Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Crushing It: Across Franchised Clients, The CRUSH Agency Scales for Greater Social Impact

Crush Agency-01

As a full-service digital shop, The CRUSH Agency specializes in designing marketing strategies for a diverse set of clients, including several franchise brands. The agency manages 135 social profiles, an impressive feat made easier by using Sprout Social for all of its online communication efforts.

Franchises, while operated by different franchisees, all share the same goal: to get the attention of a target audience and build a loyal customer base. The biggest challenge faced by franchises is maintaining consistent design and brand messaging across different communities, cultures and countries.

A tall task for sure, but this is where The CRUSH Agency thrives. With an organized and efficient approach, here’s how the agency balances its clients’ unique challenges and demands.

Your Work Is Only as Good as Your Team

The CRUSH Agency is made up of 13 employees, three of whom manage about 135 social media profiles for 25 brands, tackling a range of duties—from content creation to community management to analytics.

One of the advantages of this smaller team is the minimized risk of miscommunication. With fewer channels to go through for direction and approval, the less likely something will be lost in translation.

Smaller teams also have less red tape to deal with, making it easier to react more quickly to client needs and changing landscapes. Adaptability is important when managing brands, especially when several of those are franchises with multiple accounts.

The PRO Martial Arts brand alone has 34 Facebook Profiles and 34 Google+ Pages that are all managed under one umbrella through Sprout Social. This might seem overwhelming, but it’s manageable if you have the right tool.

The Messages tab within Sprout saves the CRUSH team time in having to log in and out of clients’ profiles to respond to followers.

“The ability to automate the more mundane task of scheduling and logging in and out ensures that we are able to spend a more limited amount of time in a more productive way,” Social Media Manager Wendy Kirkwood said.

Deliver & Maintain Consistent Content

One of the toughest challenges faced by an agency is capturing the brand’s voice and mission. Franchises are divisions of larger brands and have similar messaging despite being operated by different people. While a bit easier than managing 25 individual brands, time zones and locations have to be considered.

For example, the Facebook Pages for PRO Martial Arts in Naperville, Ill., and Bel Air, Md., look very similar in terms of cover photos and they share many of the same posts. While this makes populating each PRO Martial Arts Facebook Page easy, execution is a challenge.

With different time zones in mind, previously Kirkwood and her team had to separately schedule the same post for each Page. With 34 Pages to get through this took hours to complete. But thanks to Sprout’s Bulk Scheduling feature, the agency has been able to shave a substantial amount of time off of the process.

“We were previously uploading the same post and scheduling it onto 30+ social profiles, which took hours,” Kirkwood said. “Now it takes less than 30 minutes, freeing up time to engage more followers and provide more value to our clients’ online communities.”

Scroll through PRO Martial Arts’ respective Timelines, and you’ll notice some key differences with each location’s content.

For instance, the Naperville location highlights partnerships with other local businesses, while the Bel Air location promotes local events. These location-specific details are important to keep organized and help to set one franchisee apart from the others.

Track Your Performance

Metrics play an important role in determining whether a piece of content works. With the same type of posts being shared across all 34 Facebook Pages, it’s easy to assume that the audience for each Page will respond similarly—after all, it’s technically the same business, right?

While this is true, you can’t assume anything. People following the Bel Air Page might love checking out pictures from local events, but Naperville’s followers could prefer reading and sharing inspirational quotes. This is why it’s critical to monitor metrics for each Page so you can tweak individual content strategies accordingly.

“We measure ROI based on the KPIs of follower count, engagement rate and visibility (reach or impressions,” Kirkwood said. “We also consider the performance of individual posts in terms of engagement (shares, likes, comments) and detect those patterns to recreate successful campaigns.”

Through the Reporting tab within Sprout Social, CRUSH was able to:

  • Eliminate the hours spent calculating percent changes and follow growth rates for multiple clients
  • Set the time period to specific dates in order to share extremely precise numbers related to various campaigns
  • Seamlessly sort posts by different key performance indicators to detect patterns in high-performing content

The latter is especially important, as it allowed Kirkwood’s team to recreate common elements of those posts and continue producing strong content for the agency’s clients.

“None of our campaigns would be possible without Sprout Social,” Kirkwood said. “Sprout has saved us so much time and manpower that we have been able to grow as a business and take on more clients than we ever could have without it.”

The post Crushing It: Across Franchised Clients, The CRUSH Agency Scales for Greater Social Impact appeared first on Sprout Social.

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