How Franchisees Can Achieve Cost Savings By Pooling Their Marketing Efforts - Without Diluting Their Results.

We all know that one of the benefits of becoming a franchisee is access to centralised support. An established franchise will already have a brand presence and there’s a lot to be said for this. They’ll typically provide brand guidelines and a suite of assets that are available to you as the franchisee, which saves a lot of time and money and ensures the brand identity remains consistent across the group. They may also run national advertising campaigns or other marketing activities, which will be helpful in generating awareness when you’re just starting out.?

However, in most cases it’s up to the franchisee themselves to market their individual business locally. Today’s customers are moving away from chain stores, embracing the shop local ethos, and expect franchisees to be part of the local community. In fact, 97% of people find out about a local business online.??

Hyper-localised targeting is therefore extremely important to franchisees and is making the business of running a franchise more complex than ever before. Traditionally, collateral was produced at a national level and distributed to local franchisees, which is becoming more difficult as local audiences increasingly expect local marketing. Whilst the franchisor could assist in running these local campaigns, they’re unlikely to have the resource or insights to do so at the desired level to have a positive impact locally.?

Individual franchisees may not see the benefit of working together with their counterparts but there’s no point in multiple separate franchisees all paying a different agency to look after their digital marketing. SEO is a great example of this. Even if your franchisor has a centralised website, they may not have optimised pages for each of the local franchisees, considering aspects such as local target keywords and meta descriptions, so that each page ranks for search results for ‘near me’ or location-based searches. In our experience some of the common issues that we see for franchisees are...... read the full article