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The stratospheric rise of ChatGPT has created immense interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI), and its applications for digital marketing and customer growth.

What can generative AI do?

Generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT is able to create a wide range of original text, images and even video content. OpenAI is a leader in this field, having created both ChatGPT (a text-based generative AI) and DALL-E (an image-based AI).

AI is expected to completely transform digital marketing in the next few years, particularly as massive companies like Microsoft, Meta and Google race to be the leader in the field.

Can AI be used for franchise SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) for franchise companies can be complex due to the nature of the franchise model. It is quite common for franchises to “copy and paste” content across their local franchisee pages or microsites. Although this is convenient and cost-effective, Google views this as duplicate content and therefore does not attribute search engine authority to it.

Therefore, this seems like a perfect opportunity to use generative AI. ChatGPT and other AIs can create hundreds of unique writeups quickly and cost-effectively, which solves the duplicate content issue while avoiding the time and cost of using humans to do the work.

However, the complicating factor is that Google can tell if content has been created using an AI by looking at signals such as the text structure, grammar and syntax. Google has stated that they are not against AI-generated text per se, but they have also been clear that they reward original, high-quality content.

Given this, at this point it is not entirely clear whether using AI to generate website copy will have a positive impact on SEO. Although the content will be unique for each location, it is certainly possible that Google may deem it as duplicative and therefore discount its value. We at Reshift Media are currently conducting experiments to assess the effectiveness of this approach and Google’s treatment of this strategy.

At this stage our advice to franchise marketers is to be cautious when using AI for SEO purposes. Things are evolving very rapidly, so we expect the picture to become much clearer in the near future.

Can AI be used for franchise social media marketing?

One of the most impactful opportunities for franchise systems is to use automation and AI to create localized social media posts and advertising. Incorporating local information such as a photo of the local storefront, the name of the city/town/neighborhood, or local products/services offered will cause posts and ads to stand out more. As a person is scrolling through Facebook or Instagram on their phone, they are more apt to notice and engage with a post or ad that includes the name of where they live (or other information), as they see it as more relevant to them.

Like everything else in franchising, the challenge with social media marketing is creating a repeatable process that can cost-effectively scale across your franchise locations. We at Reshift have spent years refining an approach where we use automation and AI to enable programmatic localization of social media posts and ads.

To make this approach work, we combine a franchise system’s location data with AI and automation to programmatically insert localized information into nationally created posts and ads. Through this approach, a single person can create a post or an ad which is automatically modified for every location to include details such as the location name, city or even local offers.

Franchise companies that incorporate local information into their organic social media marketing typically see a 200% – 500% increase in organic social media performance and more than 500% increase in advertising performance.

Our recommendations for franchise companies

In terms of ChatGPT and generative AI in general, our advice to franchises is:

• AI is going to be a marketing gamechanger – do not get left behind. Consider how you can use AI and automation in your social media marketing to achieve localization and personalization at scale.
• AI-generated content will have an impact on SEO. At this stage, approach this cautiously as it is possible that Google may view your AI-generated content unfavourably.
• Experiment with AI and make use of the tools Google, Meta and other companies provide.

Please visit www.reshiftmedia.com to read the full article and watch an in-depth video walkthrough.

Reshift Media is a franchise marketing agency that was voted the world’s best franchise marketing firm at the 2023 Global Franchise Awards and recently received the Gold Medal for Lead Generation at the SMARTIES.