Franchise Marketing: Why is it Important?

What is Franchise Marketing?

Franchise marketing is any form of activity that you engage in that actively grows your business.

This may include anything from digital marketing to public relations.

The goal of franchise marketing is to increase brand awareness and drive revenue among your franchisees.

Basically, franchise marketing can be broken into two separate sections:

Operational Franchise Marketing

This is the marketing activity that you and your franchisees do in an effort to acquire new customers and attain them. Some examples include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Email marketing
• Social media digital marketing
• PPC advertising

Franchise Development Marketing

This is the marketing activity that you (the franchisor) perform in an effort to sell additional franchise locations to prospective franchisees and grow your overall franchise business.

While franchise marketing can indeed be broken down into categories, the truth of the matter is there will be some overlap. After all, the goal is the same: to grow your franchise business.

Challenges faced by the franchises to market their business

Lack of marketing synergy between brand and their outlets/partner network

Since the outlets have a presence nationwide or in different parts of the country, it becomes challenging to maintain a consistent dialogue with the other stakeholders involved. Some franchisees do their marketing independently and the brand isn’t involved in any marketing activities, some function on a cost-sharing basis for their marketing needs. Hence the marketing synergy is broken as the brand does not completely control all the franchise marketing decisions.

 

Difficult to collaborate with every individual location

Each outlet or franchisee spread throughout the city, state, or various locations. If the brand does not have a dedicated marketing team with a good number of resources to coordinate and take regular updates, a lot can go wrong. Collaboration and speed is the key here and most of the time, brands fail to do that efficiently.

Bandwidth crunch to scale dealers’ and franchisees’ campaigns

Since a brand is dealing with multi-location stores, there is always a resource crunch which makes the process to scale digital campaigns slower and tedious. Many brands have started using automation or CRM tools to track the leads and marketing funnel. But this technology adoption is still very rare and at a nascent stage which makes it even more challenging to scale the franchisee’s advertising.

Managing unique needs of each outlet/partners

Each outlet or dealer network has its own unique needs as per the location and the type of consumer needs. It’s not necessary if ‘Product A’ works in a store, then it should work in all other branches. Data helps you identify what people are searching for in that particular area and what does the sales number indicate for that particular marketing product. If the brand isn’t studying its audience and data, then it’s bound to fail at franchise advertising.

Inconsistent brand messaging and aesthetics across the outlets/partners

If the dealers and brands have the same message pasted all over their social handles and online presence, then that’s a complete failure of brand communication and efficacy. The offers and promos can be similar, but the messaging has to be tweaked as per regions and TG. For example, an outlet focusing on selling flavored tea/coffee which is available in a particular region. But cannot found or is out of stock in other locations, should not  cross-promoted. Similarly, branding and creative templates cannot be incoherent with the brand identity and guidelines.