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INTEGRATING NATIONAL, REGIONAL & LOCAL MARKETING FOR FRANCHISE GROWTH: A BLUEPRINT FOR MAXIMIZING ROI
7 TRENDS IN HR TECHNOLOGY FOR 2024 HOW LOCAL SOCIAL ADVERTISING SOLVES TOP FRANCHISE MARKETING CHALLENGES
The IFA’s Marketing, Development, & Technology Toolkit serves as your essential guide to unlocking the full potential of your brand. Within these pages, you'll discover proven marketing strategies, operational methods, and innovative technology solutions. Learn from five esteemed supplier member companies of the IFA, each providing invaluable resources and insights. Read on to elevate your brand’s presence and drive explosive growth!
agEnterprise, powered by
AlphaGraphics, was created to help franchises and multilocation businesses build a successful brand.
AlphaGraphics, with more than 230 locally-owned and operated locations in the U.S., offers a complete range of print, signs, visual communications, and marketing services to businesses.
For over 50 years, AlphaGraphics has been a trusted partner for businesses of all sizes, helping them get noticed and get business. Now we’ve created agEnterprise, a powerful platform designed to be a central hub for branded, customizable marketing assets.
agEnterprise is a brand management platform that helps franchises maintain brand consistency, streamline marketing processes, and empower franchisees with tools to achieve marketing excellence. It addresses the unique challenges faced by franchisors in maintaining a cohesive brand image while allowing for local customization. With agEnterprise, you can leverage technology to enhance your marketing efforts, ensuring your brand stands out in a competitive market.
In today’s world, it’s crucial for brands to present a unified image to their audiences. agEnterprise provides a centralized platform to house all marketing assets, ensuring that every piece adheres to brand guidelines. This consistency not only strengthens brand recognition but also builds trust with customers.
Franchisors can oversee and manage the brand’s overarching strategies, while individual locations have the flexibility to customize marketing materials to suit their local market needs. This dual approach allows franchisees to maintain a strong, cohesive brand image while catering to the unique preferences of local customers.
agEnterprise makes it easier for franchisors to create, distribute, and manage marketing campaigns. The platform’s design studio enables users to quickly design high-quality marketing materials without the need for extensive graphic design skills. This reduces time spent on marketing tasks, allowing franchisees to focus on other critical aspects of their business.
This feature ensures that marketing budgets are utilized effectively, maximizing the ROI for every marketing dollar spent. By offering a transparent view of how funds are allocated, agEnterprise helps franchises make informed decisions about their marketing strategies.
With our 230+ locations across the country, each of your franchisees can rely on their nearby AlphaGraphics to provide local support, fulfillment, and distribution. This means quicker turnaround times, cost-savings, and a reduced carbon footprint.
• Local, in-person support: With 230+ centers across the country, you and your franchisees can expect local expertise, support, fulfillment, and distribution.
• Franchise expertise: As a franchise ourselves, AlphaGraphics knows the ins-and-outs of balancing national brand recognition with local needs and unique markets.
• Quality and cost assurance: Each AlphaGraphics is qualityand color-certified, ensuring consistently high quality to uphold your brand standards. Print production costs across your footprint will be offered at a discounted, competitive rate.
• Intuitive, user-friendly design studio: Powered by Canva, our design studio makes it easy for franchisees to customize their designs while staying on-brand.
• Personalized platform and customer experience: We’ll get to know your business inside-and-out and work with you to design a platform that best suits your needs.
Experience the benefits of agEnterprise by scheduling a demo at shop.alphagraphics.com/agenterprise
Phone: 800-955-6246
Email: nationalaccounts@ alphagraphics.com
Website: shop.alphagraphics. com/agenterprise
Location3 is franchising’s proven leader in driving digital transformation. We are a catalyst for revenue growth, offering strategic consulting and professional services specifically tailored to franchisors. Our expertise in datadriven marketing, technology infrastructure and digital media empowers our partners to thrive in the digital landscape. In addition, our platform (LOCALACT) provides your franchise owners with powerful technology that optimizes their local digital presence and media mix to drive customer acquisition and local revenue growth.
In the competitive world of franchising, integrating national, regional, and local marketing strategies is crucial for sustained growth and profitability. Effective marketing integration acts as a major differentiator for franchises, providing a cohesive branding and communication strategy crucial for penetrating markets and generating leads, customers, and sales at all business levels. Unified national, regional, and local campaigns create a seamless customer experience and a consistent brand message, fostering increased loyalty and customer engagement. Moreover, integrated marketing strategies allow franchisors to utilize the full spectrum of data and technology resources to tailor campaigns that resonate across diverse markets. This piece examines why franchisors must embrace this integration and how they can effectively do so in the future.
Disjointed marketing strategies, including national-only or localonly efforts, often fail to address the comprehensive needs of a franchise system:
• National-Only Challenges: Focusing solely on broadreaching strategies may generate lower-cost leads but often ignores the unique needs of local markets. This oversight can lead to underperformance in specific regions, leaving some franchisees without sufficient qualified leads or opportunities to optimize their local market presence.
• Local-Only Limitations: Local initiatives, while important, may miss out on economies of scale and suffer from a lack of consistent brand messaging. This can lead to higher costs per lead and a fragmented approach that does not leverage the potential of national and regional support.
In many franchise systems, franchisees may opt to pool their budgets for co-op initiatives, allowing for broader regional advertising and promotions. While these cooperative efforts can be highly effective in extending reach and pooling resources, they must be carefully managed to ensure alignment with the broader national strategy and local marketing needs:
• Ensuring Cohesion with National Strategies: It’s essential that co-op marketing efforts are developed in alignment with national marketing goals and branding guidelines. This
ensures that all messaging is consistent and supports the overall brand identity.
• Integrating Local Incremental: Co-op marketing should also incorporate tactics from local incremental campaigns of franchisees to ensure an effective, full-funnel media approach at the community level, without creating unnecessary overlap. This requires a sophisticated approach to budgeting, geotargeting, audience targeting and sequential ad creative to engage customers.
• Shared Goals and Metrics: Establish shared goals and metrics for co-op marketing programs, ensuring that all participating franchisees are clear about the objectives and expected outcomes. Regularly review these metrics to gauge effectiveness and adjust as needed.
Proper alignment of national, regional, and local marketing using a data-driven methodology also requires a comprehensive marketing technology stack. By leveraging modern marketing platforms, franchisors can ensure that marketing dollars are spent wisely, tailoring strategies that respond dynamically to the unique characteristics of each location and market condition. When evaluating your current tech stack and ideal future state, consider adopting the following five tactics as a baseline:
1. Harness the power of data analytics to gain insights into customer behavior and market trends. This will allow for more targeted marketing strategies that resonate with local audiences while aligning with national objectives.
2. Employ advanced marketing technologies to streamline campaign management and measure effectiveness across different regions and localities.
3. Foster collaboration between national, regional, and local marketing teams to ensure that all levels are aligned and that strategies are implemented cohesively.
4. Develop customizable marketing materials that local franchisees can adapt to fit their markets while maintaining brand consistency.
5. Continuously monitor the performance of marketing campaigns at all levels and adapt strategies as needed to optimize results.
The integration of national, regional, and local marketing programs is critical for the long-term success of any franchisor. By adopting a unified marketing strategy, supported by robust data analysis, advanced technology, and effective collaboration, franchisors can not only enhance their brand visibility but also significantly improve bottom line ROI at each location. This strategic synergy is indispensable in today’s fragmented market landscape, ensuring that every franchisee, regardless of market competitiveness, has the tools necessary to thrive. A holistic, fullfunnel approach not only achieves better financial outcomes but also builds a stronger, more resilient franchise system. n
Paychex, Inc. is a leading provider of integrated human capital management solutions for payroll, benefits, human resources, and insurance services and proud to be a preferred vendor of the International Franchise Association. By combining its innovative softwareas-a-service technology and mobility platform with dedicated, personal service, Paychex empowers business owners to focus on the growth and management of their business.
Paychex Integrations connect the Paychex Flex® platform with other systems to help businesses run efficiently by sharing data smoothly and automatically without manual intervention.
Technology trends in HR point to solutions that significantly enhance business operations. Since the role of HR continues to expand in many workplaces, HR technology can help automate much of the work involved in areas such as applicant tracking, new-hire training, and benefits administration.
Business leaders may consider thinking more holistically about the employee experience (EX)—from the recruitment process to well after employees' last days with the business. Integrated human resources technology can be critical to improving each phase of the end-to-end employee experience, as well as key areas that can shape workers' time with the business, some of which include:
• Recruiting and hiring
• New-hire training and onboarding
• Benefits offerings
• Employee training
• Employee well-being
• Offboarding
Investing in learning management can help employees further develop in key skill areas and better understand your company culture. Offering development opportunities through learning management software, as well as job rotation, job expansion, and peer coaching can all help employees grow within the organization and help you create a sustainable workforce.
With the rise of remote and hybrid work models, employers and HR teams should strive to adopt and implement a consistent work environment that keeps workers connected, engaged, and productive. This includes implementing tools that foster collaboration, provide onboarding and training, and keep lines of communication open between employees and HR.
Creating and fostering an inclusive and diverse work environment requires more than simply recognizing that differences exist among your workforce. It also means recruiting, hiring, retaining,
and developing employees from many backgrounds, making sure their voices are heard and incorporated, and providing them with equal access to success within your organization. That could mean using HR technologies to:
• Develop automated skills assessments.
• Gather feedback on the adoption or effectiveness of employee resource groups.
• Make data-backed decisions around hiring and promotions.
• Determine concrete success metrics for a role.
• Use anonymous feedback on inclusivity to improve company policies.
AI has dominated news cycles in 2023, and as AI continues to evolve, its influence in the workplace is sure to grow as well. Some key areas where HR teams may be able to leverage AI include:
• Training and career development
• Engagement
• Employee feedback
Using data to make business decisions isn't a new concept. Even still, companies of all sizes that invest in HR analytics may have the foundation to make smarter decisions, from when to hire more employees due to staffing shortages to whether employees are taking advantage of the benefits offered to them.
The use of cloud-based HR systems continues to grow among businesses, especially with younger employees accustomed to working almost entirely online.
Other increasingly popular cloud-based benefits may include:
• The ability to incorporate HR analytics to build on prior recruitment experience and design new processes to attract potential candidates.
• Offering a comprehensive training process that grants employee access to company materials
• Enabling employees to use self-service portals and chat functions.
• The means to pinpoint individual employee peak performance and reward their efforts.
Whether it's investing in HR solutions or building on new HR tech trends, it's critical to simplify complex HR administrative functions, free up resources, and create more efficient processes. n
For more than two decades, Scorpion has helped local business owners leverage digital marketing and technology to reach their goals. Driven by award-winning AI and marketing expertise, Scorpion is focused on bringing franchise brands more customers, more revenue, and most importantly, more profit.
With Scorpion, there’s no guesswork, only growth.
For many years, businesses struggled to understand the direct impact of their marketing efforts. Traditionally, one of the best ways to measure success was by understanding the number of people who “may” have seen an ad across different channels. And at the time, that was enough. Enter the age of digital marketing, and transparency into success (while not perfect) became clearer. For the first time, businesses could see which leads were driven directly from their marketing and know their cost per lead (CPL). It was a huge step forward.
We’ve recently entered into an age where that’s no longer enough. What makes a lead a “good lead”? How should you prioritize the leads your network is getting? What locations can improve their lead quality? Most importantly, how are the leads you’re getting turning into customers and revenue? Those are the questions we are now in position to answer with marketing technology, investments in generative AI, and integrations with CRMs or other data warehouse solutions.
Before we get to the lead-to-customer and revenue story, let’s talk about the rise of generative AI. It feels like AI is everywhere you turn these days. And no matter what you think about it, AI is here to stay. This should be a great thing for your brand and franchise network. AI can quickly analyze data then provide actionable insights, enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency. When it comes to marketing, AI can help optimize strategy, advertising spend, and how to target ideal audiences to improve results.
As an example, Scorpion recently launched a product we call Leads AI. Leads AI instantly transcribes every call driven by your digital marketing, and assesses the potential customer's level of intent and likelihood of booking an appointment and buying from you. With that information, it scores and prioritizes leads based on your locations’ unique needs. By identifying which leads are most likely to convert to high-revenue opportunities, it helps us refine your marketing to target your ideal customers— knowing where they are and what they're buying—so you can
attract more of them. Lastly, it analyzes each customer interaction to provide suggestions for your team on how to improve their intake and customer experience processes. These are insights that were not possible for most brands at scale until now.
While understanding the quality of your leads is extremely important, understanding which leads turned into customers and revenue is even more critical. By integrating your marketing with your customer relationship management system (CRM), you can see exactly what is driving customer acquisition and revenue for your brand. Once that information is gathered, you can leverage AI to optimize your marketing strategy to invest in the channels that are yielding the best ROI / ROAS (return on ad spend). Fortunately, data integration doesn’t have to be a costly endeavor. With technological advancements, brands of all sizes can access cost-effective approaches and solutions to manage customer data and marketing efforts effectively.
Even better? AI and data integration no longer operate in silos, so it’s easier than ever to take advantage. When AI is used harmoniously with good data, it can facilitate, increase, and elevate a brand’s decision-making.
The integration of technology has become increasingly vital for brands of all sizes. Yet, many brands overlook the importance of integrating their marketing and operational systems, potentially missing out on valuable opportunities to connect with customers and drive growth.
By knowing exactly how your marketing is performing through the power of integrations and advancements in AI, your brand can take its marketing to the next level. Stop spending valuable time piecing together what’s working and what’s not. Invest confidently in strategies and technologies that drive real growth and improve your marketing ROI. n
Phone: 214-459-0250
Email: jamie.adams@ scorpion.co
Website: www.scorpion.co/ franchises/
Tiger Pistol simplifies local advertising, including social media and sponsored display, for multilocation brands, franchises, resellers, and agencies. Our platform automates location-based advertising at scale with a focus on flexibility, marketing collaboration, and performance to facilitate consumer connections and drive sales.
Campaigns published through Tiger Pistol drive better results with greater spend efficiency and ad performance, proving that local relevance improves return on investment.
Tiger Pistol is the ideal solution for advertisers seeking to launch effective, efficient locationbased campaigns.
Local social advertising stands out as a crucial tactic for navigating and overcoming the unique challenges franchise brands face. Modern local social advertising tools offer solutions tailored to the franchise model like simplifying campaign execution, ensuring compliance with brand standards, and facilitating easier adoption among franchisees. These tools can automate complex processes, provide actionable insights into campaign performance, and enable franchisees to focus on what they do best – serving their customers.
According to Franchise Update Media’s Annual Franchise Marketing Report (AFMR), franchise marketers are wrestling with a wide array of challenges, including:
• Getting franchisees to stay on brand
• Marketing plan pivots
• Franchisee compliance and adoption
• Franchisees distracted by digital marketing complexity
• Tight profit margins for franchise owners affecting their willingness to invest in marketing
• Reaching their target market within budget
• Stricter privacy policies resulting in less effective targeting
• Demonstrating the ROI of marketing efforts
These challenges underscore the necessity for franchise brands to adopt innovative marketing strategies. Local social advertising offers a pathway to conquering these hurdles by enabling franchisees to create targeted, engaging, and effective marketing campaigns that resonate with their local audiences. Read More.
Local social advertising addresses the challenge of keeping a brand consistent across franchise locations by offering a platform that allows for the creation of locally tailored ads while maintaining the overall brand message. This platform should provide templates for franchisees to customize campaigns with local relevance without sacrificing brand integrity, ensuring a consistent brand image. Additionally, this technology supports quick adjustments to marketing strategies in response to market
changes, enabling franchisees to stay relevant and maintain a strong connection with their local audiences. Read More.
Franchisees are battling it out in local markets against fierce competition, making activation in local marketing essential. To succeed, brands need to synchronize local efforts with national strategy, foster franchisee advocacy, and optimize resources. By leveraging social media automation, providing user-friendly advertising solutions, and offering comprehensive education and support, brands can empower franchisees to flourish locally, driving mutual success and brand growth. Read More.
Local social advertising offers a targeted approach for franchise brands by focusing on geographic areas instead of individual behaviors, leveraging the widespread acceptance of location sharing among consumers. This method respects privacy while enabling precise audience targeting through location, enhanced by the integration of first-party data for more personalized and effective ad campaigns. The strategy not only boosts sales and conversion rates for franchises but also creates a beneficial cycle of data sharing and insights, optimizing marketing efforts and driving foot traffic to local stores. Read More
Proving the value of marketing investments has become essential, especially for franchises, as over 75% of Chief Marketing Officers must now show how their efforts contribute to business growth. Franchise marketers often struggle with limited data visibility, data fragmentation, and the challenge of linking marketing actions directly to revenue gains. Local social advertising, supported by advanced technology, offers a way forward by consolidating data, standardizing metrics, and providing deeper insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, ultimately helping to demonstrate their impact on profits more clearly. Read More
Implementing a local social advertising strategy significantly addresses the challenges highlighted in the AFMR report. By providing franchisees with essential tools, knowledge, and support, franchise brands ensure a unified brand experience, improve marketing efficiency and efficacy, enhance customer engagement, and offer franchisees a competitive edge. By treating local social advertising as a key strategy, franchise brands can increase local engagement and open up new opportunities for long-term growth in competitive markets. n
VP of Business Development
Tiger Pistol 1220 W 6th St Suite 201 Cleveland, OH 44113
Email: sales@tigerpistol.com
Website: TigerPistol.com
If you enjoyed this excerpt, consider downloading the full playbook to access an enhanced roadmap to solving each of these challenges, complete with rich statistics and success stories.
You can access the playbook HERE
Sarah Cucchiara
When you switch payroll providers and work with Paychex, we’ll help you:
• Pull data directly from your previous system
• Collect any necessary information to set up your account
• Process the first few payrolls for you while balancing year-to-date payroll data
Contact your dedicated Account Management Team to learn more: go.paychex.com/IFA-toolkit
