With so many free and accessible digital tools available, it should be relatively easy to get a handle on marketing efforts for your franchise business ... right?
If you’re a marketer, you know that’s not the case. The reality is that even established franchise networks struggle to succeed and scale their brands without some outside support. Most in-house franchise teams don’t have the bandwidth required to adequately serve each franchisee once the brand expands beyond a few locations.
Franchise marketing, like many aspects of business operations, can’t be a “one-size-fits-all” venture. It takes time—not only to adequately optimize the various campaigns but also to meet with individual owners to understand how marketing efforts are impacting their businesses on the ground. An agency that does this well becomes an invaluable ally and frees up the internal marketing team to take a bigger-picture view of the network’s operations.
Franchises and other multilocation businesses operate in a peculiar middle ground where all of their locations generally share the same name, services, and branding, but they serve different markets and therefore different demographic makeups. Beyond brand cohesion, franchises are all individually owned, meaning each location may have different growth goals and face its own unique challenges.
This distinctive combination of diversity and consistency often necessitates the intervention of a third party, such as a franchise marketing agency, to oversee and manage various aspects of the marketing strategy. An agency can:
Partnering with the right franchise-focused marketing agency significantly reduces friction, particularly when it comes to scaling a brand and its associated market. That’s because even though each individual location will have its own objectives and challenges, a shared foundational strategy exists across the network that, when implemented correctly, can be used to hit growth goals for new locations more quickly.
Franchise marketing experts understand the nuances of building a comprehensive and cohesive strategy across a franchise network, including how to effectively:
Optimizing all of these factors with guidance from a franchise marketing agency helps maintain brand consistency while leveraging local flair to grow sales.
When you want to get more proficient at something, you turn to professionals for training and advice. As discussed above, franchise marketing can be tricky, and navigating the space can be especially tough without the right experience. Getting support from a franchise marketing agency means always having an expert available to walk you through unfamiliar territory or answer questions that may arise. The best franchise marketers make an effort to keep their finger on the pulse of the latest marketing strategies, trends, and technologies, helping to ensure regular upskilling and reskilling of your personnel in their areas of expertise.
Another advantage of partnering with the right franchise marketing agency is that it can relieve a franchisee of the obligation to know the intricate details of the “how” behind all the marketing efforts. Of course, with regular meetings, transparent reporting, open communication, and proactive client service, the client should always feel like it knows how the marketing efforts are translating to its business.
Any marketing agency should be able to demonstrate the experience and systems it will use to help your brand get from where it is today to where you want to go. If an agency can offer support where you are now but can’t help you once you scale, then it likely isn’t the right long-term fit. An agency should be able to demonstrate how it has helped brands win—and how it can help you do the same.
For home service franchises, SmartBug was able to leverage its longtime standing as a Google Premier Partner Agency—a recognition given to only 3 percent of agencies worldwide—to become an early adopter of Local Services Ads, one of the latest advertising formats offered through Google. This meant our eligible clients were able to beat their competitors to the space and earn more business as a result.
Our franchise marketing team also tackled rapid expansion and campaign management hurdles for Two Maids, resulting in enhanced lead generation and reduced costs across all of its franchise locations. Two Maids is a franchise network that provides house cleaning services, and it began working with SmartBug to improve the volume and quality of its leadflow. In six months, SmartBug drove a 37 percent increase in leads per day per location, dropped the average cost per lead by 17 percent, and reduced the number of locations failing to hit their lead per month goals from eight to zero. This success helped Two Maids expand with 14 new locations.
A good franchise marketing agency should deliver a win-win-win scenario—value for the agency, for the local franchisee, and for the franchisor.
Franchise marketing requires a balance between brand consistency and local flair—and maintaining that balance while growing the brand isn’t easy. Hiring a franchise marketing agency means freeing up bandwidth for your internal marketing team to focus on additional strategic growth initiatives such as product development, acquisitions and mergers, market penetration, or competitive pricing.
With more than 800 franchise clients, SmartBug fully understands the foundations of what makes marketing for a franchise network successful while effectively driving success at the local level. Plus, we meet the franchisee where they want to be in terms of how detailed marketing conversations can get. See how we can help you maximize revenue growth in every local market.