Evolution of Local Advertising for Franchise Brands
The Evolution of Local Digital Advertising for Franchise Brands
For decades, franchise brands have...
The power of a franchise brand is two fold; national brand recognition combined with the collective talents, ambitions, and community knowledge each franchisee possesses. This powerful combination, when harnessed, propels franchise brands from the ground up. The positive impacts can most often be seen in areas like customer service and operations, giving guests the feeling that a national franchise brand is their local store.
However, when it comes to digital advertising, brands still struggle to activate franchisee required local spend. Local advertising budgets go unspent. Local knowledge goes untapped. As a result franchise brand marketing suffers as a whole, but the ones who suffer most, to no fault of their own, are the franchisees.
Why do franchise brands and agencies struggle to activate local franchise advertising? Here are the major issues most often cited by marketing teams and their franchisees and how Hyperlocology helps to solve each.
1) lengthy approval processes and too many steps to launch
Every marketing team strives to offer solutions for their franchisees to invest their local budgets effectively in digital marketing. But it hasn't been easy. In order to ensure brand safety, proper copywriting, and that local advertising does not interfere with national advertising it’s a must to have proper oversight. This oversight, however, typically results in cumbersome and lengthy approval processes which turn franchisees off to investing in their local advertising.
See how Hyperlocology streamlines local advertising
2) limited local budgets, limited channel access
Even with proper creative and messaging controls in place, franchisees have smaller budgets to work with. On their own, they’re simply not permitted to access many of the top channels because of minimum budget requirements. Grouped together with other locations to form an ad fund, and they’re not able to benefit from advertising dedicated and customized to their location.
See how Hyperlocology executes brand advertising customized for each location
2) too many advertising channels to master
Even with larger local budgets, an effective local advertising strategy will include multiple channels. Search, social, display, maps, out-of-home - to name a few. To create awareness, consideration, intent, purchase, and repeat loyal customers requires a presence on multiple channels and tactics like retargeting across channels become essential. Finding the right mix requires knowledge of multiple, often sophisticated, advertising solutions and becomes a major barrier for local advertising to take root.
See how Hyperlocology creates a single access point for all major digital channels
3) 1p data is applied only to national budget efforts
Local advertising is usually on an island. Leveraging specific audiences or audience segments based on first party customer data is usually reserved for the larger budget initiatives. Better data results in better outcomes. Like with national efforts, local efforts should be powered by the reams of data collected in brand CDPs or CRMs to improve results per location. Without it, local advertising is inefficient and less effective.
See how Hyperlocology streamlines CDP data to the local level for per location advertising
4) franchise marketing agencies cannot cost-effectively create individual campaigns per location
Without thousands of location-level creatives with custom targeting and individual location landing page, which requires thousands of individual line items each with their own dedicated budget per location, the advertising is not actually “per location.” Building campaigns this way would take too many man hours and headcount costs would make it not feasible. Instead, agencies group local funds together and buy across a region or DMA to support all locations within the region, sometimes, at least, targeting specific local POIs.
See how Hyperlocology automates the creation of thousands of location-level campaigns
5) franchisees are unable to collaborate on national or ad fund marketing
Because each location doesn’t have its own dedicated piece of the advertising pie, local owners are typically left in the dark. They have no transparency into their contribution. It’s not possible to have franchisees collaborate on advertising in their market. Brand advertising doesn’t meet the local consumer preferences or the owner’s business priorities.
And brands miss huge opportunities to improve local customer engagement or to empower franchises to boost campaigns with their own budgets. Brand marketers are left with data sets that represent large regions and never truly understand how to market locally for their franchisees.
See how Hyperlocology empowers campaign boosting and matching brand budgets for local advertising
6) multiple franchise marketing agencies create siloed data
It’s challenging for brand marketers to provide guidance to local owners when multiple agencies manage advertising efforts. Data is siloed. Accessing reporting can take many requests, emails, and excel sheets to piece together what’s happening across all channels for individual locations. Without easy access to all data per location, in one place, brand teams are not armed with the tools to be able to provide insights, learnings, and suggestions for local advertising improvements. When brand teams are armed with data, the guidance they can provide to individual local owners not only improves local ad results, but also generates a ton of good will, collaboration, and trust with franchisees.
Local activation is one of the biggest challenges for franchise brands and their agencies. The agency model of media planning and buying leaves many franchisees behind, and millions of advertising dollars on the sidelines. This also leads to unneeded tensions within the system, and unhappy franchisees. When brands and agencies leverage multi-location advertising platforms like Hyperlocology they’re able to improve national-to-local collaboration and to activate every franchise location with digital advertising strategies and insights. With a per-location approach, the entire system wins.
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