Marketing Your Franchise Locally

Marketing Your Franchise Locally

If you want to help your franchisees grow their businesses while protecting your brand, consider working with your preferred marketing agency to develop packages to market your franchise locally.

Many franchises offer grand opening plans and packages to help new franchisees get off to a strong start, ensuring they get the word out about their new location and discouraging the temptation to reinvent the wheel. Why not continue to lead them in the right direction? Established franchisees also can benefit by selecting from franchisor-approved packages.

Local marketing packages are a win for both franchisors and franchisees. Packages give franchisees control over their budgets while helping to protect franchise brand standards. Attractive, budget-friendly packages encourage franchisees to use approved creative rather than building their own ads that do not meet brand standards. Whether the packages comprise social media ads, search ads or a combination of both, local packages provide scalable, economical options.

Creative Options

To begin to develop local marketing packages, franchisors must work with their agency to build a library of approved creative and ads. They might start by creating a set of brand awareness ads and some key messages for systemwide sales or promotions or times of year – maybe an annual sale, holiday or back-to-school promotion, etc. Your agency should be changing the ad creative at least once every quarter, so you will need four brand awareness ad sets, for starters.

An agency that handles your national ad fund as well as marketing for your franchisees can recommend local messaging that complements national campaigns. Effective local ads will layer onto national ads, bringing consistency to messaging while allowing franchisees to choose which messages best meet the needs of their particular location. Because local ads are designed to dovetail with national campaigns, marketing packages can be as effective as they are economical.

Budget Options to Market Your Franchise Locally

The packages should offer options at various price points. Smaller markets have different needs and budgets than larger markets.

Because ads for packages already have been created, sized and approved by the franchisor, franchisees can more quickly and affordably launch their local campaigns. There may be some room for customization, although that likely will incur an additional charge.

The Big Picture

By creating packages through one agency, franchisors also will ensure they have access to analytics of all the local marketing campaigns running across the franchise system, so they can gain visibility into how campaigns are performing in different markets. They can compare which campaigns are performing best and which strategies are yielding optimum results. That allows them to share winning strategies with other franchisees to ensure they implement best practices consistently.

Finally, packages can be a terrific selling point for new franchisees. Having a library of creative available and local marketing packages at various price points lifts a huge burden off owners who are still learning your brand, building their customer base and operating on a starter budget. They’ll need to depend heavily on your agency to steer them in the right direction as they prepare for grand opening and beyond.

Local marketing packages allow franchisors and franchisees to grow smartly together.