Franchise Your Business

Franchises, AI, And The New Search Reality with Steve Buors

• Big Sky Franchise Team | Tom DuFore

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Want a front-row look at what’s actually working in digital franchise marketing right now? 

In this webinar, Steve Buors, co-founder of Reshift Media, will break down the most effective strategies they’re seeing franchisors use to drive growth in 2025.  He unpacks how AI is reshaping local marketing, media buying, and content at the franchise level, and where it’s overhyped vs. truly useful. You’ll walk away with a clearer view of where digital franchise marketing is headed next.

This was a live recording on December 5, 2025 at approximately 1 PM Eastern USA.




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Tom DuFore:

All right. Uh well, thank you everyone for uh uh joining us today. My name's Tom DuFour. I'm the founder and CEO of Big Sky franchise team. And this is our webinar series that's been live and rolling here for coming up on almost six years. It's hard to believe it's been that long. Uh and we uh if if you are not subscribed to our show, you can subscribe to us at franchise your business podcast. It's the franchise your business podcast on your favorite uh podcast subscription service, or uh subscribe to our YouTube at Big Sky Franchise Team. Uh just search for us on YouTube at Big Sky Franchise Team. Uh and we have a wealth of resources. We have our second uh podcast as well uh that is called the Multiply Your Success Podcast. If you just can't get enough of us and you're looking for more stuff, this is great. Um, but uh our session today is really geared on uh uh uh digital marketing and uh variety of uh what I think are important topics, which is why I thought this was a perfect medium for this. And our guest today is uh our guest is Steve. Uh uh Steve, please pronounce your name for me if you will. I want to make sure I get it correctly. It's Bjors. Bjors. Okay, I would have said it wrong. All right, Steve Björr, thank you so much. And Steve, I'll give you a little overview on Steve. He's a digital marketing innovator with more than 20 years of experience helping businesses attract loyal customers, expand, expand brand awareness, and ignite innovation through data-driven digital strategies. As CEO and co-founder of Reshift Media, Steve leads a world-class team supporting over 200 clients in 22 countries across all aspects of digital marketing, including software development, social media, search and web solutions, and a wide variety of other digital-related topics. And really, for us today, what we're hoping, what Steve's gonna be sharing and talking about is really how franchise brands can win in this new era of digital marketing. So, Steve, I'd love to turn things over to you.

Steve Buors:

Well, thanks, Tom. I really appreciate it. Uh, I do have a few slides I'll share. I find that having uh some visual aids tends to help. So I'll just share my screen here. Can you see that okay there, Tom? I sure can. All right. So um, as Tom mentioned, we will be talking today about how franchise brands can win in this new area of AI and just all the changes that are happening in digital marketing. Um, he did mention uh Reshift Media. So we are a digital marketing company. We specialize in franchise organizations. Uh, I tell you that because uh to give you a bit of context as to what you're about to hear through the presentation. We work with more than 200 franchise brands in 28 different countries. So we're bringing all of that experience to what you're about to hear here, here, here today, I guess. So, in working with franchise systems, I truly believe that what's going on in the marketplace today with AI and the transformations we're seeing in digital marketing is good for franchises. Uh, this isn't let's try and survive, let's try and make the best of it. I actually think this is a real opportunity for franchise organizations to take it to the next level from a digital perspective. And that's because the franchise business model, I think, is tailor-made for what's happening in the world today. And these these are some of the advantages. There's obviously more, but I'd like people to bear these in mind as we talk about where things are going from digital marketing, and you can see how these advantages can apply. Um, the first and obvious one is franchise organizations are built to scale. I I love the fact that you have a head office that, you know, their job is to chart the course for the brand, be looking at opportunities, provide strategy. And at the same time, you have all of these great in-house entrepreneurs who are your franchise owners who are vested in the success of their local enterprise. And so you get the best of both worlds because now you have someone or a group of people who are looking at overall, and you have um people who are on the ground and know their communities the best, which kind of gets into the next bullet, which is that local knowledge and community connection. You don't get that with other business models, at least not ones that are at the scale we're talking about here. If you're looking at an owned network of uh locations, you just don't get that local knowledge the same way, in the same uh vested uh interest that a franchise owner tends to have. Um, I love the trust and familiarity uh point. So one of the best things about being part of a franchise network is you got this trusted brand. Maybe it's a national or regional brand, but at the same time, when someone walks into that location, there's that franchise owner again, right? There's that familiarity, the community connection. Um, as a marketer, I personally love the multi-level data collection you get, collecting data obviously at the franchisee level and in the local market level, but being able to roll that up and see overall trends, really powerful. And the last one, which I do know is a bit of a double-edged sword sometimes. I've worked with enough franchise systems to see when things go well and when things don't go as well, but agility and execution. So, you know, a lot of times working in franchise systems and like, oh boy, but it's gonna be hard to roll this out across all of our franchisees because you know we're gonna have to communicate. Oh boy, oh boy. I I get it, and it's hard, particularly if you have hundreds or thousands of franchise owners, but it's that ability to have one core idea, one core piece of technology that can then be localized and owned and adapted for each market, that agility and execution, that's huge. So these are the advantages I want everyone to bear in mind as we get into the next steps. So it is not an overstatement to say that generative AI is completely changing everything about digital marketing, any internet overall. Um it is changing how search works, it's changing how we create content, it's changing how we use digital marketing tools and changing how we reach consumers. It's even changing creative. In fact, every illustration you see in this presentation is AI generated. So all of these little robots you see on my screen, all the backgrounds, all the illustrations you're about to see, these are all AI generated. And it's an exciting time to be a marketer because I can't think, you know, in in my long history of digital marketing, other than the launch of Google itself or the launch of Facebook itself, which yes, I was around for. I'm kind of happy and also a little, you know, surprised to say, I guess. Um, other than those major events, this really is a huge inflection point. And before we go talking about, you know, forward, I want to take us back just half a step. So let's talk about how search engine optimization has worked over the past couple decades. It's actually kind of funny when you think about it. So you as a person, you go to Google and you type in something, you're looking for something, and you get a list of blue links, right? Page one at Google. And what would you do? You look at the top few links, first one, second one, third one, you look at what that link says, and you're like, well, maybe that's got the answer to my question. Click the link, you go through to the page uh that that link goes to, and you read that copy, and you're like, Does that answer my question? Eh, not really. What do you do? You go back to Google, click the next blue link. Does that answer my question? Eh, not really. Go back, click the third one. Oh, hey, that answers my question. It's actually kind of kind of crazy when you think about it. It's like you're hunting and pecking to try and find the right answer. And for us as marketers, we were in a battle royale for making our blue links higher than the other guy's blue links, right? We're constantly in that fight. I got to get my my blue link higher than the other guy's blue link because I know that top three links get clipped more, page one gets clipped more, et cetera, et cetera. And this is this has been SEO for the last, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. The thing is, this is completely changed. Generative AI has completely changed the entire way you need to think about search. You know, search now looks completely different. This is an example of perplexity. Same thing as ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloed, whichever your favorite um generative AI is. The way it works is you type in your question. In this case, who's the world's best franchise marketing company, and you get one answer. By the way, this is a real screenshot. This isn't a mock-up, but just for fun. Uh, but you get one answer. So, what the AI has done in this case is it's gone out to the internet, it's looked at all the different sources, it's indexed that, it's you know, assessed it based on various criteria, comes back with a single answer. So, as a consumer, this is great, right? No more hunting and pecking. I don't have to click and go through and oh, blah, blah, blah. Here's the answer. As a business, this is horrendous because businesses depend on people clicking through to their website to see their services, see their products, read their blog posts, get cross-sold, you know, sign up for the newsletter, whatever it is. And in this sort of environment, you don't need to click, you just get the answer. And in fact, the type of uh generative AI most people are seeing is this one here. When you go to Google, again, I've said who's the world's best franchise marketing company, and you get this AI overview. This is what you know the vast majority of consumers are seeing right now. You know, come of the some of the more forward-looking ones are actually using ChatGPT and Perplexia, et cetera. But the majority of people are seeing this AI overview, which again is a is a generative response. So Google in this case has gone out, searched the internet, come back with the best answer to the question. What's really fascinating is um what this does in terms of click behavior. So Pew Research Center did a study on this back in March, and they looked at what happens when AI overview is there and when it's not. So if you look at the bottom here, this um where I've put a little red box, when you just have the blue links. So imagine this screen without the AI overview. It's just the old school list of blue links. What Pew found is that if it's just a list of links, those links will get clicked 15% of the time. That sounds really low, I know, but you gotta bear in mind here, people are you know closing browsers, bouncing around, redoing searches. But take the data at face value. 15% of the time, the blue links get clicked. When that AI overview shows up, just like it is in the screenshot, that propensity to click goes down to 8%. So almost half. So what that means is when an AI overview is displayed, people are roughly 50% as likely to click these blue links, which makes sense, right? Why would I click it when I got the answer right there? So again, as a as a consumer, great, I got my answer. As a business, horrendous because people aren't clicking those links anymore. Now, our friends at Google would point to these links on the right here and say, Don't worry, guys, we always cite our sources, and they do. So they've they've cited a couple different sources here. If I click show more, there's actually a bunch of sources. Um, and people can click through to those. That's great, except Hugh looked at that as well and they found that those links get clicked 1% of the time, which might as well be zero. So, what this means is when an AI overview shows up, people simply don't have to click anything. And for you as a business, that's a big deal. And what's interesting is that that's leading to a decrease somewhere between 30 to 60 percent for your average website. Now, it's a big range. Um, and the reason it's a big range is because it actually kind of depends on how well your search optimization was doing before. If you had really good SEO, particularly for um query-based um or question-based searches, like who, what, where, why, how, um AI overuse tend to show up a little more for those types of searches, and so you're impacted even more. Whereas, frankly, if your SEO wasn't quite as good or you weren't ranking for those types of searches, you're not impacted as much. So it's almost like, ah, it's not hurting me that much, but it's probably because your SEO wasn't great before. It's a disproportionate impact on the companies who actually had good SEO. So I love real examples, so I want to show you a real example of this in practice. So this is a real search I did. Which companies provide a business mailbox of 24-hour access? And this is the real result I got. Again, it's an AI overview. I wanted to show it to you on the phone just to show you how dominant this is on the phone, which is which is the number one use case for search, obviously. It's really all you see. And you notice here it mentions the UPS store. Full disclosure, that's one of our clients, that's how I happen to know to know this example. But I show this to you to show what the new gold standard is. So when someone conducts a really detailed search, which is what I did here, you know, it's it's quite a you know deep cut of a search, which companies provide the business mailbox 24-hour access. The best you can get from an AI perspective now is a straight mention, like you see here. They actually mention the UPS store by name. That is absolutely the gold standard in terms of what you're going for. Well, what's interesting about that is there's no click. Now, I might just go to my nearest UPS store, which happens to me for me to be a few blocks away. Um, but there's no click, there's no attribution, there's no heat map to look at, there's no, you know, page depth, time spent, none of those metrics exist because I never click through to the UPS store website. Which means we as marketers and as business people need to start to think about search differently. So it's no longer a um try and rank in links and get clicks and get traffic and measure it that way. It's actually more of a display. It's almost like display advertising where I'm just trying to get my brand out there. And I know a lot of businesses really don't like this. And like I said, a lot of businesses have lost up 30 to 60% of their traffic, which they're not happy about. But the fact of the matter is the genie's out of the bottle. There's no going back. You're not going to convince Google and ChatGPT and Perplexy to just, you know, take the ball and go home and stop doing this. This is the way the world's going, and consumers love it. And frankly, it is a convenience for them. So we as business people need to be smarter about how we use it and how we index for it. So that gets to where AI pulls its information from. So this is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of imagination. I wanted to give you a bit of a cross-section. I also can't cover all of this in detail, but I'll give you a quick sort of summary. Um, the number one thing that is still in your sphere of control is your company website. It is not nearly as important as it once was. For your old school search, you know, the blue links, uh, your company website actually was quite important, how you wrote it, how you structured it, etc. It's still important, but the AI is actually looking more for the knowledge of the internet more so than just the knowledge of your company website. I'm gonna talk more about that in just a minute. What is really important is your Google business profile. I'm gonna talk about that in some detail, so I'm gonna bypass that for just a moment. What is very interesting is that social mentions and user-generated content carry a lot more weight from an AI perspective than your old school search. So um Instagram and X in particular are indexed and crawlable by the AI search engines. So those pieces of content are usable and crawlable. And yes, you as a business can post, and that's a good idea. But more importantly, if people are talking about you on Instagram and X and are saying good things, or if they're saying negative things even, that is indexable and usable by the by the AI. No, Facebook isn't crawlable, and no, LinkedIn isn't crawlable. Uh, those are both black boxes to the AI still. But there are some social pieces of content there that are crawlable. Reviews are massive. What the AI wants to understand is how people feel about your business and what they're saying about it. So when someone does a search, like, you know, where who's the where's the best barber in Riverdale? The best is based on reviews. So it's looking at uh Google reviews, again, coming back to the Google business profile. If you're a restaurant, Yelp's very important, trust pilot, et cetera. So reviews are really important. And not just getting reviews and having reviews, but the AI is actually looking at how quickly the business responds. So if you respond quickly, that's viewed as a positive signal. Your business is more engaged, it's a better business. If you never respond, or if it takes you months to respond, that's actually hurting your visibility in those AI overviews I just showed you. Uh, top 10 lists are great. Top 10 places to eat in in you know Gotham City, uh, going with the comic book theme. Um, those are great. Any kind of third-party validation, any kind of other website talking about you in a positive way, excellent. Um, I say to my PR friends, we we don't do PR at Reshift Media, but I say to my PR friends, like, this is this is the golden age of PR because getting those mentions and that validation on third-party sites is so, so important in the new era. And what's really interesting is it doesn't even have to be a backlink anymore, right? We've all been chasing backlinks for 20 years. And yes, a backlink is still great, it's still part of the algorithm. Absolutely, it's a good thing to have. But just the mention is actually valuable. So if someone just mentions reshift media with a backlink, the AI is smart enough to figure out who that is, attribute that back to my company, and give us that kind of external validation thumbs up. And the last one here I'll talk about is forums like Reddit and Quora. So Reddit in particular has seen quite an uptick thanks to AI. Um, if you're not familiar with Reddit, um I really encourage all business people to go look and be familiar with what Reddit is these days. But it's essentially an online forum where people can discuss anything. And they do. There is a uh forum or it's called a subreddit for literally anything. And people will post a question. How do I change an alternator on a 2007 Honda CRV? Um, where's the best place to get a haircut in you know metropolis? Uh, where can I get a good pair of glasses? Like they post questions about anything, and then the community answers it. That type of content is tailor-made for the AI because it's real people, real opinions, using plain language, and so the AI loves it, absolutely loves it. So you should be looking at what people are saying about your brand on Reddit because that is going straight into the AI uh modeling and understanding of who your business is and what you do. In fact, Google and Reddit cut a deal last year, I think it was for like $50 million. I might be wrong on the number, but basically, Google is paying Reddit for access to their data to train the AI. So Reddit is literally part of the training regimen for the AI because it's all natural language, et cetera, et cetera. So you you should be paying attention to all those. Um, so for you as an organization, kind of takeaway here is you know, looking for third-party validation, looking for what people are saying around the internet, and being really active as a member of the internet community.

Tom DuFore:

Real quick, Steve, just a quick question on that. Uh, specifically on Reddit and Quora and some of these uh sites like that. Um, I've seen or let me rephrase, or heard people say, well, you want to have uh you don't want to use your actual name on these posts, or you want to use your business name. Is there A best practice or an option for when you're posting or things that you're doing there?

Steve Buors:

Absolutely. So the first thing is people on Reddit in particular will sniff out, you know, someone kind of being salesy, if I can use that term. So you got to be super careful because it is really easy to get blowback on Reddit, right? If the community turns against you, it can be quite ugly. So don't go in just posting um, you know, positive comments about your company because they will figure it out. You should be completely transparent. So you should create a company uh account with a company name. You should act uh be an active participant in the community as your company without being salesy, right? You're being helpful, you're giving good tips. Um, you are literally just trying to be the good guy, right? Hey, we're here to help, sort of idea. Don't post a bunch of stuff. Here's my product, here's my product. Don't try and post, hey, we're a really awesome company, you should love us. Be legit with it, be real about it. Um, and if you do want to advertise on Reddit, you can. They have ad units and those are fair game. And we've had really good success actually advertising on Reddit in conjunction with legitimate community posting. Um, but it is not something you just jump into and just start putting a bunch of content. That is a dangerous little game.

Tom DuFore:

Perfect. Thank you. Well, that I think that helps clarify some of the you know various bits of information I've heard over the, I don't call it the last couple years about that topic. So that that's helpful. Thank you.

Steve Buors:

Yeah, you're very welcome. Um, let's do a second example because again, I love examples. So I'm gonna change my search. So remember before I said who who uh provides a 24-hour mailbox. I'm gonna change that. And I'm gonna say, where can I rent a business mailbox with 24-hour access near me? A very, very similar search on purpose because I want to illustrate an important point. I did that search. This is the response I got. So I didn't get an AI overview, I got a local search response. Everyone's probably seen this on Google where you get the map and you got the pins. What's interesting about this is um this still gets clicked. Right? Remember the AI overview, the big thing is no one clicks through. Here, I can click it to call, I can get directions, I can click through to the website, I can click to learn a more about the business. This generates engagement and clicks. And it's a completely different search algorithm that's triggering here. So what um what's in the back end to generate an AI overview is actually very different from what have what triggers this local search. And these local searches are incredibly valuable to you as a franchise organization for a few reasons. First of all, it's kind of nice that AI overviews tend to show up less frequently. It's not that they don't show up, but they show up less frequently. Um, and what's nice about that is again, we do still want clicks, we still do still want engagement, we do still want to outrank our competitors. So that's an opportunity. The other thing is that local searches have incredibly high volume. In fact, um near me searches are one of the only category of searches that continues to grow up more than 100% every single year. It is the fastest growing area of search. And you can see another stat I have there, 32% of consumers search online for local businesses multiple times a week. Huge volume, really important searches. What I also like is that a local search, when someone's doing a near me or, you know, in metropolis, uh, you're only competing against businesses in that area. So you're not competing with people across the country or even people, you know, around the world. You are literally competing with businesses who happen to operate in that area. So your competitive set is much smaller, therefore you have a better chance to rank. And probably the most interesting thing, um, you know, for those of you who are interested in ROI for everything you do, local searches have amazingly strong purchase intent. As soon as someone's searching for where can I get something near me? It's because they want to buy the darn thing, right? And in fact, 82% of people who you know shop perform a near me search first. So it's really, really a powerful type of search. And so where the story is really developing for franchise organizations is you actually want to rank for AI results, and you want to rank for local results because that gives you your best opportunity for success because AI results are very informational type of things. How, what, where, how, um, you know, what is, etc. You want to rank for these. You have to rank for these because this is the whole direction search is going in. It's no longer a list of blue links. It's not about being in the top three or the top 10. It's literally one answer. You need to be structuring your content. I'm going to talk a little bit about what that means in just a second, but you need to be structuring your website, your content, your search strategies around ranking for that one answer and trying to get your brand in there. But at the same time, you have a tremendous opportunity on local search as well as a franchise company. You have all these locations, you got all this local content, and you can rank for explicit local terms. This is where someone's saying, you know, a plumber in Springfield, or I want to get, you know, a coffee shop near me. Huge opportunity for a franchise organization. So my advice is go after both. Go after, you know, the AI-based search, because it is, in fact, the future, but local is not going anywhere anytime soon. So rank for those as well. A few ways to do that. Um, your website is still the hero. Now, it's not nearly as important as it once was, as I said, but it is the thing you control the most. I can't stress this enough. Think about your website on a sm a phone first. It has to be, everyone says mobile first, mobile first, mobile first. Nobody means it though. You have to mean it. When you're looking at your website, don't look at it on a big screen. Look at it on a on a phone because that is where the vast, vast, vast majority of your customers are looking at it. And it has to be fast. It has to be fast because consumers won't put up with a slow slight, neither will the search engines. And a lot of franchise organizations actually structure the website. I hate to use the word wrong, but wrong. This is how a website should be structured if you're a franchise organization. In this case, uh, the URL I'm using just for example purposes is your website.com. Then your locations would be your website.com slash springfield, your website.com slash Riverdale. That's really important. That's called a subfolder structure. A lot of franchise organizations will organize it as uh springfield.yourwebsite.com. That's called a subdomain, or they'll just create a whole new URL, your springfield website.com. In both of those cases, the the site is viewed as a completely different property in the eyes of the search engine, and they are not connected to your major main brand. Remember before how I said even just seeing reshift media, the search engine understands who that business is and can attribute that great citation that mentioned back to my company. If you structure your website where all of your local sites are in the search engine eyes, disparate. So again, you know, RiverdaleCompany.com or Riverdale.mycompany.com, it doesn't see those connections. It views it as different companies. You need to structure your website as a subfolder because what happens now is you are explicitly making connections between all of your locations and your corporate brand. And those locations now help each other because they're connected to each other. They help your corporate brand because it's connected, and your corporate brand helps your local brands. It really is a better mouse trap. So for all of you franchise systems out there, I implore you to structure your website like you see here. You also need to make sure that you have local information on each microsite. Table stakes is what you see here: address, phone number, hours of operation, name of the location. You gotta have that. Absolutely the bare minimum. You should also have a bunch of other information I'm gonna talk about in just a second, but as a bare minimum, you have to have that. And what you need to do is make sure that the search engine understands what all that data is. So this is a screen grab of a website uh our company built. Um, obviously, if the search engine hits this page, it will probably figure out that's the address and it will probably figure out that's the phone number. We structured it that way on purpose. But one thing that search engines and particularly AI search engines hate is uncertainty. So if it is not entirely certain where that location is, let's say in this case, there's a Scarborough in Texas or something, and you're not 100% sure where this location is or what that information is telling them, it will it will index it, but it won't have as much um confidence, and therefore it won't equate to as much visibility. So what you want to do is you want to actually add additional data specifically for the search engine. This is called structured data, or you may have heard the term schema markup, same thing. Um I know everyone's probably excited. I'm showing you code, probably excited to see some code. I know everyone came on this webinar saying, I hope I see some code today. Um this is this is a very simple example. This is actually the back end code that we've applied to this particular website. It says, Hey search engine, I'm using schema markup. This is a local business. So we've explicitly said that this franchise location is a local business. Um, its address is you know 45 Ironside Crescent in Scarborough, Ontario with a postal code. Works the same for zip code, by the way, for US. Um, and this happens to be a location in Canada. Um, this is their geo coordinates. So we went the extra step to actually give the specific lat and long. That way there is zero um misunderstanding as to where this location is. That is so important for those near me searches. When someone says, I need a coffee shop near me, if the search engine has the exact lat and long, there's no doubt where that location is. We've also marked up the phone number and the hours. This is the simplest example of what this is. Every franchise organization should have this type of markup. It's called local schema markup. But there are hundreds of these. If you're a restaurant, there's a restaurant markup, there's a menu markup. If you're uh a fitness gym, there's there's actually a fitness gym markup. Like there are all types of different coding that can be applied specific to your type of business, uh, specific to the content you create. So if you're an e-commerce business, there's a product markup. If you're a services company, there's a services markup. And what it does is it literally teaches the search engine about your business. This is imperative, particularly in the AI area, uh AI era, because the AI needs to understand in granular detail to answer these very faceted long tail questions that people are asking. Getting back to content, I mentioned before localizing content. So when I say that, yes, of course, phone number, address, etc. But you want to make those local microsites as specific to their communities as you can possibly do. Uh, an easy one is local specific promotions. If there's any kind of you know, special offers or seasonal offers that a location is providing, that's easy. Local service area details. What neighborhoods do they serve? What are their what's their coverage area? Um, how are they connected to their community? In fact, you know, go so far as to talk about your community involvement. Are you sponsoring any charities? Are you part of any events? Uh, have you won any local awards? Um, local customer testimonials are tremendously valuable, particularly for the AI. The AI loves real people's opinions. And so those local customer testimonials are great. They can be video, they can be text, whatever. Um, really helpful when you put those on your local microsites. Um, I haven't talked a lot about FAQs. I could do a whole talk just on FAQs these days. So an FAQ is your frequently asked questions, right? You've seen these on websites where it's like, you know, are you open weekends? Yes, we're open weekends, blah, blah, blah. It seems pedantic, but I can tell you that those FAQs are like AI search plutonium because it is it is tailor-made for AI. Question, answer. Question, answer. As many FAQs as you can do, do them. They're great for local as well. When you want to like, you know, what cross streets are you located at? Do you have parking? Um, what's your average wait time? Um any local pricing, right? All that stuff. Those are great FAQs, great for those long tail searches, people are asking. And if you can manage it, even having a local blog is a good idea. If your franchise owners are able to do local articles, great. Just as much local information as you can provide, that gives you that up that opportunity both on the AI search I talked about, but also on that local search I talked about, right? Trying to, again, we're trying to index for both of those concurrently. And the last thing on my slide here is to talk uh to talk about is to publish AI-friendly content. So there's a couple of things you need to change your head about. First of all, is you know, make sure that you have proper structure to your webpage. You should have that anyway. Proper headline, subheadline, body copy, blah, blah, blah. Using consistent terminology. So SEO people for a long time probably trained you as a franchiser or as a business owner to talk about your business in different ways on purpose because you're trying to index for different keywords, right? So, you know, sometimes I'm gonna say marketing, sometimes I'm gonna say digital marketing, sometimes I'm gonna say advertising, some whatever. Um that actually isn't as powerful in the AI world because what the AI search is trying to do is find a commonality and connect dots. And so if you're constantly talking with your products and services differently, you can't connect those dots and understand that they're the same thing. So, what you want to be able to do is talk about your brand, your services, your products, your locations in a very consistent fashion. So, particularly the names of your locations, whatever you name them, always refer to them by that name. And the last thing here is keep your convert, keep your sorry, keep your language more plain and conversational. So those hundred dollar marketing words that you know everyone has on their website, or those inside baseball jargon that no one outside of your industry understands, get rid of them. People are searching with plain language and are looking for plain answers. And that is how you should be writing all of your content. Write like a real human, right? Like a real person for a change, right? Don't write it with all these you know huge terms and you know, ways that people don't actually talk. And if your website's the hero, then your Google Business profile is definitely your trusty sidekick. So even non-Google properties use the Google Business profile for information. So ChatGPT, Perplexity, Um, Cloud, they all crawl your Google business profile. As a franchise organization, it is imperative that every single location has a fully completed Google Business profile. It's free anyway, so you might as well do it. It doesn't cost you anything. It's so important that the information matches your website. So the name of the location has to match, the address has to match, and make it as exact as you can. So, as an example, if your website says 1, 2, 3, home street, that is what your Google Business profile should say. It shouldn't be 1, 2, 3, home ST period, right? Abbreviation for street. Should be as exact as possible. And make use of that Google business profile. Don't just put in your address, your phone number, and your hours of operation and walk away. It has a ton of stuff in there. You can choose different categories that your business operates in. You can add all kinds of amenities like do you have a wheelchair ramp? Do you have on-site parking? Um, et cetera, et cetera. Add all that. And the reason you're adding it is because when someone does a search, like, you know, where can I find a great restaurant? I can bring my uncle who's in a wheelchair. Well, if you've told Google that you got a wheelchair ramp, you're good to go. The other thing to look at is creating Google posts. So on your Google Business profile, there is the ability to create um event posts and services posts and just general content. No one's really reading it. Like no one's really going there and reading that. It's more about informing both Google and any other AIs that are crawling your site that you have events or that you have specials or whatever it is. It's an education more for the computer than it is for the humans, but it's certainly an opportunity from a ranking perspective. Customer reviews are massive, as I said. Actively solicit Google My Business or sorry, Google Business Profile reviews, um, you know, simple stuff like, you know, leave a review after you have a great service, all the stuff you're probably doing anyway, and then respond to it quickly. As I said before, if you're letting those reviews sit, positive or negative, without response, your business is viewed as not as engaged, and it does, in fact, impair your visibility in AI-based searches. Okay, I've got shift gears. Um, we're almost at the end of this. Shift gears, I want to talk a little bit about advertising. I've talked a lot about search up to this point, um, but advertising as well. Digital advertising is being fundamentally disrupted by AI. And a lot of franchise systems I deal with are kind of scared of it. They're like, I would like to be using all the new tools and all the AI stuff to do my advertising, but you know, I'm not a technical expert. I don't have a bunch of technical experts. I don't have a lot of money to go build a tech stack. You know, this sounds very daunting. What I'll tell you is that you don't have to build all this. There's plenty of companies building it for you. Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, they are all building AI into their systems for you. You don't have to do it. I'm gonna give you a really simple example of uh Google My Business. No, sorry. Too many Google Google products. Google Performance Max. If you're familiar with Performance Max, it's Google's product where you can syndicate advertising across all their platforms. So across uh Gmail, search, YouTube, Google Display Network, um, the little overviews that they put on your um Android smartphone, basically any Google property. In one spot, you can advertise across them all. But what they're doing is they're using AI to figure out how to target those. Amazon does the same thing, Meta does the same thing, TikTok does the same thing. So I'm gonna give you a really simplified example to show you just how easy AI can be for you as a franchise. What uh what you do is you provide the machine, in this case, um the Google uh performance max with different uh captions and different photos. So you're not building ads, you're actually building or you're supplying the components of ads, is how I would call it. So in this case, again, very simplified example. We've given the machine three captions. Looking for yard care services, contact reshift yard yard services today. We do like a beautiful garden, we provide landscaping services. Those are three unique and um focus uh three unique captions focusing on different areas of business. And we've given four different photos. One has a guy doing some gardening, one has a guy like Paving stones, one has a guy, you know, using a lawnmower. We give all that to the to the machine. Then what happens is the AI will look at all that content, understand it, and when someone lands on the Google property, again, assuming I'm using a performance max example here, say this gentleman lands on the Google property, the AI will look to see what they know about that person. Oh, you know, I know this guy. He was just doing some searches for gardening a while ago. You know, he's probably interested in gardening. So it's going to look through the content I've supplied and it's going to give him the gardening uh caption in the picture of the guy doing some gardening. And it's done that to personalize that ad to that person's behaviors. So the AI is now using everything it knows about that person. So, and Google knows a lot. It uses all of that data to choose which pieces to assemble, and it assembles it in a way that makes sense for wherever that person is. So if they're on YouTube, it will actually take a bunch of photos and it will actually stitch them together for you and it will make a short little video. If they're on search, it will make a little search ad. If they're on display, it will actually create a display ad. It is literally real-time building ads based on what it knows about that person. And it's doing this hundreds of thousands of times a day to learn. And it starts to learn what combinations of copy and imagery, with what combinations of people, what demographics, with geographies, what works best. And within about a month of doing that, you've run millions of you know real-time scenarios. It starts to really dial it in and figure it out. It's absolutely incredible what this can do. And it does it with very few inputs from you as a business owner. You still need to know what you're doing. You need to make sure you got your tracking and your configuration and set up your pixels. And there's there's lots of nuts and bolts to do, but you don't got to build it. It already exists. Now, I know what a lot of you are probably thinking is well, that's terrifying. But the fact of the matter is, done well, people actually kind of like personalization. Studies show that 47% of people prefer a personalized deal because it's more relevant. 42% actually say that they're interested in customized products. And almost kind of counterintuitively, 25% increase in trust from a uh personalized advertisement. And the reason is because people feel like it's made for them. And, you know, it's more pertinent and therefore more valuable. Now, you can't be too creepy about it where you know you're getting a little over-targeting and you're trying to, you know, show that guy, you know, everyone's seen that ad where it's like, hey, you were looking at these red shoes and you left it in your cart. You should go buy these. That has its place, but that isn't what this is. This is a personalized ad based on millions of repetitions. What you can do as a franchise system, though. So that that what I just showed you, that's built right into Amazon, Meta, TikTok, Google, they all have that built in. Here's how you take it to the next level as a franchise company because you got something no one else has. You have a bunch of locations with in-house entrepreneurs across the country. So you can take personalization and you combine with localization. Localization is when you enhance a campaign with local market information. So that could be the name of the city or the neighborhood. It could be uh tied into a local event that's going on, like maybe there's a fair this weekend, could be tied into a local holiday, whatever. Something that is pertinent to that location. These posts or ads feel incredibly more relevant because it actually mentions the person's city or neighborhood or the mayor or the whatever by name. And it takes it from being just a generic faceless ad to something pertinent to me. And studies show that people click and convert more when the ad copy has local landmarks, events, or promotions that they actually recognize. A few stats that kind of back this up. Studies show that when you localize an ad, you get a 200% increase in click-through rate, a 90% increase in conversion, and your return on ad spend goes up by 120%. And it is simply because people are more engaged with the advertising, because it's more pertinent, it breaks through that clutter. There is no shortage of advertising online, that's for sure. And by putting in that localization, it breaks through that clutter, creates that little spark of, oh, that seems interesting, and gets that engagement. So here's how you as a franchise system can do this. There's that personalize that I just showed you. So again, you can use Performance Max to do this, TikTok, et cetera. Use the in-house or built-in tools from these platforms to create the personalization. But you can then use automation and AI to take it to the next level to sub in localized information. So you can see here, all I've simply done is I've changed a copy to we've been making City Gardens Beautiful since date, contact owner at reshift of city by calling phone number. So now what I've done is I've still created that gardening copy, but now I've created it in a way where it's flexible to insert local terms. So I end up with an ad that looks like this. We've making Springfield Gardens Beautiful since 1987. Contact Andrew at reshift of Springfield by calling blah, blah, blah today. That ad will work, you know, on average, you'll get a 90% higher conversion rate on that ad because it's got all that great local information, right? It it still kind of has the same personalization as the first ad, but because it's so localized, it now has that additional um spark of interest for those people to click. Okay, so let's try and bring it together real quick. So um I honestly believe that this is a great time for franchise companies. The companies that embrace AI, embrace where things are going, and take action will in fact do very, very well. But you got to take action now. Search in particular is changing faster than most people realize. By this time next year, search won't look anything like it does today. Um, it's changing from a, like I said, a list of blue links to a single answer. And it's also changing from text to audio. I didn't even get a chance to talk about voice search today, but search is now truly multimodal, meaning that it's video-based, it's picture-based, it's voice-based. Um, it won't look anything like what it does today. You have to take action immediately, otherwise, you will be left behind. And don't forget that as a franchise organization, those in-house entrepreneurs, those local franchise owners, they're your secret weapon. Localization really is an advantage that only franchise companies can wield in a really um uh scalable fashion. So don't forget about that. Use that to your advantage. If anyone's interested in downloading this presentation, you're welcome to have it for absolutely free. Scan that QR code. Uh, we'll take you to that presentation. You can download it at your leisure. If anyone's interested in talking with me anytime, I'm happy to take a call. I can talk about this stuff all day. Send me an email, whatever you like.

Tom DuFore:

Back to you, Tom. Well, thank you. No, this is this is fantastic. And um, I'm glad I was just gonna ask, how can people reach out, get in contact, uh, and connect with you? And uh we'll include these, uh, the reshiftmedia.com on our uh on in the show notes as well of this. Um, but I I uh the the presentation is fantastic. You really brought bridge together a lot of questions, just I've had even on how does this play with the franchise or the franchisee, all the new shifts and change in digital marketing, AI, and bringing all these pieces together. It's brilliant with what you've shared. Uh, one of the questions I did I was thinking about as you were talking about this is uh the frequently asked questions. And in particular, um, I guess it's twofold. One is uh just having these free frequently asked questions. Do most companies do you publish these as individual blog posts? Do you have kind of a frequently asked page on your website that, you know, is a mile long with answers or videos or, you know, just in in that regard? That's part one. And then part two of the question is in a franchise system, does each local franchisee do they publish their own frequently asked questions? I just was it, you know, kind of trying to connect some pieces here. What your recommendations are on those?

Steve Buors:

Excellent questions, Tom, uh, both counts. So an old school sort of FAQ is kind of the one long page with the accordion, right? Where you got it's the question, you click the arrow and it opens and you got the answer. And and that's still okay. It's it's still fine. Um, there is a structured data schema markup for FAQ, which you should apply. And you literally say, This is the question, this is the answer. So that that is it's still okay, but the next level version is actually where you make it almost like um you remember like an old school glossary of terms almost where you have all your questions, you categorize them, and I click and it goes through to a single page that has the question and the answer. That's actually the next level because now what I can do is um I got now dozens of pages that have a question and answer, a question and answer. I can interlink those with blog posts for more information. They should be purposely brief, by the way. It should be like a question and like a little answer like this, not not like this, right? You don't actually want it to be a full-on article because then it loses the brevity and the simplicity that the that the search engine is looking for. So you purposely keep it brief, but what you do is you interlink it now with related blog posts, or if you have partners that provide that, or if you have services. So now you're creating this uh semantic relationship, and that's what you want. You want to start to think of your content less about just flat content and more about interrelationships. Um, so the best FAQs these days would be almost like an index page where you got a bunch of questions, you got a nice little search bar, maybe there's um categories, like if I'm asking questions about you know search optimization, or if I'm asking questions about social media, or if I'm asking questions about web development, whatever. So you can jump to different categories the user can explore by seeing, or they can do a search. And then when they click it, it goes through to a page now that has the detail. Uh from a franchisee perspective, um it's great when you can do a local FAQ. Now the trick is you can't just copy and paste the national FAQ onto the local page. That's just duplicate content. The search engine doesn't care about that. You also can't copy and paste your FAQ from one location to the next, same problem. So, best scenarios are you have a great FAQ on your on your corporate site, on your on your franchise company site, nice deep one, like literally a couple of dozen or more FAQs is totally fine. And then on your local one, it's usually smaller, and it's usually more about, you know, um, are you open weekends? Um, you know, do you have any specials or offers, or are you wheelchair accessible? Things like that. So you can still do local content, uh, but focus it on what's pertinent to that franchise.

Tom DuFore:

Very, very helpful. Yeah, that that's great. Because uh, I was thinking about you addressed what I was kind of thinking about that dupe, what could easily be you could duplicate content, uh thinking you're doing helping franchisees or helping your franchise network when it's it's not really making a difference here. It's so that that that's really helpful. Thank you.

Steve Buors:

Yeah, no, and and duplicate content, it's it's one of the banes of the franchise company existence, honestly, because you know, the reason search engines don't like duplicate content is um that's what people were doing back in the day to game the system. They were just replicating pages uh in an effort to try and increase search rankings. And so the search engine purposefully strips out duplication because it says it's redundant and I'm only interested in you know unique novel content. But as a franchise organization, like it is valuable content. You're not trying to game any system, it is legitimate, but unfortunately, you kind of fall into that duplicate content bucket. And so if you have 10 locations and all the content is largely the same, even if you change the name of the location and the phone number and the address, but if all the body copies largely the same, I can tell you the search engine is just ignoring those other locations. It's it's really it's really a big problem for a lot of franchise companies.

Tom DuFore:

Well, fantastic. Well, um Steve, this is a fantastic uh uh presentation. I I think that for the listener tuning in who watches this uh live or uh watches a recording or listens to this, uh, would be wise to reach out or get a copy of this presentation and uh connect with you here. Uh again, it's reshiftmedia.com. Steve, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being here today.

Steve Buors:

Thanks, Tom. Really appreciate you having me.

Tom DuFore:

Yep. Have a great weekend, everyone. Thank you for being for tuning in.

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Tom DuFore

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