Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2011 | Page 28

Grow Market Lead
26

CMO
roundtable:
Dianne Phibbs, President,
Calabrand Marketing

Local marketing has always been an important
part of individual unit
growth, particularly in
organizations that have
not grown into co-op or national advertising. Franchisors must assume a leadership role in helping franchisees understand how to market at the local level.
Franchisee success in local marketing
has three important elements:
1) Franchisee involvement in local
marketing efforts starts with a clear understanding of the roles of the franchisee
and franchisor. So often franchisees join
a concept thinking that because they’re
part of a franchise organization, everything will be done for them because they
pay royalties. Local marketing is critical
to individual location success as well as
for the long-term health of the brand.
It’s important to be sure your franchisees
understand their role in local marketing
as well as that of the franchisor. Be sure
to communicate this as much as possible,
starting with the sales process.
2) Teach your franchisees how to plan,
implement, and evaluate a marketing
program. Make this a focus of your new
franchisee training program. Start with
a marketing calendar that will outline
the revenue-generating initiatives for
the first year of operation.
Help your franchisees understand how
to evaluate marketing programs such as
local print or community sponsorships so
they may make good decisions for their
location. Continue the process by offering user-friendly toolkits for marketing
materials. Provide easy access to materials
that have an impact and that franchisees
will want to use. This will ensure that local use of marketing materials will be in
keeping with the brand image.
Test new programs in company and

What are some effective ways to
get franchisees to ‘buy in’ and
become actively involved with
local-level marketing efforts?
franchised locations to provide an ongoing level of support. Then, teach your
franchisees how to evaluate marketing
efforts and measure success.
3) Share best practices and success
stories of franchisees. Franchisees love
to hear stories about other franchisees
and how they’re growing their businesses.
This will create excitement within the
franchise community and entice franchisees to try new things. Provide a forum
for franchisees to share this information
through a franchise marketing council
or intranet.
Be sure to assume a leadership role in
local marketing. Don’t leave it up to your
franchisees to develop and implement
their own materials. It’s the franchisor’s
responsibility to provide tools, information, and resources to help franchisees
make good decisions and drive revenue
at the local level.
Jayson Pearl, SVP Marketing
& Franchisee Onboarding,
BrightStar Care

At BrightStar Care, our
focus on helping owners
become actively involved
in local marketing starts
with making programs
as easy to implement as possible. We’ve
seen much higher satisfaction and adoption of local marketing initiatives when
the process is easy and the communication is clear for our owners. We work to
make this happen by focusing in three
areas: services, training, and technology.
1) Services. We try to offer the services
that keep our owners and their staff focused on providing great care and community networking—not on printing
and graphic design. Our Creative Brief
System is one example of this: an owner
can submit a design request for anything
from an online advertisement to a car
wrap, and our graphic designers will

bring these to life. This provides a win all
around as we add high value and ease for
our owners, while ensuring consistency
and quality in brand and legal elements.
And by making the completed designs
accessible for review by all BrightStar
owners, they have access to more great
ideas that we can more efficiently create with only customization, not starting
from scratch.
2) Training. Training is a big part of
engaging our owners in local marketing—making sure they understand the
tools that are available, how best to portray our brand, and the best marketing
investments for their stage of growth.
We link the benefit and compliance of
training for our owners by requiring
“Brand Orientation Training” for all
new franchisees before they are given
access to the many marketing files and
resources we’ve created for them.
3) Technology. Leveraging technology
is key to franchisee local marketing program buy-in. Helping our owners create
and thrive within new social platforms
like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as
well as building their local online assets,
is a top priority in our business. Making
sure we help our owners establish and
build their sites, pages, and accounts
and then providing them with ideas for
generating great local content is key. We
also provide online dashboards for owners to monitor the results of their efforts
and benchmark their reach against other
BrightStar franchisees.
Heather Neary, Chief Marketing
Officer, Auntie Anne’s

When striving for franchisee buy-in, it is important to engage with
franchisees when making
your decisions. Franchise
Advisory Councils (FACs) are powerful
groups in your system—if you listen to

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