Other best practices talk of the importance of reviewing franchise marketing structure and fees, franchisee business and marketing planning, as well as the need for field managers to be more rounded business consultants – helping franchisees develop their total franchise business (i.e., not just improve operations and compliance).
An important area that franchisors, in our experience, do well to develop is local area marketing expertise. We say this because franchisees are often overwhelmed with choice (for their marketing spend), conduct quite disparate campaigns and generally underspend. Many franchisees also, to be fair, don’t have the skills or experience to independently plan and execute an effective local marketing programme. This is where the franchisor, either through direct marketing staff and/or field managers, needs to provide strong marketing leadership and local marketing expertise.
The more a franchisor is expert in this area, the more they can help franchisees with a critical function of their business. This doesn’t mean that the franchisor needs to know everything about local area marketing from the outset. Indeed, this would be impossible – as local marketing is an ever-evolving area and there will always be learnings. However, it does mean that the franchisor needs to focus resources to be sufficiently organised and proactive in exploring, planning, reviewing and assessing local marketing initiatives – including what works where.
Ultimately, the franchisor, typically through well-selected and trained field managers, needs to be able to provide franchisees with well-considered guidance on an appropriate local area marketing plan, including local area implementation. And this means, if there is a tight budget, the field manager should have good insights into what might form the most effective local area marketing campaign in a given situation.
Marketing is an incredibly important function for almost all franchising companies. The quality of marketing can be a real success factor. It follows that franchisors, as owners of the brand, and business model, should be able to provide franchisees with excellent local marketing expertise and guidance.
Relevant questions:
- Does your organisation encompass local area marketing expertise such that you can provide great local marketing guidance to franchisees?
- Are there opportunities to improve local marketing initiative performance insights?
- Do you provide field managers and franchisees with adequate marketing tools and training?
About the Franchising Best Practice 500 Series
This is part of a series of franchising best practices. Franchize Consultants is sharing and publishing these best practices weekly for the betterment of franchising. We know that better knowledge and execution of franchising best practices leads to bigger and more valuable franchisor and franchisee businesses.
We have assembled the first 40 best practices into The Best Practice Handbook, which is available for purchase.
