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8Traits SuccessfulFranchise

MarketingManagement

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Marketing Franchise

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8Traits SuccessfulFranchise

MarketingManagement

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Marketing Franchise

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Introduction

Franchise marketing is challenging. By the nature of the business model, many franchisees are innovative, involved, small business owners. Others, in master franchise roles, are savvy business operators with a full marketing team independent of corporate.

While a franchise connection obviously means many more things, a common brand, brand messaging and brand marketing are critical reasons why an individual business person would connect to a franchise. Thus, full compliance to franchise marketing guidelines, con-tent and activities just naturally happens, right?

Maybe not so much.

Franchisees are an interesting lot. They’re fiercely loyal to their franchise brand, yet fiercely independent. They will most certainly “know more than you,” yet look to you for the knowl-edge they need. As a marketing team member for the franchisor, yours is most definitely an interesting challenge.

As we observed the marketing activities of our various franchise clients over the past decade, Saepio has noted eight common sense traits of successful franchise marketing management. This short white paper outlines these observations, along with a handful of anecdotal stories from the trenches. We trust that this document will either reinforce your already on-target practices or spark an idea or two to help you improve your franchise mar-keting solution.

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

Trait One

Make it Simple Franchisees like marketing simplicity. If your corporate marketing resource center is easy to use and intuitive, they will jump on board.

We observed a franchise struggling to get franchisee participation. The marketing re-sources center was impressive in the amount of content that was available for use. Lots of categories, lots of options. Lots of overwhelmingness.

We worked with the franchisor to simplify the organization of the content into nine simple starting points focused on “what do you want to do?” This focus on simplicity changed everything and franchisee use of the site grew quickly.

So observation one is make it simple. Put yourself in the shoes of the individual with respon-sibility for local marketing and design your solution to the time availability and skill sets they have.

To read more about how Saepio solu-tions keep it simple and empower local marketers while controlling brand, read “Marketing Asset Management Technol-ogy to Boost Marketing Results.”

http://info.saepio.com/white-paper--using-mam-technology-to-boost-marketing-results

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

Trait Two

Give Them ChoicesEven while the power of the global brand is why they are a franchisee, they still want to be involved in the choices.

There’s really no single story to tell here. Many franchisors and non-franchisors alike launch their marketing solutions with limited content choices. The general concern is that the local marketers aren’t capable of making as good of a selection choice as the corporate market-er... which may often be correct. But lack of choice can translate into lack of use.

You may not be aware of this, but each of your franchisees is also an art director! Our sec-ond observation is to let them be just that. Don’t take that participation away. Let them make product, graphic and even verbiage choices, but do so within a framework. The bot-tom line is that solutions that offer more choices and involvement typically see more use.

To read more about how Saepio solutions empower local marketers but help the corporate marketer control brand, read the case study, “Sonic Boosts Brand Consistency, Streamlines Marketing With Saepio.”

http://info.saepio.com/sonic-case-study

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

Trait Three

Provide Fresh Content or a Fresh Perspective on ContentMarketing resource solutions that provide fresh content or fresh perspectives on content experience heavier use than sites with dated content ... no mater how good it is.

A franchisor in the auto services sector had a very strong marketing solution with a wide range of content, lots of choices and flexibility and a very simple user experience. Use by franchisees, however, was sliding.

A quick survey of franchisees showed that the content was thought to be old and stale. It was an interesting finding because the content was “timeless,” if you will, and was really strong and brand promoting. This revealed that the age-old challenge of an organization seeing its own content frequently and therefore believing it is old and needing refreshed while the target consumer has not seen the content enough to lock in the brand message assimilation that repetitive messaging delivers. Thus, content was being viewed as dated or stale when the target audience perhaps hadn’t even seen it yet.

The franchisor implemented a new process to systemically add new content and refresh how the existing content was used and franchisee participation grew.

Observation three thus is keep content in your marketing solution fresh but refresh how your franchisees view legacy content so they view it as fresh content as well.

To read more about how Saepio solutions help to keep content fresh, read “Using Marketing Asset Management to Keep Content Fresh.”

http://info.saepio.com/market-ing-asset-management--keep-content-fresh

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

Trait Four

Make it EasySimple and easy are different. Easy is about minimizing the amount of tasks and time re-quired to execute a campaign or even place a single ad.

A couple of good illustrations from the trenches come to mind here. The first was a retail franchise chain with a lot of SKUs. The franchisees were finding shopper flier creation chal-lenging because it involved navigating through category folders to get to the right product image. When the franchisor marketing team surveyed the franchisees, it quickly learned that everyone knew products by their SKU. Problem solved. A quick reorganization of the marketing resource site enabled the franchisee to simply enter the SKU of the product they wanted featured and then to select from among images associated with that SKU.

The second case example is also from retail. In this case, the local marketers wanted to still put the finishing touches on ad content but they also wanted a more complete starting point. The franchisor responded by creating a workflow step wherein a regional manager used the marketing platform to version an ad template with suggested content and then shared that template to the local marketers to add their finishing touches.

The point of Observation 4 is to look for every opportunity to make your solution easy to use. Look for ways to parallel natural workflow within your organization. Additionally, look for ways to automate processes. While not in the stories above, simple things like only one

credit card transaction being required for a multi-supplier fulfilled campaign can go a long ways towards gaining involvement and compliance.

To read more about how Saepio solu-tions empower local marketers, but help the corporate marketer control brand, read “Automating Marketing Localiza-tion.”

http://info.saepio.com/automating-marketing-localization

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

http://info.saepio.com/mam-marketing-store-front

Trait Five

Connect the DotsGuide the franchisee through the connected pieces of a campaign. Help them put the various pieces together such as ordering a window sign when they plan an EDDM or email campaign.

Many franchisors organize and launch solutions around categories of ads – emails, print ads, direct mailers, signage, etc. While this works, several franchisors have found that walking franchisees through a step-by-step process leads to more integrated campaigns.

One franchisee in particular improved multi-channel campaign use by simply collecting the different pieces of a campaign in a single storefront view. Others have taken a more ad-vanced approach of integrating workflows.

Observation 5 then is to tell your franchisees exactly what you want them to do by organiz-ing your marketing storefront as a step-by-step task sequence.

To read more about how we organize the storefronts’ step-by-step task sequence, read “Marketing Store Front: Connect Multi-Channel Marketing Processes, Streamline Marketing Fulfillment.”

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

http://info.saepio.com/how-four-national-brands-control-brand-and-empower-local-mar-keters

Trait Six

Share SuccessThe franchisees talk amongst themselves re: what works and what doesn’t. Help them by putting that information in your marketing solution and becoming part of the conversation.

Franchisors know that franchisees talk amongst themselves outside of the corporate frame-work. One franchisor in the auto services space chose to engage in these conversations by capturing and sharing success stories.

An easy way to share these helpful hints is to use the marketing center email and/or land-ing page platform to send out the success stories. Plus, you can point back to the specific campaign collections or individual templates that are referenced in the success stories.

We like to share success too. See how four national brands succeeded by using Saepio technology to power brand con-trol and local marketing.

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

Trait Seven

Make it Free / Share the CostsIf they have to pay, they won’t play.

We’ve watched all types of strategies through the years regarding who has to pay for what. What we can observe definitively is that FREE is a powerful word.

When access to the solution is free, use of the solution is strong. One franchisor in the hos-pitality space learned this the hard way. This franchisor associated a cost with each media output. The price set was just a pittance of what the franchisee would have had to pay to an agency to create a local version of the ad. The content was good and the process was easy. Yet no one was buying.

During an annual survey process, the franchisees spoke loud and clear – it wasn’t the low cost that bothered them but rather the fact that they were being asked to pay. The franchi-sor responded by making the solution free and utilization immediately soared.

Other franchisors have found success in offering to share campaign expenses, as well. What-ever your approach, make sure it is understood and accepted by your franchisees because our Observation 7 is that if they have to pay, they typically don’t play.

To learn more about a shared platform, request a demo today. It’s free too!

http://info.saepio.com/demo-request

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

Trait Eight

Communicate FrequentlyAll of the observations above pale in importance to the value of communicating frequently and effectively.

Like with many of our observations, there are many stories we could tell about the im-portance of communicating frequently. When we notice utilization of a marketing center starting to slide, we immediately look to see if there’s been a drop off in the communication from corporate marketing to franchisees. Usually there is.

Our recommendation is that you communicate both on a systematic schedule, where you highlight and direct franchisees to specific, featured content, and on a special events basis where you draw attention to a specific action you want them to take.

The speaking part, however, is not the most important part of communicating frequently. As you’ve no doubt noticed, woven throughout this list of observations is multiple refer-ences to a survey of the franchisees. Our observation would be that these surveys too often happen in response to a problem. Really successful sites typically have some process for gathering ongoing feedback and input from the franchisee community.

One way our marketers communicate is through campaign calendars and to do lists. To read more about this functionality, check out “Campaign Cal-endar and To Do List Keeps Distributed Marketers on Schedule.

http://info.saepio.com/mam-campaign-calender-and-to-do-functionality

Franchise Marketing from the Trenches8 Traits of Successful Franchise Marketing Management

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About Saepio

Saepio makes it easy for corporate and local marketers to build and run effective and en-gaging all-channel marketing campaigns. Saepio’s powerful MarketPort marketing platform starts with easy …

• Easy to Build and Run Cross-Channel Campaigns because everything – email, land-ing pages, social, mobile, digital banner ads, signage, print ads, direct mail, and much more – are all managed in a single, integrated digital marketing platform.

• Easy to Maximize Brand Value at the Local Level because local and corporate mar-keters share a single platform but experience the same platform differently based on their roles. Brand control, speed to market, and content localization is all easily accom-plished whether messages are for local, national or global audiences and corporate marketers can easily assign campaign tasks to local marketers.

• Easy to Engage Customers with personalized, relevant messages because corporate intelligence gleaned from CRM data, customer analytics, consumer actions and more can determine what content is served when, where and how.

• Easy to Automate Marketing Fulfillment because robust workflow enables every cross channel customer touch point to happen automatically whether launched by corporate marketing, initiated by a local marketer or triggered by a customer’s action.

This robust yet simplified approach to today’s complex marketing challenges is in use at hundreds of leading companies and organizations, including many of the world’s most powerful brands. It is transforming the way corporations focus and manage their marketing efforts in a world that introduces new channels, new competitors, new regulations and new opportunities at every turn.

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