Without a solid marketing plan, you’ll struggle to spread the word about your franchise. When you create a marketing plan for your franchise, you’ll strategically plan your campaigns and gain insights into your customers and competition.
Not sure where to start when it comes to marketing your franchise? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, I will walk you through a step-by-step process of creating a franchise marketing plan.
What Is a Franchise Marketing Plan?
Your marketing plan outlines all the strategic actions you’ll implement to promote your franchise’s services or products. Typically put together by a team of marketing experts such as SEO specialists and data analysts, your franchise marketing plan will help you allocate your resources effectively, measure your progress, and maximize the success of your campaigns. You can also ensure brand consistency across all your franchise locations while identifying strengths and weaknesses, gaps in the market, and market trends.
If you want to retain your reputation and continue to grow your franchise empire, you shouldn’t solely rely on brand recognition to push your business forward. Research has found businesses that plan their marketing ahead are 331% more likely to report success.
How to Create a Franchise Marketing Plan: Step-by-Step Process
Marketing a franchise is no walk in the park. A long-term strategy that takes time and patience, a successful marketing plan can provide extremely fruitful results for your franchise.
1. Determine Your Objectives
Before you develop specific strategies, you should determine your short—and long-term goals. Of course, increasing profits is always the ultimate objective, but how do you intend to attract more customers as quickly as possible and maintain that increase in numbers in the long run?
Clearly define your objectives in marketing your franchise. For example, determine which marketing channels you want to use, what metrics you want to see, and how these metrics will convert into sales. Your short-term and long-term marketing goals will sit at the center of your franchise marketing plan and keep your strategy organized as you continue to grow.
2. Define Your Customer Base
Don’t cut any corners when it comes to researching your customer base. You might be familiar with your core audience, but advertising to them might not provide a return if you’ve already cornered 90% of that market. Instead, look beyond your primary customer base and look to expand.
Pay attention to the details. Analyze the data available to understand the different types of people who buy your products and services. Look for things like the age, gender, and income level of your customers. What do customers and potential customers want from your business?
Understanding this data about your customers helps drive your marketing strategy and will guide you on the most effective tactics.
To get the most bang for your buck, divide your customer base into segments. Then, you can create highly targeted marketing and advertising strategies that appeal directly to their needs. Encourage your franchisees to collect customer feedback, which will allow you to divide your customer segments into geographical areas and further fine-tune your plan.
3. Create a Brand Voice for Your Franchise
While geotargeted marketing can pay dividends for franchises, it’s still an absolute imperative to maintain brand consistency across all your branches. Your brand voice is the glue that holds the franchise system together as you scale the business. Make sure that every property waving your banner is instantly recognizable and associated with trust, value, and reliability.
When you develop your brand voice, you balance your business’s values with customers’ wants, needs, and expectations. This will create an approachable and well-known brand identity at all of your franchise locations, regardless of who manages them.
4. Pick Your Primary Marketing Channels
Nowadays, there are countless ways to reach new and existing customers. While you don’t necessarily need to utilize every single marketing channel, I recommend making use of quite a few. Some of the most effective online marketing channels in terms of potential ROI include SEO, paid advertising, social media, and email campaigns.
SEO
I briefly mentioned search engine optimization (SEO) earlier, a crucial pillar to establishing brand recognition. The ultimate goal of SEO is to target specific industry-relevant search terms and rank in the top positions of Google and other search engines.
SEO is one of the best ways to organically grow your franchise and secure ongoing brand exposure for free. Plus, the average close rate for organic leads from Google is nearly 15%, so there is a massive potential for an increase in sales in addition to a boost in brand awareness.
You can also use local SEO to market to specific regions. Local SEO targets regional keywords such as “best restaurants in New York City.” Around 77% of consumers use Google to find businesses such as stores and restaurants in their local area.
The downside of SEO is that it can take time and a lot of adaptation for the results to show, depending on the size and current online presence of your franchise. It can take months or even years to rank for the most lucrative, high-traffic keywords.
Social Media
Social media, love it or hate it, can’t be overlooked when marketing your franchise. Around 71% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand following a positive social media experience. Deciding which social media platforms to use depends on your franchise’s target base. However, the most popular social media platforms are LinkedIn, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook.
Email Marketing
Email marketing may seem old-fashioned, but it remains one of the most lucrative marketing channels. In fact, email marketing campaigns can bring returns as high as $42 of revenue per $1 spent, which is one of the highest marketing ROIs. Email is most effective when your communications are personalized and clear with a single call to action, which is why in-depth customer research is so vital.
PPC Advertisements
While you implement your SEO strategy, you can drive traffic to your website faster by investing in paid advertising, also known as pay-per-click (PPC). By bidding on keywords, you can drive online customers to your site almost instantly. This allows you to reach customers much quicker. For example, paid search ads account for nearly a quarter of all the retail industry’s traffic.
5. Explain Your Franchise’s Unique Selling Point
You likely established your franchise’s unique selling point (USP) when you formed your company and wrote a business plan.
However, to continue growing your franchise, you should adapt your USP to reflect your business’s current state and vision.
Put your USP into actionable writing to help guide the development of your marketing strategies. As you build brand recognition, you must solidify the connection between your business identity and your unique offering.
6. Analyze Direct and Indirect Competitors
Knowing your enemy is just as important as understanding your target market. Depending on your industry, your competition may be rife. To get through to your customers, you need to gain a thorough understanding of your direct and indirect competition.
Your direct competitors are those who sell the same or a similar product to yours. For example, if you run a burger joint, all burger joints and restaurants selling burgers are your direct competitors.
On the other hand, indirect competitors sell products that satisfy the same need (hunger in this case). So, when you’re targeting hungry locals as a burger joint, you’ll be competing with a broad array of fast-food and delivery services.
When conducting your research, analyze key metrics such as market position, product and service offerings, pricing strategies, marketing strategies, and customer experience. This will help you identify strengths and weaknesses that you can capitalize on to elevate your franchise.
7. Measure Your Success
To determine whether or not your marketing strategies are successful, you should set measurable and obtainable goals for your franchise. Doing so allows you to tweak aspects of your marketing strategies as you progress and gain access to customer and competitor data.
Key metrics you should measure include conversions, customer retention, customer acquisition, and return on investment (ROI). And just as important as crunching the numbers, you should find out what your actual customers think of your efforts. Obtain customer feedback and adapt your marketing strategy based on that feedback.
While it’s okay to be bold when it comes to your franchise marketing campaigns, set realistic goals that are actually achievable. Setting unrealistic targets can make it challenging to determine what went wrong and where to make improvements, and ultimately, may prove to be very disappointing.
8. Create a Marketing Budget
Of course, regardless of the amazing marketing ideas you have in mind, you’ll be bound by a budget—and a budget you should be strict with. The good news is that franchises typically charge a marketing fee to franchisees that’s calculated as a percentage of their monthly revenue. These funds will help fund your overall marketing goals for the franchise without having to dig too deep into your pockets.
It’s a good idea to set aside funds for marketing, but sticking to a predetermined budget should be a key goal. Many businesses fail because they invest in expensive but ineffective marketing strategies.
Take the time to analyze costs when researching the different marketing channels available to you. If long-term brand exposure is your key goal, you might be able to minimize your spending on aspects like PPC. However, if you intend to launch a new product and want immediate results, paid advertising is likely your best bet. Just keep in mind that PPC ads will eat up a sizable chunk of your marketing budget in the short term before being taken over by more affordable channels following the launch.
Be realistic with how much you can afford to spend; it can help you choose the most suitable channels. As a point of reference, a recent HubSpot study found that businesses allocate around 13.6% of their total budget to marketing.
9. Develop an Effective Marketing Strategy
Now that you’ve gathered in-depth data on your target market and competitors, determined which marketing channels to use, and established your objectives, you can develop a targeted marketing strategy for your franchise that maximizes your return on investment.
With your key demographics in mind, determine what type of content your customers consume and on which platforms they tend to find it.
You can also look at the effectiveness of your competitors’ campaigns and create content that is more relatable and actionable. The ultimate goal is to outperform your competition in the success of your marketing and, ultimately, revenue.
When developing your strategy based on all your analysis, it’s a good idea to create a timeline or calendar so that your team can remain on track and you can keep in line with your targets. For example, if your primary marketing channel is SEO, create an editorial calendar for all of the blog content you plan to publish.
While it can be tempting to pump out content as quickly as possible, I urge you to prioritize high quality over everything else when it comes to marketing your franchise. After all, each marketing campaign directly reflects on all locations in the parent company.
10. Continuously Update Your Marketing Plan
Unfortunately, marketing is an ongoing process. When it comes to franchise marketing plans, the hard work never stops! Once you start implementing your campaigns, you need to monitor their performance, continuously create new campaigns, and capitalize on new channels. Pay attention to key metrics such as impressions (how many times your content was seen), engagement, and conversions.
Don’t be afraid to finetune your marketing plan as your campaigns progress. You’ll always find small ways to make your campaigns even more effective.
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Benefits of a Marketing Plan for Your Franchise
As you can see by now, a marketing plan helps you organize your marketing strategy and maximize your ROI. Here are some of the key benefits of creating a marketing plan for your franchise.
Brand Consistency
When done properly, a marketing plan sets the tone for all your franchises in your organization, regardless of their location. Instead of each franchise carrying out individual marketing strategies, you’ll create a company-wide brand voice. An example of a franchise marketing campaign that resulted in an iconic moment for the brand is the “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle from McDonald’s. After the fast food franchise released the jingle in 2003, it became synonymous with the company and remains their most successful advertising campaign.
Targeted Marketing
Trying to target your customer base without a marketing plan is like stumbling around in the dark, searching for a specific item. You might eventually find it, but not without wasted time and unnecessary effort. A well-crafted marketing plan is like flipping on the lights—you can clearly see your target market and efficiently craft campaigns to connect with your customer base.
Competitive Advantage
If you have a thorough understanding of your competitors’ marketing efforts and put resources into outperforming them, you’ll have a leg up. Competition can be fierce in franchising, and it’s important to do everything you can to remain a leader in your industry.
Build a Marketing Plan That Drives Your Franchise Forward
Marketing is an important pillar of franchising, and creating a strategic plan is the foundation of building brand recognition and engagement. Ultimately, a solid marketing strategy will send your franchise business down the path toward success.
Looking to expand your franchise and connect with potential franchisees? Franzy is here to help you achieve your goals. With our resources and expertise, you can expand your reach and grow your franchise business effectively.
