Franchise Companies - Look Before you Leap

By M H Ahssan

Automate your marketing and track the results: franchise companies should be in a position to recommend strategically-assembled bundles of different marketing channels that have a synergistic effect.

Send me your tired, fatigued and under-performing franchisees and you will see the long line of people who can't seem to market their businesses. Is it any wonder? This is not the generation of Yellow Page advertising. Franchisees have to reach their customer demographic using multiple media channels. To compound the problem, if they are not in front of their prospects at the exact moment the prospect is making a buying decision their competition is just a click of the mouse away. How does the franchisee of the 2010 decade market their business? Automated marketing systems.

Time-of-Need. This is when a franchisee must have their marketing message in front of a prospect. And by the way, it has to be in the preferred media channel that the prospect is paying attention to. Imagine a two-year-old child in the back seat of the car who has done a great job with potty training, but sounds the cry of a need of facilities. The first business with facilities to put a marketing message in front of Dad, at his time-of-need, is getting his patronage. Take that rationale to real-life business applications and you will see that you have to have your message in front of a prospect at their time-of-need. If your business is cleaning air ducts, your message has to be in front of a very attuned prospective customer, such as an expectant mother, or if you fix transmissions, your message has to be there at the first rattle that comes from beneath the car.

How is a franchisee supposed to know when these events occur? Analytics, of course. Franchisors must be in the business of informing their franchisees of the detailed demographics of the system's customers and the media channels they listen to. It is not difficult to identify who expectant mothers are in a franchisee's territory. They all exhibit the same patterns; they order the same magazines, shop at the same stores, buy the same products and complete the warranties for those products. Perhaps no one completes warranty cards anymore, but it is easy to get data about people who buy cribs and baby seats. Analytics can also tell a transmission repair franchisee that the useful life of a transmission is between 150,000 to 200,000 miles. Now it is up to the franchisor to provide that franchisee a geo-targeted list of people in their territory that own those cars.

It may not be easy for franchisees to get this information, but the franchisor should be capable of handling this process. Franchise candidates looking at companies that will not have this empirical data available for their territory for their first day in business shouldn't buy that franchise. A prospective franchisee who hears that the company's marketing strategy is primarily franchisee networking should run for the hills: This is code for "we don't have the money to develop marketing systems."

There are ample marketing studies that indicate how many times a message has to be seen before it is comprehended and that number is being compounded daily due to information-overload from technology. Franchisees are crying out for "set-it and forget-it" technology to get their message in front of prospects frequently enough to be noticed. This is an overwhelming task in today's marketplace. Not only do they have to have the frequency to be noticed, but they have to be ready to change the marketing plan at a moment's notice, when market factors change. In September 2008, the Dow Jones average began dropping and fell from 11,600 to 7,000 in January 2009 losing 40 percent of its value in just four months. Every business in the country had to make quick adjustments to their marketing message. So how can a franchisee possibly do this with any type of marketing that is automated?

The answer is an automated marketing platform with integrated multiple media channels that has the flexibility to change the marketing message at a moment's notice. This can't be done with multiple, stand-alone media-channel platforms. It is virtually impossible for the franchise companies to operate individual media-channel platforms that their franchisees need to reach their customers, and have their franchisees understand and use them. Multiple marketing platforms are confusing and hard for franchisor and franchisee to use. Because they are separate systems it is difficult for the franchisor to make sure the marketing content matches for each platform. Soon the marketing message on the e-mail platform is different than the Web to print platform, so the messages at best do not reinforce each other; or worse they contradict each other.

Franchisors should provide an easy to use intuitive multi-media automated marketing system for franchisees to contact their prospects and customers across the media channels that reach their customer demographics. These automated systems deliver predetermined messages that are launched automatically on a timely basis, even from a request from a prospect themselves. However, the system should possess the flexibility to change the message based on information gathered from the prospect; this is called "scoring the prospect."

For example, if a prospect clicks on a franchisee's pay-per-click ad and requests information, in addition to the immediate call from the franchisee, automation should kick in and deliver to that prospect specific information they requested. The system should also put that prospect in a queue to continue to receive more marketing until they become a customer or the timing is obvious that they are no longer interested. Every piece of marketing should be designed to gather more information about the prospect and their interest to more finely-tune the next piece of marketing that is in the queue.

Watch out for Imposters

There are some systems in today's marketplace that claim to be automated marketing platforms, but are actually Web sites that are just links to individual media channels that do not "talk" to each other. These sites do not possess the capability of having the automation of one marketing channel to be able to trigger new marketing workflows to the customer or prospect. Although these platforms are more convenient to use than having a different platform for each media channel, they are not true set-it and forget-it technology. The obvious give away, if you are on a system that does not truly integrate the media channels, is that each media channel will have its own shopping cart and the performance reporting does not flow back to the host system.

The great news for franchise companies is that the same technology that has forced them to play in so many different media channels is the same technology that is available to automate and track their marketing programs. For a franchisor who has a multi-media channel marketing system, they can quickly modify the system-wide marketing message to match changing market dynamics. The system should also accommodate marketing message modifications from each individual franchisee for their territory and individual business dynamics.

Track the Media Channels

There is no reason with today's technology not to be able to track every piece of marketing and advertising that is launched. This trend is holding a lot of people accountable. No longer can the creative team blame poor campaign results on non-trackable pieces. Even direct mail can be tracked by using personalized URLs, trackable telephone numbers or by having people express interest to text message tracking campaigns. Reports of this tracking should return to the host site where the marketing materials are developed and launched, so they can be compared to other campaigns or media channels.

With automated marketing systems, franchisors are no longer totally dependent upon franchisees to ask the customer "How did you hear about us?" which is the most undependable process. Franchisors for ages have been at the mercy of franchisees who complain that corporate marketing and advertising programs do nothing for their business. Now with automated marketing systems that track lead generation by media channel and by campaign, franchisors can prove to franchisees that programs and campaigns are successful by pointing to the reports on the automated system that disclose the lead flow to their store. It is very easy with pass-through trackable telephone numbers, PURLs, unique micro-sites, text-message cell phone numbers, and other technologies to determine how a customer was acquired.

Automated marketing systems can actually reduce marketing dollars by using more efficient geo-targeted marketing and advertising strategies. Today's economics for small businesses will not allow for unproven strategies. Franchisees have to know that their marketing and advertising dollars are going to be spent on campaigns that the franchisor has tried, tested and proved that they work. This is a big burden on the franchisor, so seek proven channels and campaigns that a good automated system will deliver. There should be someone that says "we know that the campaign using three e-mails and two printed pieces with text message interspersed will yield this result."

Franchise companies should be in a position to recommend strategically- assembled bundles of different marketing channels that have a synergistic effect. A good automated system will be able to launch a bundled marketing and advertising program that has a good fundamental strategy.