2015 marks the fifth year in a row that the franchise sector is expected to grow and create jobs at a faster pace than the rest of the economy. One in 12 businesses is a franchise, and nearly 50 percent of all retail sales in the U.S. come through franchising. While franchises and multi-site companies may be multiplying rapidly, with opportunity comes challenges. The very nature of these types of businesses — multiple locations spread out geographically where brand consistency is vital — creates its own set of unique hurdles which must be overcome.

One such hurdle is the ability to take control of the vast quantities of content created by franchise companies with numerous locations. Effectively managing content can be a challenge for any business, and managing it across multiple physical sites adds another layer of difficulty. For example, franchise owners need to control the brand experience across all locations while allowing for localized customization and maintaining the experience customers have come to expect when interacting with their chain.

According to Melissa Webster, program vice president at IDC, “Franchisers have some unique requirements when it comes to website management and publishing. They must be able to control their brand while giving their many franchisees a fair degree of local autonomy, so they need strong multi-site capabilities. They also need a solution that’s very easy to implement and use, because their franchisees typically don’t have significant IT resources.”

Primero Systems, an innovator in Web CMS solutions, has developed a platform specifically designed to help franchises address these challenges: Webtreepro. A powerful, flexible, mobile-friendly, cloud-based content management system, Webtreepro is filling the gap in what has been an underserved market segment. Today, most CMS systems support many contributors all feeding one site (‘many-to-one’) publishing, but Webtreepro takes a different approach. Using Webtreepro, a single user can publish to many sites simultaneously (‘one-to-many’). This is especially important to multi-site companies, which need to funnel content to multiple outlets in order to maximize their overall Web footprint, local search visibility and local relevance.

There’s no question that Web presence is of critical importance — a website is the ‘face’ of a company. Ensuring that Web pages work cohesively together for effective brand management presents a challenge for business owners. With Webtreepro, brand owners can enforce brand control every step of the way, allowing layout and design freedom to local edition sites while ensuring a universally consistent brand look and feel. In addition to enabling brand control, Webtreepro gives brand owners the ability to launch sites quickly — ensuring that new franchisees hit the ground running with everything they need to make their franchise a success.

Already deployed and fueling thousands of sites, including such notable brands as Cruise Holidays, Travel Leaders and Sport Clips, Webtreepro is proving to be an elegantly simple, robust, highly flexible platform that fills a void for franchises.

Key Features:

• Single source publishing preserves search ranking
• SaaS architecture provides full CMS via the cloud, no need to invest in hardware
• Intranet/Extranet provides private access to content
• Enterprise-grade hosting and security
• Portal/landing pages to support marketing campaigns
• Set up levels of content editors and workflow permissions
• Custom and integration services for an optimum solution

Focused on enabling new capabilities and growth through the infinite capabilities of software, Primero has been designing custom software solutions across a wide variety of verticals for the past two decades. Helping franchises and multi-site companies maximize their brand presence throughout a network of websites is the company’s key focus today.

According to Diane Beattie, director of Web Products for Primero Systems, the specialized ‘one-to-many’ nature of Webtreepro is what sets it apart. “Let’s face it — the CMS market is crowded,” she noted. “We bring something different to the table. In creating custom solutions for franchise customers, we quickly saw that the ability to control the brand experience across the board, while allowing for local personalization, was not an isolated need. Webtreepro’s ability to act as a funnel to multiple locations is key — this ability is not found in other CMS offerings. Additionally, its highly flexible nature makes it especially well-suited to the continually growing, evolving franchise model of doing business.”