A Better Solution to Local Franchise Marketing

toppers-testimonial-screenshot

It’s hard to market a franchise these days. No matter how much time and effort you devote to crafting great campaigns, distributing them throughout a national network of franchisees can be an enormous task.

Whether it’s a bulky, inefficient marketing supply chain or campaigns that fall flat time and time again, it can seem next to impossible to find harmony between your corporate marketing team and store managers operating on the frontlines of the business.

But as many franchisors have already discovered, the solutions to distributed marketing problems have less to do with your messages and more to do with the system you’re using to plan, produce and deliver them.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the most common local marketing problems franchises encounter and explore how many older franchise marketing systems put a drag on your bottom line.

When brands struggle to move the needle through local marketing efforts, the issues typically stems from one of three common problems:

1. Franchisees are left out of the local campaign planning process

There’s no better way to gauge what’s working at the local level than asking your franchisees themselves. More often than not, however, campaigns work like a one-way street. Corporate teams put the ideas together and franchisees wait to see what shows up at their doorstep.

Newer, more integrated distributed marketing systems allow you to open a dialog between you and your store managers to share ideas, get feedback, and ultimately boost confidence among everyone involved.

With simple communication features, it’s easy to highlight your highest performing stores and make them part of the planning process when setting up the next campaign or promotion.

2. Local marketing funds are either unrestricted or over-restricted

If you’re supporting your franchisees with financial support without restrictions or spending guidelines, it shouldn’t be a surprise when that money ends up paying the rent or other expenses instead.

On the flip side, giving your franchisees a headache with a laundry list of restrictions to abide by can deter your managers from marketing themselves to local customers in the first place.

While you may strike a good balance between spending guidelines and freedom on your own, today’s distributed marketing platforms give you the ability to track exactly where your funds are going by giving franchisees a single online storefront where they can order exactly what they need, when they need it––all under the guidance of corporate management.

3. Corporate marketing is getting pulled in too many directions at once

Franchisors that succeed with their local marketing programs almost always have a corporate manager or marketing team supporting what franchisees are doing to gain reach locally.

Pulling corporate in too many directions forces them to devote more time to every day operations and less time to building powerful new campaigns.

Instead, let your corporate team get back to strategy by automating many of the operational processes that can slow the system down.

Solving local franchise marketing problems with a more efficient platform

All of these problems boil down to one key issue: a lack of efficiency.

Your next campaign idea might have huge potential to resonate with local customers, but without a system to help you execute that campaign effectively and within budget, it might never reach its full earning potential.

If these problems hit close to home, there’s a better solution many companies are already taking advantage of.

A customized brand portal not only makes it easier to distribute local marketing materials to your locations, it also distributes the campaign planning process itself between your corporate team and your franchisees.

With a single portal franchisees use in tandem with corporate managers, campaign materials can be transformed into easy-to-use templates your franchisees can customize to fit their local market. Combine this with robust approval and ordering features and the entire process becomes dramatically more simple.

Here at Suttle-Straus, we build customized brand portals that solves each of these problems through a single tool.

Streamline your local marketing efforts from beginning to end

A customized brand portal makes it incredibly easy to automate the content creation process and allow franchisees to assemble approved branding pieces all within a corporate-controlled environment.

With incredibly easy drag-and-drop design tools, franchisees can simply log into the system, select what they need to order, customize store location information, and submit an order.

Worried about maintaining brand consistency? Corporate approval options ensure all campaigns maintain the brand standards before any order is made.

It's not just about improving efficiency; it's also built to boost actual success with each consecutive campaign. Using our local market insight tools and targeted mailing lists, you can easily focus on your ideal customers with a personalized message while measuring your success for continual optimization well into the future.

Interested in seeing how a customized marketing portal has helped a major franchise streamline their local marketing efforts and improve their bottom line? Download our Topper's Pizza Case Study here

About the author

Latest posts

Chrissy Knaak

Chrissy Knaak

As the former Marketing Director at Suttle-Straus, Chrissy oversaw all marketing projects, including website initiatives, print campaigns, conferences, and market research.
Loading posts...

Topics: Franchise Marketing, Technology

Comments