Corporate franchisor marketing teams put in countless hours and Herculean effort into the overarching marketing strategy that protects the brand and serves the franchisees. The most successful 'zors provide their 'zees with a Marketing Playbook featuring all the approved marketing channels, collateral, assets, examples and how-to's making marketing at the local level easy, affordable, and attainable. They know that when franchisees win, everyone wins.
I've seen some amazing playbooks that not only provide all the information that a franchisee needs to execute on-brand localized marketing, but also provide links to specific items and preferred vendors and/or ordering portals to execute the marketing tactic cited. These are the companies that you see on Entrepreneur's Franchise 500 Ranking. Making marketing scalable and easy for franchisees is the key to marketing success.
In the absence of a playbook, franchisees are unsure where to turn and cite the following reasons for deviating from brand compliance and local store marketing efforts:
Here are some strategies to overcome these objections and increase franchisee participation with local marketing efforts:
A good marketing playbook also needs a communication plan, and feedback loops to hear about what's working. If your franchise executes quarterly marketing campaigns, you may produce playbooks by quarter, if you have monthly events breaking it down into manageable chunks can be helpful and more meaningful to franchisees. High performers don't just send emails, they also host weekly or monthly conference calls to go over the marketing tactics and answer questions, as well as supporting franchisees with quality contacts internally and with preferred vendors.
What is working for you to get everyone on board with local marketing?
Karen Wenning is the Business Development Manager at Suttle-Straus where she works with franchises on scalable solutions for managing their marketing collateral, direct mail and signage needs. Connect with her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenmwenning/
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