Annual Franchise Marketing Report: Marketing Budget Spend & Effectiveness

2019 marked the debut of the Annual Franchise Marketing Report (AFMR).

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 assist franchise consumer marketers in understanding 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, executive vice president 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.

Marketing Budget: Spend & Effectiveness

To engage their customers, marketers have implemented an integrated, omnichannel marketing strategy. Respondents reported a somewhat balanced spend - with the exception of digital advertising, which played the largest role in their overall budget mix. Social media and websites were the next two leading categories. The "Other/Don't Know" category consisted of respondents who completed the survey but may not have had the marketing mix or access to results.

"While digital advertising is balanced in the amount of spend versus effectiveness, social media and websites are very effective versus the amount of budget allocated to each," said Phibbs. She noted that there are two schools of thought on this: 1) Would the results increase if more dollars were allocated to social media or websites?; and 2) Are the websites and social programs being maintained properly?

"With so much of the buyer's research being done online before the purchase, it's important to have the customer-interfacing tools working at their optimum to achieve the purchase," she advised.

 Next time: Digital marketing budget: Spend & effectiveness.

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.