How to build a better marketing budget

Franchise brands constantly strive toward creating unique and engaging marketing campaigns that seek to reach customers to increase sales. So, carving out the right amount of budget to effectively accomplish this mission isn’t an exact science, since there are so many factors that play into certain marketing campaigns. Nowadays, brand marketers have been charged with getting the right amount of response from campaigns to show a positive return on investment. This proves to be tricky in some situations when there isn’t enough budget dollars to go around and move the needle significantly in the right direction. It has forced franchise marketing departments to be more creative and ensure all the silos of communication like public relations, social media and digital work to support launched campaigns. Marketers also have to be one step ahead and have the next big idea and campaign to support that idea ready to go if the current initiative isn’t driving sales. So, franchise marketing teams understand that in this day in age they have to be flexible and be constantly idea-driven to get the right visibility to stand out from the competitive clutter in their industries. Here are some insight and tools of the trade from today’s marketing executives on how they budget and plan for their company’s marketing campaigns: How do you determine a budget for a marketing campaign? What factors do you consider? Any tips? “Beef ‘O’ Brady’s franchisees pay a percentage of sales each month to be spent on advertising. We group the stores into DMAs and use shared funds to purchase media in support of our five system-wide promotional windows. In addition, we have a second budget spread equally over all stores to support stores with in-store POP, menu prints, local-store marketing and social media.” — Heather Boggs, vice president of marketing, FSC Franchise Co. LLC, parent to Beef ‘O’ Brady's & The Brass Tap* “Each quarter has a campaign with specific budget for creative development and media placements. During each quarter, we focus on our core menu categories: House Pizzas, Build Your Own Pizzas, & Topperstix. Within each campaign, there is always secondary messaging attempting to drive additional trial and impact frequency of customer visits, which provides metrics to understand drive and impact.” — Scott Iversen, vice president of marketing, Toppers Pizza* “Wing Zone sets its budget for the entire year by estimating the amount of total sales. Once this number is calculated, we start laying out our marketing plan for the entire year. The seasonality of wings allows us to break our year into four three-month promotion windows. Plan a year in advance, and budget based on a percentage of estimated sales to understand your opportunities.” — Dan Corrigan, marketing manager, Wing Zone “Targeting your marketing will make your spend more efficient, and knowing who you’re trying to reach will inform the type of media you should consider to reach them. It’s important to think about what the goals for the campaign are: Are you looking to drive awareness? Build brand recognition? Drive new customers? Launch a new program or product? These all factor in to how much budget you will need.” — Angela Zerda, director of marketing, Mosquito Joe* “We determine a budget for marketing campaigns based on the goals for the program, the program idea and the target audience. We know in advance what programs are really big bets for us, and we schedule those according to seasonality. Obviously driving traffic to restaurants is always the goal, but we have to allocate our funds wisely and plan to invest more during slower periods or when we have a particular program we want high awareness of — like our upcoming No Kid Hungry program.” — Natalie Anderson, senior brand manager, MOOYAH Burgers, Fries & Shakes*