Despite ecommerce’s steady growth, most companies still rely on driving customers into actual stores.

Reaching people on the ground requires a smart approach to local marketing––a task quickly becoming more digitized every day.

Each year, over 4,000 franchise CEOs and marketing executives are surveyed to reveal the biggest trends happening in local franchise marketing across all industries.

The feedback is published in an annual report to give franchisors valuable insight into:

• The most effective lead generation activities companies are utilizing
• How much money companies are allocating to local marketing efforts
• How businesses are measuring their return on investment
• How well brands are utilizing emerging channels and media to reach more customers 

If you haven’t noticed, direct mail campaigns are getting smarter thanks to systems allowing mailers to finally track each piece being sent out. Now, direct mail marketers can see why a campaign either worked or fell short of expectations by analyzing this important data.

The USPS’s Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) tracking system is a way to encode mailing information for letters and flats.

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.