Sponsored content by SOCi.
Express Employment Professionals (EEP), a globally franchised staffing company with more than 860 locations in five countries, helps good people find good jobs by connecting good companies with good people. The brand and its franchisees needed to increase the online presence of locations in order to achieve the company’s mission of putting a million people to work annually. It was crucial for the solution to be easily adopted by EEP franchisees to save them time, energy, and stress when it came to managing their own digital marketing efforts and getting people in the right jobs. Starting with a rollout to franchise locations in March 2022, SOCi helps EEP reach their local communities with a platform that provides franchise owners with easy-to-use tools and solutions that consolidate digital marketing efforts to save them time, effort, and money.
Franchisee adoption of the SOCi platform was vital to EEP’s marketing strategy and was successful because of the unique ways EEP rolled out its new platform programs. Sheena Hollander, International Spokesperson, Director of Corporate Communications & Public Relations for EEP’s parent company, Express Employment International, let us in on how her team crafted creative ways to ensure franchisees adopted SOCi and were set up for success.
3 C’s of Local Adoption For New Solutions:
- Champion
- Competition
- Communication + Collaboration
Finding your Champion: Sheena suggests identifying a respected company leader to lead the charge as a champion for any big initiative. Empower the champion with a focus, strong data, and information on how the new tool will move the needle by saving time and money. Choose a C-Suite level leader, like a CEO, with a lot of influence. As a franchised brand, having additional franchisee Champions is equally important. Identify franchisees of influence in your organization and those who will be top super users of the new tool. Prior to a large-scale rollout, grant these super users special, early access to the tool and in return, ask for testimonials, data points, and their advocacy to encourage adoption by their peers.
Leverage friendly Competition to drive adoption: Don’t underestimate the competitive nature of your teams. Leverage different types of Competition between franchisees to drive adoption with incentives, where appropriate. Showcase easily understandable data to help your teams make strategic decisions to highlight how the new tool improves efficiencies for the winning teams. Promote the franchisees having the most success using the tool to light the fire of Competition.
Communication is key: Work with your business partner, in Sheena’s case SOCi, to create individualized training that speaks to your brand’s language and is specific to your company. Make training required before the use of the tool and when possible, offer a reward for completion. Help the company keep adoption top of mind through systemwide newsletters, monthly strategy articles showcasing success, leadership messaging references, testimonials, and franchisee name drops, and include touchpoints at franchisee meetings.
The bonus C when working with SOCi is Collaboration: Collaboration with SOCi as a business partner helped EEP create personalized training for their franchisees and teams, and regular cadence calls and quarterly business data reviews allow the company to prioritize data-driven decisions and pivot strategies in real time. Within just the first few months of rollout, EEP saw an over 60% system-wide adoption rate of SOCi, the 2nd highest adopted offering across the company.