Your franchise organization likely already has an AdFund in place and hopefully a strategy allocating that budget toward a national campaign. But is it effective? Does it support the franchisee’s local needs?
More important than simply collecting AdFund dollars, the strategy your organization has in place in regards to how to help the franchisee spend those funds regionally is crucial; the expectation that franchisees have the expertise to effectively execute a regional strategy with the allocated budget is where many organization’s strategies fall flat.
An effective, centralized strategy not only creates national visibility, it removes the burden from the franchisee and also maintains concurrent and consistent visibility across the variety of channels where your customers exist. Your customers won’t discover a local promotion the same way: one might hear a radio ad, while their neighbour doesn’t listen to the radio but sees your commercial when watching their favourite content on YouTube, while yet another potential customer becomes engaged through your social media advertising.
Having a robust presence across multiple streams of media locally, regionally, provincially, and nationally, and capturing customers across many media tiers can come with a hefty price tag; a robust strategy that buys nationally, executes locally, and removes the burden from the franchisee can get your brand a million dollars’ worth of advertising for a half-million-dollar budget and ensure a more effective buy for everyone.
As a Franchisor, you need to ask yourself, ‘Is our current ADFund able to cover the scope of the media landscape and balance the needs of the Franchisee and Franchisor effectively?’ Simply put: How responsive, comprehensive, and adaptable is your Media Buy Program?
It’s not just about buying media—it’s about managing the resources available more effectively.
Navigating traditional and digital advertising requirements locally and nationally can easily exhaust resources leading to poor advertising performance. This is especially true if franchises don’t have a clear differentiation between Franchisee/Franchisor responsibilities, or poor control of localized advertising. By working together as a group rather than separately as distinct locations, brands can achieve greater visibility and penetration in all levels of the marketplace.
From the Franchisee’s perspective, knowing that their marketing needs are being effectively met removes the burden of attempting cost-prohibitive advertising and allows them to direct and hone their localized efforts at the community level so they can more successfully create stronger relationships within their own neighbourhoods.
By implementing a fully-managed Media Buy Program that leverages the buying power of the group, Franchisees are able to spend less individually, achieve greater market penetration, maintain brand consistency through uniformity, reduce competition between Franchisees, and avoid duplication.Just as it is not valid to expect Franchisees to effectively balance daily administration and sales responsibilities with high-level brand execution, it’s not feasible to expect each Franchisee to be able to achieve successful community-level marketing penetration for your brand without a high-level, comprehensive and synchronous strategy operating concurrently.
