Local Area Marketing support for franchisees

The challenge for every franchise group owner is how to provide the knowledge, support and tools required for franchisees to develop a degree of autonomy and responsibility for generating their own new business opportunities and sales. At the big picture level most franchisors are equipped to generate new leads via their website, advertising or PR but this needs to be supplemented with local area marketing activities that each and every franchisee is willing and able to undertake themselves. In short, a successful franchise is one that makes the most of new business opportunities generated at a national level and also at a local level.

This was the challenge faced by a franchisee group we recently worked with that was offering professional services mostly from home-based franchisees. Leads were being generated at a national level and were actively being farmed out to franchisees but there were no tactics in place for franchisees at the local level. So the Franchisee Marketing Toolkit was born. Through a series of focus group discussions with franchisees we were able to determine the local area marketing activities that would reap the best results.

We agreed on the top ten most dynamic ways for franchisees to market their business locally. This included entering local business awards, sponsoring local events, networking, developing alliances with other complementary local businesses, referral programs, hosting small targeted events, local PR, localised email marketing, the use of social media and exhibiting at local tradeshows.

We developed a toolkit that explained what marketing really is and how to make it work for them. The toolkit included top tips for each activity, action plans and checklists, real life case studies, template media releases, email banners and ads they could use.

The toolkit was launched at their annual conference with over 85% of the franchisees agreeing to take up the offer to purchase the toolkit. The results were great with many of the franchisees taking up at least four of five of the recommended activities in their local area.

Our Franchising Toolkit can just as easily be developed to cater to the marketing needs of professional services networks and associations - please contact us on 1300 998 558 so we can chat about your challenges and how we can help.