SocioConnect - An Integral Enabler of Caremark’s National Marketing Fund Launch

Caremark is a leading homecare franchise operating with 130 locations across the UK, providing vital homecare services to individuals in need. The Caremark Home Care assistants deliver excellent care with compassion and a cheery smile. Caremark enhances and supports its local franchise owners with marketing, data analysis, business and leadership guidance,  quality and compliance while the franchise owners provide compassionate, trustworthy, and positive care to their customers. 

Caremark relies heavily on digital marketing to recruit new talent and raise brand awareness, especially as they continue to expand their services and reach new audiences.

Caremark have just announced their new marketing strategy that brings their brand messages straight to their local audiences across all channels; including Digital, TV, Radio and Print. This allows each franchise owner to have control over the overarching marketing message in their territory and to achieve a cohesive national campaign while maintaining local relevance. 

To do this, they have just launched a National Marketing Fund for their franchise network. According to Emma Scholes, Director of Marketing for Caremark, the main objective of this strategy is to balance long-term brand building with short-term lead generation for local offices.
SocioConnect was an integral part of this launch for Caremark’s digital presence. Choosing a platform purpose-built for managing the social media for multi-location businesses and franchises improved efficiency for the franchise, prioritised local marketing, and increased social media reach for Caremark. 

Prior to adopting SocioConnect, Caremark faced significant challenges in managing its local social media pages. Amelia McEwen, Digital Marketing Coordinator at Caremark Limited, explained that as the franchise had so many local social media pages, it was difficult to organise local social media and maintain brand consistency across locations. In addition, the team struggled with cumbersome content scheduling. The lack of analytics and inability to effectively manage Google My Business and Facebook messages across locations added to their pain points. 

With a large network of franchise owners, some of whom have never had training in digital marketing, there was also a strong need to centralize social media operations, simplify content creation, and enhance franchisee support.

How Caremark Streamlined Franchise Social Media

To enable the efficient rollout of the new strategy, Caremark partnered with SocioLocal, who developed SocioConnect specifically for multi-location businesses like Caremark. This centralized tool enabled Caremark to manage each branch's Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business and LinkedIn profiles by being able to:

• Easily schedule and publish content across multiple branches
• Manage reviews, direct messages and comments from a single platform
• Monitor engagement and performance analytics
• Ensure brand consistency across all local franchise social media pages
• Give local users the ability to schedule their own posts with ease 

In addition, SocioLocal offered training and ongoing support for franchise owners and managers, helping to onboard new users and address technical challenges.

In the initial 6 months of adopting SocioConnect, Caremark has onboarded over half of its 129 UK locations onto the platform, with plans to continue expanding this across the network. The platform has proven to be an essential tool in Caremark’s marketing strategy, particularly for:

1. Improved Efficiency: Amelia shared that scheduling content is now much faster and more user-friendly, allowing her to complete batch tasks that previously took 10+ minutes in just 2 minutes. This newfound efficiency has freed up time for the marketing team to focus on higher-level strategy and campaign development.
   
   
2. Brand Consistency: With all franchise owners able to access and post brand-approved content, Caremark has been able to ensure consistency in its messaging and branding across locations. Local branches now have the autonomy to publish localized content, such as community news, while staying aligned with the overall brand image.
   
   
3. Enhanced Support and Training: SocioLocal provides Caremark franchise owners with regular training sessions, covering everything from social media best practices to troubleshooting. The platform's easy-to-use interface and ongoing support have been a hit with franchise owners, with one local branch praising the system for being "brilliant" and "user-friendly."
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4. Centralized Communication: One of the key pain points that SocioConnect addressed was the need to manage messages and inquiries from multiple platforms in one place. This feature has been especially important for Caremark, as it allows them to promptly address Google My Business messages and Facebook inquiries, both critical for maintaining high customer satisfaction ratings.
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5. Enabling Local Branches: SocioConnect allows the local branch managers to easily promote Care services and recruit new staff members in their local area. Over the past 3 months, local branch managers have tripled the social media reach for the Caremark brand through social posting and communications. When these local posts perform well, the organic reach of brand posts naturally increases too! This is a win-win for the Caremark franchise.  
   

What does the future look like for Caremark’s use of SocioConnect?

As Caremark moves into 2025, they are excited to leverage SocioConnect further and expand their social media reach. While social media has been a strong driver for recruitment efforts, Caremark is now looking to target private customers and social media enquiries through their marketing efforts. With the launch of their National Marketing Fund and continued use of SocioConnect, Caremark plans to ramp up its social media advertising strategy in 2025, focusing on both brand awareness and local marketing campaigns. The support and collaboration between Caremark and SocioLocal have created a strong foundation for ongoing success. 

Amelia summed up her experience with SocioLocal by stating,

"SocioConnect has got everything that we need! In general, I love the way SocioLocal supports us! It’s very refreshing compared to what we had before. We know that if anyone has any tech issues SocioLocal are there straight away. You support both the field team and the franchise owners so I am very pleased with that."

The Caremark Franchise owners will continue to benefit from the National Marketing Fund with the assistance of SocioLocal and receive comprehensive marketing strategies, localised advertising campaigns along with training and support. Caremark are truly making their mark by empowering franchise owners with national exposure. 

Thank You

Connecting you to your customers, one post at a time.

If you want to learn more about how SocioConnect can centralise your franchise marketing, collating the benefits of many tools in one platform, purpose-built for multi-location brands and franchises, Book a Demo! We’ll show you how to achieve better reach, engagement and in-store performance with ease and efficiency! 

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