Marketing Byte: AFMR Examines How Marketing and Digital Advertising Funds are Allocated

The 2024 Annual Franchise Marketing Report (AFMR) provides data-driven insights that marketing professionals and other leaders can use to measure and elevate their efforts. The franchise space is constantly faced with opportunities and challenges as marketers adapt to industry shifts, including the need to accelerate the digital transformation of their brands.

Franchise CMOs, CEOs, VPs, directors of marketing, and other senior-level marketing leaders completed detailed questionnaires for the sixth annual AFMR. The data and statistical findings were aggregated and analyzed to comprehensively examine the marketing practices, budgets, and strategies across a broad spectrum of franchise brands and sectors.

Marketing and digital advertising spending increases

Many times when the topic of unavoidable expenses is discussed, the phrase “that’s the cost of doing business” is used. That appears to be the case when comparing marketing and digital advertising budgets in the past two years as brands are generally willing to spend more money to promote their products and services to consumers.

Two-thirds (66 percent) of the franchises surveyed in the AFMR said their 2024 marketing budget was higher in 2024 than 2023. Examining further, every retail (non-food) franchise and large franchise (501-100 units) in the study said their marketing budget increased this year. Twenty-four percent of the overall respondents said it was the same while only 10 percent said it was lower this year than last year.

Budget allocation

Franchises surveyed responded with nine different methods of marketing, from the most-used (digital marketing, 33 percent) to least-used (traditional broadcast, 1 percent). Other popular marketing avenues were social media (16 percent), website (13 percent), and public relations (11 percent).

With digital advertising receiving one-third of the marketing budget for franchises, the AFMR further examined how the budget within that category was allocated. There were 10 different types of digital advertising strategies, led by pay-per-click on search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, etc.) with 29 percent.

Social media advertising (17 percent) and search engine optimization (11 percent) received the second and third-highest amount of digital advertising budget allocation, respectively. Other methods included social content posts, email marketing, and video.