How can a franchisor best ensure the marketing strategy is effective? Here Paola Tanner of Fuse provides essential pointers to working well with franchisees.
The job of a marketing team is to deliver effective strategies and sales-driving products and promotions, on budget and all while satisfying multiple stakeholders. Often the hub of a business, the marketing team plugs into and is accountable to operations, senior management, accounts and more.
But what if you were to add another layer of accountability? Say hello to franchise marketing. Whether a franchised business has two sites or two thousand, the complexity this creates is what differentiates a franchise marketing team to any other marketing division.
Some franchisees want to drive their own marketing, some want to inject the brand with their own flavour, others require a lot of support. Either way, you need to work seamlessly with your store network in order to achieve your marketing goals.
Let’s take a look at some of the complexities faced by a franchise marketing business.
THE MARKETING CHALLENGE
The franchise marketing team has to:
- Communicate the marketing plan to the network;
- Reconcile marketing fund spend and franchisee spend and bill separately;
- Devise incentive programs to kick-start local marketing;
- Manage requests from individual franchisees for local marketing across multiple channels;
- Stimulate franchisee participation nationally and locally;
- Leverage the size of the network to achieve cost efficiencies;
- Execute pre-planned campaigns that meet with the approval of franchisee advisory councils;
- Ensure brand compliance;
- Review local activity to see where more support is required;
- Give business support managers access to resources they need in the field, such as reports;
- Manage extensive digital assets from network marketing activities;
- Keep franchisees well informed.
THINKING DIFFERENTLY ABOUT THE MARKETING OPERATIONS FUNCTION
An online marketing platform is going to be part of the solution to many of these challenges. The marketing team needs a central system from which to administer the network – with end-to-end national campaign management, reporting and analytics, communication tools, hierarchy controls and print and digital channel management.
It needs a platform that can house customisable multi-channel artwork templates, giving stores access to on demand print and quick to market email blasts.
Having the right tools will minimise administration time for the marketing team, giving a small team more capacity. However, you need to examine your whole marketing function to see if there are any pressure points that suggest issues beyond logistics.
ARE YOU MEETING FRANCHISEE NEEDS?
If your marketing team is getting more requests from franchisees for local marketing activity than they can keep up with, it might mean you are not meeting franchisee needs to start with. You might have the right platform, but might need to review your national campaign strategy, to determine if they are addressing franchisee needs and delivering results.
Well executed, relevant campaigns reduce the need for one-off local marketing by individual franchisees. They also stimulate satisfaction and engagement levels, increasing confidence in the national marketing effort, resulting in fewer ad hoc requests.
It is important that your artwork templates meet the needs of your franchisees. Listening to your network and creating templates that are based on their feedback will help guide your template library. Do you have a library of artwork templates but are still getting a high volume of artwork requests? If the content is not meeting the needs of the network, custom requests will keep on coming – even if you have the world’s best artwork template system.
Similarly, if you are getting a low level of franchisee participation, you might need to examine the incentive programs you have in place. An idea is to enable franchisees to top up their allocation of letterbox flyers or send a store specific email campaign for example. After 15 years helping franchises with their marketing, we have noticed that a lower unit price or an opportunity to save on freight usually gets franchisees’ attention.
How about opt-in programs? Are you making the most of your marketing spend if you send out a blanket allocation with a one-sizefits-all approach to point of sale? You can stimulate franchisee participation if they need to register their own POS requirements, and you can spend what you save on wastage somewhere else.
To overcome the challenges of marketing a franchise business, it is recommended that a franchise takes a holistic approach; looking at capability, systems and strategy to then come up with processes. This empowers the marketing team to not only resolve some of those challenges, but also provides the business with a solid foundation, with the right structure to achieve the business’ goals.
Paola Tanner is a director at Fuse Franchise Partners, a marketing implementation agency helping franchise chains for more than 10 years.