Facebook ads, a lot of opportunities pop up.

Have you ever tried to manually set up an advertising campaign on Facebook?

The number of fields and windows you have to fill in can drive anyone crazy! And when you successfully master the interface and publish your ad, it often turns out that the system doesn’t provide you with the best efficiency and results because of the wrong settings, lack of experience and lack of tests.

We know your time is limited and you need sales. For that reason, very soon your advertising campaigns can be launched directly from PromoRepublic with several clicks. Just tell us a bit about the audience you want to reach and what’s your budget, and the system will pick the best creative for the ad, text and ad format. Sounds like magic, right? Partially it is!

With Intelligent Ads, we want to be sure that every dollar you spend on advertising will bring you the desired results.

[NEW] Introducing Full Service!

At PromoRepublic, we understand that as a busy business owner you don’t want to spend time on execution, so we’ve come up with a solution for you called Full Service! It’s when WE manage all our products for you, and it starts only at $199/month!

“I know social is important, but I don’t have time to do it”.

We feel you, and we have a solution.

For all those busy-busy bees, who’re busy making money and have no time to set up posting and launching ads on social, we’ve created a Full Service – a dedicated social media manager that understands your niche and will make the most out of social. Full Service gives you the value of hiring a $60,000/year social media expert, but instead, it starts at $199/month + advertising budget.

The dedicated professionals will create and publish posts, send you performance reports, mentions of your brand and products and moreover will setup advertising campaigns for you. All you will have to do is spend 15 minutes a month to approve a content plan and advertising campaigns that we have created.

For those of you working in retail Ecommerce, we automatically help to increase ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) so that you can measure the effectiveness of advertising by sales and conversions, and not just by clicks and views.

Hope you are excited to discover all these features!

All the best,

Max Pechersky

Co-Founder and CEO of PromoRepublic

The post What is Social Commerce and why are we investing $1,5 Million to bring it to Small Business. appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

Hootsuite becomes a visual marketing tool with PromoRepublic integration! The biggest social media marketing platform now has access to a native graphics editor and template library with 100,000 post templates and images to discover your posts.

Hootsuite has always been the most powerful social media management tool:

• A wide range of networks to share your posts
• Scheduling and publishing
• Sourcing engaging curated content
• Responding to your followers
• Monitoring your progress with analytics

But there was a feature that Hootsuite was always missing – a graphics editor with an integrated post templates library. From now on their 15m+ users can discover and customize professional premade visual templates or create their own from scratch.

Why Does Visual Matter?

Pictures matter when you need to get your post noticed. It applies to all types of your posts:

• Engaging posts: quotes, polls, memes, GIFs (likes, comments, shares)
• Promotional posts: special offers, discounts, company news (clicks)
• Educational blog posts (clicks)

Your followers do not read captions, they perceive the message in your visual. They scroll through their feed and stop when their eyes find catchy image. It doesn’t matter how unique and great your content is, when it is lost among thousands of other posts.

“85% of marketers use visuals; 41% of marketers claim visuals are the most important form of content, more than blogging, videos or podcasts.”, Michael Stelzner, SMMW17.

What Was on Visual Market Yesterday

Canva

Indeed, you felt like a designer with Canva and it’s design templates, but you couldn’t manage your social media marketing like you can do with Buffer and Hootsuite.

Buffer

You could create your own images with Pablo by Buffer and schedule them to all your social networks, but there are no pre-made posts as in Canva and PromoRepublic.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite had its enhance free stock photo editor app, but unfortunately it is for mobile only.

Today the new visual app has officially launched. It means that you can work within one tool to manage all your work for social media: from discovering and customizing your visuals to scheduling and posting.

Start Creating Visual Posts with Hootsuite

To start your work:

1. Install the PromoRepublic application from Hootsuite App Directory.
2. Fill in the short from to get authorized:

Discover 100,000 Templates and Visuals

Discover post ideas in seconds, navigating through the library with post templates and images using the smart content search.

The best thing is that the post ideas provide ready-to-go templates for dozens of industries (from clothing/accessories to event planning, real estate, insurance companies and more) plus templates for holidays, events, special occasions and trends.

Customize or Create New Visuals

Customize any post template from ideas or create visual posts from scratch using a robust library packed with background images, icons and graphics. Use royalty-free Unsplash and Pexel photostocks backgrounds for free in the editor.

Post right from the Hootsuite dashboard

Add your finalized visuals to the Hootsuite scheduling tool with just one click. Finish the post with a description and a link and you are ready to go. All the power of Hootsuite posting and scheduling is now enriched with custom-made visuals!

Completely free to try

The free month plan allows you to use 200 templates and download up to 5. You can also get a $19,99 monthly plan with 6,000+ pre-made posts templates and download 20 per month.

The post New on Hootsuite’s App Directory: Visual Сontent Discovery and Сreation App IS Live appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

At PromoRepublic, we went through the same experience. But suddenly, our lives changed after one chance Skype conversation with a cool guy by the name of Olman, who asked just a few questions. And from that point on, magic started happening to our startup. That magic was because of AppSumo.com. Our startup got off the ground and started to radically change right before our eyes.

Our recipe for success is simple at a first glance, yet difficult to execute and get the most out of it. And we are not going to hide it from the startup community. We were assertive and got lucky. We knocked at the right door and it was opened to us, although not instantly. In a matter of a few weeks, our PromoRepublic service turned from a tiny startup with a couple of hundred customers in the US to the project that we can proudly present even to the Sand Hill Road investors.

After gaining success in Europe, we made a tough decision, and in early 2016 we totally focused on the USA. We refreshed the team, changed positioning to make it more focused, and tried plenty of various marketing channels in the US in search of the ideal mix.

We gathered a team to work specifically with the American market, but we could not fully load it. The team was plainly bored. In one week, we changed from a downhearted team to a cheerful and energetic one ready for new achievements in the US. We were assured that we did something really cool and useful. We thought so, but we learned the American users thought so too. There appeared hundreds of cool user reviews and suggestions. We do our best to bring those to life as fast as we can! The team’s energy and culture have completely changed. And that is really cool! We are energized and motivated.

Jump into the league of skyrocketing SaaS US startups

Every self-respecting startup dreams about getting onto popular American platforms like AppSumo.com or to the top of the day list at ProductHunt.com.

What are these platforms and how do they help startups? These platforms provide a chance for new projects without wide user base to present a new product to the Western world. In a week or two, the project can build up an initial base of active users, receive feedback on the product’s functional features, check hypotheses and more. Product Hunt offers an absolutely free platform, but promotion and collecting upvotes is a startup’s own responsibility. If a startup manages to get into the top, Product Hunt adds the product to its mail-out list of hundreds of thousand subscribers and the project owners see the real value!

AppSumo uses a different model. The service facilitates promotion through its own channels and, in fact, sells subscriptions using a revenue share system.

There is plenty of info on Product Hunt, so in this article we will focus on the startup launcher – AppSumo.com.

How does it work?

AppSumo has 850,000 subscribers for their cool mailing list as well as 200,000 followers on social media. The subscribers and followers are great leads They’re heavy SaaS users, advanced business owners, marketing experts, freelancers and agencies. They are also professional discount hunters, people who wish to get more value for less money and spend not a penny on a mediocre service.

Most of AppSumo’s audience is from the US and other English-speaking countries. But there are also people from Europe and Asia. AppSumo has a global audience, like Facebook or Google. Not bad, eh?

But it is even more than that! AppSumo has a network of affiliate partners who promote their special offers to their own audiences, so the total reach is even over 1,000,000 people.

AppSumo copywriters write a simple, accessible and funny article describing the service. At the article’s end, there is a “superunbelievable” special offer urging subscribers to buy three-year, one-year or lifetime access to the promoted service with a huge discount.

AppSumo provides enormous reach, accurate description of your product or service, and unbelievable discounts with a limited time offers, which explains why they’re selling literally several thousand subscriptions a day.

How did we get there?

In February this year, we submitted two applications at AppSumo website. But there was no reaction on their part. We did not anything specific to reach the project founders as we did not know its real value. We applied and forgot. Now, I would approach it differently, I would get in touch with those who have already got promotion on their platform and ask for an intro.

And right before the fundraising was about to start – I was then in Boston – I received the message from Olman, AppSumo Head of Business Development. These guys are fun to talk with: ‘yo, man! yo-yo-yo! Give me a five! That’s a cool application! I saw it and thought I must reach out. So, what’s up? Where are you guys? Let’s make some magic happen!’ I was riding a taxi at that moment but replied immediately that I was ready to communicate right then on Skype. And the reaction was instantaneous, he added me to his Skype contacts and we talked.

How to negotiate with AppSumo?

Since the AppSumo guys sell a lot within a short time, they try to immediately understand how serious your company is. Their representative has to check how adequate and serious your company is and while having a fun chat he asks checking questions between the lines, like ‘who are you and why are you doing this? Do you know your metrics? Where are you located, in what time zones, how many of you are there? What about customer support team?’ A positive thing for them may be an experience with other resellers as well as a system for special offers using unique promo codes.

The AppSumo guy asked me something about product details and target users, told me about similar services that made their promotion on AppSumo and their results. Having analyzed my answers he said we had a very clear service and were likely to achieve results similar to our competitors. That means 4000 new paying users. My reaction to this was pretty usual – I was struck dumb with joy for 30 seconds. But still I replied ‘Well … not too much but still something’

And that was that, we went on to discussing the launch date. I insisted on having the campaign this year, before the fundraising starts. This argument made a positive impression on my counterpart and he agreed. We set the date. Our chat lasted only 10 minutes and was megapositive. I managed to persuade AppSumo.com to accept us for their special offer in several weeks. I told our team and the preparations started immediately.

There is one more important thing to remember. Beware of cheap imitations! AppSumo clone-services may get in touch offering better deals. Copycats have low-quality base and dealing with them will only result in upsetting relations with AppSumo.

How did we prepare?

We had to seriously strengthen our customer support. It had to be 24/7 since most we were growing our US-based subscribers. It was tough. You cannot master the art of customer success in one day. So we announced that everyone at PromoRepublic would become a customer support and success manager for a week. That way, every team member would know how to support our customers.

After some time, our friend Olman at AppSumo, called us. He said ‘Look here guys, we saw you have packages for agencies. Let’s have two offers at once. There will be one individual offer and one team package’. We agreed to that as we were quite interested in agencies as our potential audience.

After that, we became proactive. We prepared a special landing page for those who purchased our subscription from AppSumo.com containing the video instructions for entering the unique code, securing access to the discounted subscription. We planned for huge traffic and such measures usually reduce the number of customer support questions.

On our web page we offered an added value: we prepared a video course, an e-book and templates for developing a social media strategy exclusively for those customers who purchased our subscription from AppSumo. Check it out here.

We told AppSumo guys we wished to launch our product on Product Hunt prior to their campaign. On the one hand, we wanted to learn how to work with comments and warm-up our support team. But also, we needed new customers in October to maintain our growth. They agreed and even posted the info about our launch at Product Hunt on their Twitter and Facebook pages.

It’s my recommendation to launch a Product Hunt campaign prior to starting promotion on AppSumo. Good Product Hunt reviews, as well as getting into their top list, will build up more trust and additionally motivate the AppSumo team. It definitely worked that way for us.

So, everything was ready for the launch. We came out on AppSumo with a double offer.

How does it technically work?

First, they made a nice special offer description for us. To help with that, we designed several pretty screenshots and gave links to the content about us.

Then came a funny article containing the special offer. Here it is.

Five days before the launch, a pilot launch started. We were posted on the AppsSumo.com website. The traffic is small there in comparison to their mail-out list but we still got some questions, and received reviews and first comments. We started working with them and it became clear what kind of questions to expect after the mail-out. That made us feel a lot more comfortable going into the big launch.

And of course, the first sales poured in! One can follow sales and money-backs online, in a partner’s section on the AppSumo website.

The mail-out started late at night. We prepared to answer comments. The whole team was ready. We engaged all the people we could: our team, our friends, friends of our friends, even our pets.

There were many nice comments and reviews.

But also, there was constructive criticism We realized we needed to expand the library of post templates for other countries.

There was a hell load of work to do and as the night grew on the amount of comments and reviews has only increased. That was an action-packed game indeed!

The AppSumo guys sent out e-mails by portions. The first portion went to half of their subscribers. For two days there was an unbelievable registration spike. Then they did the second mail-out. Things got somewhat quieter. Just before the end they did one more mail-out saying that the offer was closing the next day.

That way they squeezed those who doubted and the total number of our users grew to 4500.

What were we promised?

Participation in this campaign was totally free for us. AppSumo works on a revenue share principle. That means that they keep a part of the revenue for themselves and the rest goes to the startup. We have participated with the special offer of an individual package for $25 and a small team-package for $49.

I cannot disclose the numbers on revenue shares but I can tell that the most of it went to AppSumo and we were paid the smaller part. However, their justification argument goes that they invest part of their share in the marketing. We did not request a budget report from them, but that was true enough – we saw posts boosting on Facebook, retargeting and posting on partners’ websites. As social media marketers ourselves, we understand the cost of push marketing. This experience was worth it to us.

What did we actually get?

In return, a startup gets a number of benefits:

1. A huge global base of quasi-paid subscribers from the USA and English speaking countries (they buy long-term packages for a 1 month price). The audience is very active. In two weeks following the campaign we looked at the statistics. Two thirds of the users, who came from AppSumo, had created more than five posts using our system. For a beginner project, active users who are well informed about the alternative resources are very important! Experienced users ask great questions and give feedback. If there are many of them, it is easier to get 5-10 people agree to have Skype-conversations and give interviews. Of those who have actively commented on AppSumo, we recruited our Customer Advisory Board. It would be much more difficult to do with a 50-subscriber base.
2. There appears more high-quality statistics of service usage. The more people who use your service, the better you see dead ends in user experience. There appears an array of highly informative statistics based on when we started making product decisions and conclusions on how to improve our product. You cannot improve what cannot be correctly measured statistically. After AppSumo, we got so much data that we ended up with a Data Scientist vacancy. AppSumo gave us all the data we needed.
3. The costs were minimal. Very often, a startup spends a lot of money upfront to attract users to the website, persuade them to subscribe and, finally, pay for the product in order to – at least partially – result in ROI for the startup. It is a long and costly process, since there are different channels in the US and quite often unit economics does not work out  in the beginning. AppSumo helps to avoid excessive costs and even pays you for every active user. As you gain thousands of new users, you get a substantial income that can be spent for attracting non-discount users.
4. Recognizability. In this story, however, the money is not the most important thing. As AppSumo people say, the main thing is that a million people audience will get to know you. And a million people is a lot – even for the United States market. Your company name becomes a buzzword and you can refer to working with AppSumo, providing links to your special offers there. Partners read comments and reviews and they see that your service is good. The offer becomes a kind of Trust Machine for you similar to a successful product page on Product Hunt.
5. Organic high quality reviews are beyond valuable. There is always an active discussion just below the article involving a huge amount of comments about the service from both actual and potential buyers. In those comments it is clear who has already purchased the service and who is still in doubt. In our case, there were about 800 comments and reviews. The AppSumo users are perfectly informed about similar services on the market. Their comments are of great value. It was based on those comments that we revised the whole development plan and changed our priorities.  Comments provide an unbelievable social experiment with a huge number of participants.
6. Powerful feedback. The difference between AppSumo and Product Hunt platforms is huge. On PH, most of the comments are friendly and encouraging. Something like “yo, that’s beautiful!”, “that is superb!”, “very cool!”, “well done!”. That is because it is mostly friends, relatives, and colleagues who vote there. There are only few users who give you valuable advice. But on AppSumo, it is a totally different story. Some users try to kick the tires of you and your service. You may get questions like, ‘show me your original code!’. There may be up to 10-11 points and questions in a single message. That is really cool and valuable, I think. And a person, whose criticism you heard and reacted correctly, would remain you friend for a long time.
7. SEO  impact. The team at AppSumo say that placing special offers on a large number of their affiliate resources, which generate their traffic, has a positive impact on search optimization. We do not see SEO results to be that great so far, but perhaps that will show later.
8. Bonus. If an AppSumo campaign is mutually successful there is an opportunity to repeat it every 6 months. AppSumo favors long-term cooperation and respects loyalty very much. In our case the campaign was extremely successful and we are planning to launch it again in the nearest future.
9. References, competitors, and opinion leaders. When the campaign was over, we continued communicating with the AppSumo team. Olman introduced us to our competitors. After talking to them we decided to launch co-marketing projects and shared our experience. After the intro from AppsSumo we were talked to as equals.

Another introduction AppSumo facilitated was with the organizers of the SaaS Growth Summit online conference, whose participants include the well-known speakers and founders of cool SaaS projects – Noah Kagan (AppSumo/SumoMe), Sujan Patel (Milkshake), Laura Roeder (MeetEdgar), Nathan Barry (ConvertKit).

What is more, you can recommend a project yourself and you will be heard. For example, we have recommended another Ukrainian project. Recently, there was a Skype conversation and everyone seemed satisfied. Now they are going to launch a campaign. Rinse and repeat. This is a great process for us.

10. An AppSumo campaign raises a startup’s rating in the eyes of investors. They see both positive and negative comments and how we deal with them. They see that there is a ready team capable to adequately process a large array of user feedback. And that the team learns from the criticism and can change and move forward.

Investors see that users are ready to buy the product. And they see the demand and product’s popularity in dynamics. We emailed potential investors the link to our promo. For them, it was a good assurance that we offer a service that is needed. We could prove that we had over 4500 users in the US after 4 months of proactive marketing, which was extremely important for the fundraising that is now underway.

11. And the last in the list, but not least important – since we were selling the smallest packages in terms of available features there is a potential to upsell more expensive packages to customers filled with special offers. It is like selling an upgrade of a rented car to a person who came with a Groupon coupon for a Nissan Micra :). Put them in an Audi RS7 and see how much happier they are.

Working with AppSumo was cool and useful experience for us! We got feedback, validated our product, decided to improve its quality and make it better and more thought-out and user friendly instead of introducing new features that nobody needs.

The AppSumo team has rewarded us with a prize for participation– in late January I will have the pleasure of personally shaking hands with our contacts as I will be attending the conference in Austin, TX, where AppSumo office is headquartered. See you there!

The post The PromoRepublic experience: how a startup can get supersonic acceleration in the American market through partnership with AppSumo. appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.

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The post PromoRepublic’s Achievements 2016 appeared first on PromoRepublic Blog | Insights for Franchise & Multi-Location Marketers.