It is never too early to start thinking about 2024 planning. Whether your industry is B2B or B2C, crafting a holistic multi-channel marketing/media plan is imperative for driving franchise business growth. Diving into brand strategy, data and insights are among our favorite things at Curious Jane, and it may not surprise you to know your customer data should drive strategy recommendations. As you buckle in for your 2024 marketing and advertising planning, gather your marketing campaign and customer data and review these five essential steps to creating your franchise brand’s consumer media plan for 2024.
Step 1: Define Advertising Goals & Objectives
Your 2023 data is the best tool to help you determine 2024 goals and objectives. While the year isn’t over just yet, this data set and current performance is the best tell of how next year will look for your franchise brand. As you review this year’s performance against goals, take a dive into some of these results:
- What is your total marketing budget for 2023?
- How is your sales and lead volume for 2023?
- Are you where you would like to be, or are you looking for a 10% increase for 2024? How about a 20% increase?
- What is your average cost per sale/lead?
- What is your average cost per sale/lead per advertising platform?
Working through these businesswide marketing goals will naturally lead to some tactical and strategic questions – both of which should absolutely be a part of the conversation.
- How does my brand define and measure success? (Is it a $25 cost per sale? Is it a 0.75% click-through rate?)
- Is my brand looking to increase brand awareness?
- Is my brand looking to drive website traffic?
- Is my brand looking to generate leads?
- Is my brand looking to boost sales?
As you navigate this discovery process, start to identify your goals for 2024. It’s important to look at these specific and measurable goals across the board and set the expectation that your costs will follow. For example: If you are building a strategy to reach a 10% increase in sales for 2024, your marketing budget should also have a 10% increase. A boost will not happen without dollars to drive it there, so ensure that your media goals are backed by media dollars.
Step 2: Understand Your Target Audience
Once you have determined your goals, it’s time to dive into customer data. Develop a thorough and robust understanding of who is using your product or service. By reviewing your own client and customer data as your source of truth, you take the guesswork out of identifying your target audience, and instead, rely on the tried-and-true data at your fingertips. Use your customer data and insights to help your franchise make strategic decisions, and help answer important questions like:
- Who is my customer? (Age, gender, location)
- Where does my ideal customer go for more product information?
- How do they research?
- What values are important to my customer?
- What doesn’t my customer like?
- Where do they spend their free time?
Step 3: Select the Right Channels
In 2024, the advertising landscape offers an overwhelming number of channels. Selecting the right mix of channels is essential to reach your target audience effectively with your multi-channel marketing efforts. Using your client persona from step two, tap into those media locations where your customer spends their time and money. You may want to start with three to five ideal channels, or more if your budget allows. The more you know about your customer, the more naturally platforms will emerge.
For example, Franchise A is an emerging beauty product franchise. Their target demographic includes females in California, ages 13-30, who enjoy beauty products, are shopping on a budget, who rely on mail-delivery for their shopping needs and who prefer a virtual experience. Their goals are product sales.
This tells us a lot about how to best use our ad dollars:
- We can look at multichannel opportunities and creative to align with the seasonality and messaging for a young female Californian.
- Because our consumer prefers virtual experiences, we can learn more into digital marketing efforts (instead of traditional channels like direct mail).
- Because our consumer skews younger and more digital, social media emerges as a natural fit. We know this demographic relies on social media and video content to learn about new products and brands.
- This user may rely on TikTok search engines, YouTube product testimonials, Google searches for the website or check out hashtags and reviews on Instagram. Therefore, we may want to consider these platforms as our primary channels.
Step 4: Put Yourself in Their Shoes and Allocate Budget Accordingly
The best thing your franchise brand can do to allocate your media budget is put yourself into the shoes of your consumer. Continue that trek as you align marketing efforts with the customer experience.
Curious Jane recommends a full-funnel marketing strategy, regardless of the product or service your franchise brand offers. “Full funnel” speaks to the user’s research journey and decision-making, and we recommend aligning it to your marketing strategy.
When evaluating your target persona’s sales journey , it is important to identify which platforms are the right fit at each phase. For example, does your customer use Facebook to find new brands or do they rely on LinkedIn to review business services?
Once you’ve identified platforms and their place in a customer’s sales journey, set a realistic budget for each platform at each phase in the funnel. Allocate your budget strategically, considering the cost of each channel, how they are used by your consumers and their potential return. (It’s important to strike a balance between high-impact channels and cost-effective options.)
Step 5: Monitor, Analyze, Optimize and Repeat
The final and ongoing step is to put your plan into motion in 2024 and keep a pulse on performance. It’s important to know your franchise consumer media plan is fluid and flexible, meaning it will ebb and flow just like your business does. It is meant to serve as a backbone or structural support to your marketing execution, so there may be times when things need to shift to accomplish those goals.
Marketing, advertising and sales insights will be the true basis for your analysis. Use tools like Google Analytics 4 on your website, tap into your CRM and review campaign data provided by your advertising platforms. Pulling these types of data sources together will help you track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, conversion rates, click-through rates and customer acquisition costs. Monitor the performance of each channel and campaign to identify what works best for your franchise business. Most importantly, regularly review and optimize your plan based on your findings.
