If I Had $10,000, This is How I Would Spend it in One City

For a young franchise brand seeking to grow, $10,000 may be all that the budget allows for advertising. Unfortunately, $10,000 doesn’t go very far in most markets unless you’re a well-established brand. So 1851 talks to Dawn Kane, President of Hot Dish, to learn more about how companies can get the most bang for their buck. Established in 1999, Kane and her team were pioneers in the franchise advertising world—at the time, there wasn’t another agency that approached advertising the way that Hot Dish did, Kane explained. “We were one of the first companies to create national advertising campaigns but execute them locally based on nuances in the market, much like a franchise model.” Young brands don’t have the luxury that established companies have with brand recognition and reputation. Therefore, to attract qualified franchisee prospects in a strategic way, ads should be localized and tailored to a target audience. “The key factor that a lot of companies get wrong is who they think their target audience is—they think it’s just the general public,” Kane said. “If you have limited marketing dollars, you have to identify your primary market and focus your dollars on that particular audience. Other prospects will come later down the road, when you have greater brand awareness.” Surprisingly, many franchises don’t have a correct understanding of their candidates’ characteristics, Kane said. “Many clients think that they know who their main client is, but often times we will provide them with the data, and it completely changes their marketing strategy,” Kane said. To ensure that ads resonate with the brand’s target audience, Hot Dish accesses a third party resource to assist in lookalike modelling. Lookalike modelling is an advertising technique that creates a profile for prospective customers/franchisees based on the behaviors of existing clients. By simply inputting an email address, Hot Dish is able to create a profile on what franchise prospects and customers look like—their interests, income, gender, and media consumption. “When we place ads, especially on the digital side, we look at the people, not the medium,” Kane said. “We look at our research and see where the target audience is consuming media. It may be radio, digital, print or even direct mail. The most effective medium depends on the end user.”