Annual Franchise Marketing Report: Digital Marketing: Spend & Effectiveness

2019 marked the debut of the Annual Franchise Marketing Report (AFMR). For a short time, we will publish highlights in this newsletter. Ordering information is below.

This new annual report provides franchise consumer marketers with invaluable data and analysis they can use to benchmark their performance against other brands, within both franchising and their industry sector - a resource they can use to improve the effectiveness and ROI of their marketing efforts.

Franchising's increasingly competitive landscape has strengthened the need for marketers to better understand how their brand measures up against the competition and is performing in the wider marketplace. The AFMR is intended to help franchise consumer marketers understand how their team compares with their peers and, more importantly, help them allocate their limited resources to the most effective channels for achieving their system-wide goals.

Brands participating in the first AFMR represented more than 13,000 locations, $8.3 billion in annual revenue, and $131 million in annual marketing budgets. Diane Phibbs, EVP and chief content officer at Franchise Update Media, presented highlights from the report this past June at the 2019 Franchise Marketing Leadership Conference.

Participants consisted of franchise marketing leaders who completed an in-depth questionnaire online. Responses were aggregated and analyzed to produce a detailed look into the marketing practices, budgets, and strategies of a wide cross-section of franchise brands and sectors. The data and accompanying commentary and analysis provide the basis of the 2019 AFMR.

Digital Marketing: Spend & Effectiveness

Digging deeper into the digital category, we asked participants how they spend their digital dollars and what's performing for them. While PPC accounted for the highest spending percentage, SEO performed best in terms of how respondents ranked the effectiveness of their digital marketing spend, outpacing all other digital categories. The "Other" category represents digital marketing efforts that were not specified in this slide, such as other business websites.

"There are many studies, including our own data, that show email marketing success," Phibbs noted. "Perhaps marketers could evaluate their email marketing strategy to determine improvements for engagement and click-throughs. Subject lines, headlines, and types of content all make a difference in engaging with the customer."

 Next time: Where do you advertise on social?

Ordering Information

For more information and to order the 2019 AFMR, click here. The price is $175 until December 31, 2019 and $299 after that.