CMO Q&A – Amy Przywara programs to fit their educational needs and learning styles—from after-school tutoring and teaching children to read, to STEM classes and college prep assistance. What could be better for a marketer and mom who loves to see kids learn? Describe your role as CMO. I oversee marketing for the franchisor, Sylvan Learning. Our team executes marketing on behalf of a distributed system of learning centers throughout North America. We also provide local marketing materials and local marketing plans for our franchisees and directors. What’s the most challenging part of being a CMO today? Keeping up with the fast-paced, ever-changing world. Finding ways to invest and optimize without abandoning tactics that are working. Finding solutions that work locally and at an enterprise level. What are the 3 most important keys to being an effective CMO leader today? Trusting your team, especially the younger team members who have lots of great ideas. Listening to consumers—really listening—and then delivering. Testing and testing and testing. Try new things, but don’t back off of what works for you. How do you prepare a marketing plan and execute the strategies? We start with the consumer first. We take reviews and consumer research verbatim and synthesize it so we know what our consumer is really looking for, and then we look at our reviews afterward and see how we delivered. We then test and look at our ROI, but also take into account the “surround sound” effect of multi-channel marketing, which often can’t be seen in our numbers on a short-term basis. How do you measure marketing results and effectiveness? We look at the short-term metrics of lead volume every single day, and we also look at the longer-term conversions, the nurturing strategies, and the relationship-building. Ours is both a business of fi xing immediate pain for a family and a long-term investment for a child’s future. We measure our success in marketing similarly to how a family would measure if Sylvan were working for
What are the 3 most important keys to being an effective CMO leader today? “Trusting your team, especially the younger team members who have lots of great ideas. Listening to consumers— really listening—and then delivering. Testing and testing and testing. Try new things, but don’t back off of what works for you.” 48
FRANCHISEUpdate
ISSUE 1, 2020
them: both short-term fi xes and long-term success. Discuss your core consumer marketing strategies and objectives. We use a combination of national digital, local digital, local marketing, social/influencer, and email/texting to reach our customer. It all works together and we recognize that. Through all of our communication channels, we are trying to get more people to come into our centers and talk with us. That can also be a phone conversation, but we know that once someone walks into our center, especially with their child with them, they will feel the support and how we can help. We focus on overcoming the barriers of getting a prospective customer to that point. We do try to break it down through a simple web form or a phone call. All of these things play a part in getting to each next step. How do you go about creating a customer-centric marketing and brand philosophy? We truly listen to the consumer. We have created ways to hear directly from those who chose us and from those who didn’t. Our product is based in doing well for a child—and we do, over and over again. We know that if a family gives us a chance, we work. So we constantly look at why a mom or dad chooses another solution, try to find the similarities in those who go somewhere else, and then try to address them. How do you identify talent for a marketing team? We have an excellent internal recruiter who understands our culture and our marketing needs. She does an excellent job of sourcing candidates for open roles. We also believe in bringing in younger team members. It’s great to watch people grow and expand over the years. We also look for team members who have worked in a distributed model. That really helps the learning curve of our business. Describe your marketing team and the role each plays. We have a 13-person team and we divide up into three key areas: local marketing and franchisee support, digital-centric, and brand/ consumer. But there is so much crossover these days. The team works together to make sure the content we create is digital-centric, that local marketing needs are digital as well as offline. There has to be a collaborative, no silos approach. Why is it so important for the marketing department to have a “personal touch” when it comes to helping the brand connect with prospects? We recognize that buying a franchise— any franchise—is a life decision for someone. This is a big next step and can be scary. It is often the first time owning a business for prospects. We want them to truly understand what we do for them, and what they need to do for themselves to be successful. Those are personal conversations so prospects can truly understand what Day 1 (and Day 90 and Day 1,072) will be like. How does this help your franchise sales and development effort? Being an education brand, we have lots of prospects who want to help others. We feel the same way. We want to help our franchisees and future franchisees be successful and help more kids. Everything we do in marketing is about the success of both. What ways/tools do you rely on to do this? Our marketing plan is set up so that prospects understand what we do for them and what they need to do themselves. Local marketing is truly a key part of success for a franchisee, so we want to make sure they understand this. We have a local marketing team that works with franchisees as well as an online portal called MARC that guides them through everything they need for a local marketing plan. We help get our prospective franchisees excited for this business opportunity.