How Automation-Based Platforms Can Ease Franchise Marketers' Headaches

How can brands connect more effectively with the communities around their physical storefronts? Technology is rewriting the assumption that granular local marketing is too cumbersome to execute efficiently at the corporate level.

Franchise marketers and agencies working with franchise brands are familiar with the status quo of segmenting digital campaigns: DMA-based audience targeting. But this approach is antiquated and broad, leading to ad waste and missed opportunities to connect with local shoppers based on what most resonates with them.

Automation-based platforms can help franchise marketers speak to each of their locations’ communities by ensuring brand-safe creative at the local level, honing local messaging, customizing local targeting, and allowing marketers to manage the whole process through one central platform.

Ensure brand-safe creative

While focusing on localized messaging and targeting metrics sounds nice, most franchise marketers face a more basic struggle: unification. When a brand has 100 different logos circulating on Facebook from 100 different franchisees’ paid campaigns or business pages, brand awareness will suffer.

Ensuring compliant creative across hundreds of local business owners must go beyond simply dropping creative templates in a digital asset management portal or telling franchisees not to run their own ads.

Automation-based platforms build brand-directed, cross-channel campaigns leveraging APIs and bulk functionality inside of major digital ad platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Once inside the platform, franchisees can quickly customize and then activate these campaigns, all with pre-approved assets and brand-set parameters. This helps solve for franchisees who may not have the technical marketing know-how to activate campaigns with best practices, which can be baked into the software’s campaign templates.

When all marketing comes from a centralized tool, corporate can analyze the performance data of franchisee campaigns, compare trends to national campaigns, and use the holistic data to inform broader marketing strategies. Visibility into aggregate data across the organization allows franchise marketers to get a better handle on the brand’s end-to-end promotional messaging and tactics.

Localize messaging

When franchisees are executing brand-safe marketing with the help of accessible opt-in campaigns, franchise marketers can start to look at solving some of their more technologically complicated challenges. For instance, what’s the best way to stimulate business at storefronts across the nation, with each nestled in vastly different communities?

Rather than contenting themselves with the inefficiencies of DMA-based targeting, franchise marketers can leverage an automation-based platform to devise, activate, and track campaigns across channels with per-location specificity. Why bombard a resident of rural Tennessee with creative and messaging crafted for the urban Nashville audience? This risks turning off consumers while leaving certain franchisees feeling underserved.

Technology is making it possible to go beyond the antiquated DMA approach and connect more authentically with residents of all types of communities—without adding tons of new talent to your team.

Central marketing dashboards can even let corporate marketers assess which campaigns are driving business to which storefronts, which is helpful both for keying in on local strategies and for proving results to franchisees.

Manage it all on one central platform

Rather than relying on manual spreadsheets and guesswork, more precise franchise marketing can be driven by unified and actionable data. Housing these figures in a central, accessible platform allows for new types of aggregate analysis and will save marketers time and headaches compared with logging into different dashboards to manage each ad channel.

With your data all in one place, machine learning can put those figures to work, extracting trends and offering recommendations based on past results.

Executing a per-location marketing approach, while crucial for driving sales, is efficient only if you have the software to manage it. To achieve optimized results, adopting granular local marketing and onboarding new software must be done in tandem.

In times of economic uncertainty, franchise marketers must examine areas of ad waste to see how they can become more efficient. With all of the dollars wasted on disparate franchisee campaigns and corporate DMA-based targeting, efficiency lies in technology that can solve these problems simultaneously while offering advanced insights on how to continually improve your approach.

Michael Morris is the Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Hyperlocology, a multi-location marketing platform supplier that helps brand marketing teams execute and analyze brand advertising and local digital advertising on a per-location level. For more information, visit their website.