What is Franchise Marketing

Establishing a marketing strategy as a franchise might seem easy. After all, there is a large and successful brand that has already done all the hard work, right? While that is true, it is only half of the story. A franchisee can’t just sit back and rely on the head office for all their marketing activities. Depending on the type of franchise, you might even be responsible for marketing your location without interference from the head office!

While one might feel it is more fun that way, it can also seem like an enormous undertaking to contribute to the marketing of a large brand, even if it is only for one branch. So, we’ve put together some tips on what a successful franchise marketing strategy looks like.

1. Make clear agreements

How involved franchisees are in marketing will depend on the type of franchise formula they operate under. Clear arrangements between the head office and franchisees are necessary to make sure everyone knows what to do. These will concern things like budget and spending, campaign calendar, and how free franchisees are in creating their own materials and getting involved in local events.

2. Establish a strong marketing strategy

The perfect franchise marketing strategy isn’t a matter of one size fits all. Every formula has its own strengths and customers, and so every formula has to decide what works for them. Crafting a winning marketing strategy ensures that you don’t invest in channels or activities that don’t serve you and your business and that everyone is on the same path towards success.

3. Don't forget local marketing

For franchise formulas, just having a strong (inter)national brand is no guarantee for success. You need a balance between national campaigns that help build brand awareness and local campaigns that reach customers and build trust on the ground.

4. Join forces with the head office

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: only when franchisors and franchisees work together, can a franchise truly succeed. The different perspectives on the company provide valuable input. Franchisees can also use the head office’s knowledge and experience to grow their own marketing capabilities.

5. Share best practices

Sharing is caring. Why invent the wheel every time you want to do something marketing-related, when you can employ other franchise locations and/or the head office to help you? The entire business will improve and grow when people share best practices, so don’t be afraid to celebrate your successes!

Crafting a franchise marketing strategy may seem like a daunting task, but with clear communication between the head office and franchise locations, everything should work out. Make sure to keep the interests of the (local and bigger) business in mind and to work together. 

Now that your strategy is set, let’s talk about actually employing a franchise marketing campaign. As with the franchise marketing strategy, this can seem daunting. Do you start at the head office or locally? And what if you have 0 marketing experience as a franchisee?

Take a look at the six steps below, they will help you get started.

Step 0. Find your concept.

Of course, before we can begin setting goals and determining channels, we need ideas! Use a combination of spontaneous ideas and creative brainstorming to create a balanced campaign calendar.

Step 1. Set your campaign goals

Use SMART goals to determine what you want to achieve and measure with your campaign. Collecting this data over time and campaigns can tell you a lot about how your franchise is doing locally and (inter)nationally.

Step 2. Focus on brand identity and consistency

Use the expertise from both the franchisor and franchisees to develop a strong brand identity. The brand book and messaging matrix for the base for this, using templates ensures that the things that need to stay consistent, do. From there, adapt to your local needs.

Step 3: Segment your audience

Define your ideal customer and find out as much as you can about them. Then, tailor your campaign to them, and make sure the campaign content adds value to their life!

Step 4. Leverage several marketing channels

Don’t spend all your time on one marketing channel, and don’t spread yourself too thin either. Find out which channels work the best for your franchise and invest in them.

Step 5. Make it real

Let’s get going! Use a campaign distribution software (bonus tip, Mariva has one!) to deploy your campaign and reach your target audience.

Step 6. Measure the results of your campaign

Make sure to look back at your campaign and evaluate if you’ve met (or exceeded) or missed your goals, why that happened, and what the main takeaways are to ensure an even better campaign next time.

All in all, launching a winning franchise marketing campaign can seem like an immense task at first, but remember that the combination of experience and knowledge from the head office and the local connections of the franchise locations makes for a powerful motor to drive your franchise marketing campaigns. It may sound a bit cheesy, but teamwork really does make the dream work! 

Let’s talk about tools. Because you can’t run successful franchise marketing activities without the right tools. Your assets will get lost, content won’t be where it needs to be when it needs to be, and the approval process becomes an email-chain the likes of which we haven’t seen since the ‘90. So, you need software. Let’s go over the ways that franchises use marketing software, and why Marvia is the one-stop-shop for all your needs.

DAM

Most companies start with Digital Asset Management software (DAM). A DAM helps businesses simplify their business processes by providing a central online hub for creating, managing, sharing, and finding digital assets to help manage creative processes and maximize the value of assets.

Content Creation

The next step is content creation software. There are, of course, options in the Adobe Creative Suite, such as InDesign and Photoshop. Other platforms combine a DAM with content creation options. In Marvia’s Brand Platform, users can create content with Dynamic Templates. Dynamic Templates are a must-have for simplifying content creation and unifying brand identity through franchise locations.

Marvia also recently launched the Template Studio. The Template Studio allows users to transform InDesign files into editable templates. Your team or partners can effortlessly customize these templates to create consistent, on-brand content across various formats and channels, all without having to involve the head office’s marketing team for every single poster.

Distribution

Getting the necessary marketing or campaign materials to your locations can also be handled by your software. Marvia’s 360° Campaign Distribution lets franchisees distribute localized campaigns quickly across offline and online channels in just a few clicks. This relieves the burden on the central marketing team, reduces administration and sends a consistent campaign message to your customers.

Analytics

And, of course, you need to know how your marketing activities are performing. With Marvia’s Insights and Analytics, you gain (location-specific) intelligence to increase franchisee participation and optimize marketing campaigns. The dashboard also logs individual user activity and how assets and products are being viewed and used.

Integrations

Marvia also works together with a growing number of partners that bring integrations to external software, or provide services such as localized printing. 

We can tell you our brand platform is ideal for franchise formulas, but we can also let our satisfied customers speak for us.

Poké Perfect

Poké Perfect is currently the largest poké concept in the Netherlands and is looking to expand. The brand chose to focus on local marketing to reach their ambitious goals.

Poké Perfect was looking for a way to work on the day-to-day of the business while keeping an eye on the big picture. They were also looking for ways to empower enthusiastic franchisees to run localized campaigns to grow local visibility.

Now, everything is clear to everyone and it is easy to plan in advance. Franchisees have more space to run campaigns and offer their customers a personal and localized service while the process doesn’t cost more time and manpower.

New York Pizza

New York Pizza's marketing department wanted to reduce one-time requests and focus more on branding activities, since making marketing materials for the entire franchise was their responsibility and kept them from doing what they really wanted.

They were looking for a way to provide their franchisees with marketing materials, allow them to create their own materials and support their franchisees in doing so. They were also looking for easy storage of assets and easy distribution of materials.

After implementing Marvia, the marketing department was able to largely let go of local marketing. They still take care of supplying marketing materials, but franchisees are the ones designing materials such as posters, flyers, and social media content with their own message and distribute them directly using the Social Media and Door-to-Door leaflet integrations.

Fit20

Fit20 was looking for a way to provide their franchisees with brand materials and to activate them to get more involved with marketing.

The brand was looking for a brand portal for their franchisees and partners, with a media library to organize assets, templates to let franchisees create their own promotional materials, and the possibility for franchisees to post directly to their social channels.

Marvia’s brand portal provided it all. Since implementing Marvia, Fit20’s content creation process has accelerated and their branding is more consistent over channels, whilst also becoming more localized.