Learn the Secrets To Franchisee Marketing

Now more than ever, local marketing is critical to the strength of franchisee-owned businesses. 

Thanks to the COVID-19 crisis, consumer spending has tightened and foot traffic has all but disappeared. As small businesses fight tooth and nail for survival, they cannot afford to be anything less than top-of-mind among their patrons. 

It is essential that franchise brands hone and increase their local marketing efforts to support franchisees at the store level. But too many franchisors are still missing a few key components of an effective franchisee marketing strategy.

To help franchisors fill in the gaps of their local marketing strategies, 1851 gathered a panel of franchise marketing experts for an exclusive webinar revealing some of the most important secrets to franchisee marketing.

“Shh, Don’t Tell Anyone: The Secrets To Franchisee Marketing” features insights and tips from Nick Powills, 1851 Franchise Publisher; Jessica Martin, Marketing Specialist with Payroll Vault; Dawn Kroeger, Marketing & Communications Director with Two Men and a Truck; and Michel Leconte, CEO of SEOSamba.

You can watch the full hour-long webinar above, and we’ve captured just a few of the main points below. 

Why Is Franchisee Marketing So Important?

According to Kroeger, franchisee marketing is at the very heart of why entrepreneurs get into franchising in the first place.

“When you join a franchise company, you’re looking for guidance and for historical information on what works and what doesn’t, because if you weren’t, you would just start your own Tom’s Moving Company. We’re going to share, ‘here’s what we know from 35 years of experience in this moving industry, in customer service’, and we know these are the tactics that work to drive leads and build your brand locally, because we also have 300 other locations telling us what works, and we’re aggregating everyone’s information — we can scale it,” Kroeger said.

How Can Franchisors Prepare Franchisees For Successful Local Marketing From Day One?

Martin says that Payroll Vault provides every new franchisee a pre-packaged suite of tools and resources to ensure effective marketing in any market.

“When we onboard a franchisee, we set them up with a very basic checklist and outline of what they should be doing right out of the gate,” Martin said. “And then, as their marketing matures, as their business is maturing and their reach is maturing, then we guide them, and we actually outline a quarterly business development and marketing plan for them. So it becomes more of a cut-and-paste. So we have a full library of communication templates that we’ve developed [and] imagery to go along with it that [is consistent with] our brand standards and guidelines. And then we also outline the marketing messaging behind the sales focus for that quarter.”

Marketing The Right Way, To The Right Audience

Knowing your audience is crucial, Powills said. “I’ve sat in a marketing advisory council meeting where the franchisee said, ‘our target is everyone from 2 to 99,’ and I’m like, ‘boy, you’re going to need a lot of marketing dollars to get after everybody who is between 2 and 99.’ So that’s a question for franchisees to ask back to the franchisor: ‘Who should my target audience be, and what data can we pull from all these other franchisees that can tell me who I should be targeting. Who is the most likely to spend money with us, who’s most likely to spend the most money with us, what is the average ticket for these demographics?’”

Powills says every franchisor needs to clearly establish what he calls “the why you, why now?”

“Why would anyone care about you, and why would anyone care about you now?” Powills asked. “If that message is not clear when you’re spending all these dollars on marketing, then you’re just a logo.”

In short, franchisees and franchisors alike need to “understand who your target is, deploy the right message and be willing to ask the questions,” Powills said.  “As you go into 2021, start writing down some of the goals you want to achieve so you can work backward and figure out the spend.”

How Can Franchisees Make The Most of Their Marketing Resources?

According to Leconte, franchisors provide the tools and framework for effective marketing, but it’s up to the franchisee to leverage those resources. 

“You can’t expect everything from the franchisor, they can’t be engaged at the micro-level with the committee, but they can give you the tools to enable that engagement on your part so that you can showcase your work on social media, for instance,” Leconte said. 

As for how to create a high-impact social media marketing campaign, Leconte says specificity is critical.

“Typically what we’ve found will be most effective at the franchisee level is to boost and promote posts that actually contain an offer — something that is very specific — because those audiences on social networks get depleted very quickly at the local level. If you’re using very basic messaging, you need to renew that messaging over and over very quickly so it becomes very tempting,” he said. “So, specific offers are great for that because they tend to give you an answer very quickly as to whether or not this is working for you, and if it works today or for the next three days, it’s great. Keep in mind that it might not offer the same return on investment six days from now because of that depletion effect — the fatigue that comes from a social network presence.”

Maximizing The Impact of Pay-Per-Click Marketing

“What we’ve found when looking at pay-per-click accounts is that lots of the budget is getting wasted,” Leconte said. “And there is a very easy trick to see at a glance whether you are wasting a lot of your budget: number one, you need to make sure that you have access to those accounts, so you need to require transparency from your provider. Number two, once you get into those accounts, take a look at the keywords and the search terms. If you look at the search terms, those are the actual queries that people are using to see and click your ads. So if you see lots of keywords here that are irrelevant to your business, then you are wasting a lot of your budget.” 

Franchisee Marketing Advice for 2021

As brands enter 2021, Powills advises marketers to consider how the landscape has shifted. Take radio, for instance.

“As much as radio continues to be tempting, take the insight that more people are working from home and probably not listening to the radio. If you’re going to deploy a budget into radio, make sure you’re doing it with purpose,” Powills said. “Pre-COVID, I would always buy around weather and traffic, because that’s what gets people to tune into the radio and listen to those things, but the value of radio advertising may have shifted.”

Secondly, Powills pointed toward a trend in social media that is making that world “less social and more media.”

“If you want your Facebook post to get the interaction or return on investment of the time you put into it, you’re going to have to put money against it,” Powills said. “So I do think there’s actually going to be an exodus of local pages on Facebook, on Instagram on Twitter for franchisees because of time and money and energy it takes to manage those things and potentially the lack of return unless you are willing to put more money into it.”

For more tips and insights into how franchise brands can increase the impact of their local marketing efforts in 2021, watch the full webinar in the video up top.