For a franchise to succeed, it requires two distinct marketing strategies: one targeting investors and potential business owners (franchise development strategy) and another targeting consumers, the customers for the services and/or products (consumer marketing strategy).
While both are important, they are also incredibly different, and you must treat them that way. For consumer-facing brands, like urgent care centers or plumbing franchises, it takes more than just an ad or two to get the word out. You need a comprehensive franchise marketing plan to help set you apart from your competition, while keeping you closely aligned with your overall brand.
In this blog, Ignite Visibility’s Co-Founder & President, Krish Coughran, will focus on franchise consumer marketing by explaining how you can effectively market your franchise locations to consumers, ultimately improving your bottom line and establishing your brand as a household name.
What’s Covered:
- What is Franchise Marketing?
- The Franchise Marketing Ecosystem
- National Marketing Strategies – Franchisor
- Local Franchise Marketing Strategies – Franchisee
- Bonus: Traditional Marketing Tactics for Franchises
- National-to-Local Strategies
- Consumer Journey in Franchise Environments
- Measurement and KPIs
- Leverage Technology for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy
- Common Challenges for Franchise Marketing
- FAQs About Franchise Marketing
What is Franchise Marketing?
Franchise marketing is the type of marketing done to promote a large, multi-location franchise brand. It creates brand awareness, drives revenue, and establishes a solid foundation for its franchisees.
There are two types of franchise marketing: franchise development and consumer marketing. Franchise development focuses on building the opportunity up to be attractive to potential business partners or investors. Consumer marketing is what we all typically think of as franchise marketing. It’s what makes the brand or business attractive to consumers. For this blog, we will focus on building a marketing strategy for franchise businesses that appeals to consumers.
Let’s get started by diving into the fundamentals of franchise marketing.
Expert Insights into Developing a Franchise Consumer Marketing Strategy
When it comes to consumer-facing marketing, franchise locations have unique needs. Owners often need to balance multiple locations with a cohesive and consistent franchise marketing plan that connects everyone in the franchise to the end consumer in a holistic solution. From SEO and paid media to content marketing and web design, many elements will contribute to a solid strategy, and none of the aspects should be overlooked.
A solid strategy is a two-pronged approach. It starts with the national, or brand-level, strategy that builds a business into a nationally recognized name. Once that is established, each individual location has to work on its local, or franchisee-driven, marketing to help its store stand out from the crowd in its local market.
This is true regardless of industry. Take a national health chain, such as Massage Envy, for example. The national headquarters of Massage Envy expertly oversees aspects such as brand colors, logos, and messaging. They probably also play a role in the limited-time marketing and promotions. Their franchisees can then work on a hyper-local level to establish themselves in the community through initiatives such as partnering with a school to offer teacher massages or offering special, localized promotions. For this strategy to be effective, it requires buy-in from both the national and local levels of the brand, and for the marketing content and creative to share the same unified voice.
Action Item: Consider your franchise’s specific marketing needs, including your target audience and industry. Once you are clear on your needs, franchisors and franchisees can work together to build an unforgettable franchise marketing strategy that will keep customers flocking to your business and your locations ahead of the competition on a national-to-local level.
Importance of Consumer Franchise Marketing
The consumer side of franchise marketing is crucial because it’s what ultimately determines the franchise’s success. The national branding and marketing help to fuel local demand and vice versa.
National marketing helps to build the common KPIs that most businesses are interested in, including brand awareness, website traffic, media coverage, and customer retention.
Consider this: when a new Burger King opens in town, it brings with it the nationally recognized name, logo, brand colors, and products. It doesn’t have to establish itself in the community like a mom-and-pop burger joint would. The brand awareness is already established and continues to build. Each franchise network must strive to create brand awareness at the National and Regional levels.
The same principle applies to any industry. In the healthcare industry, we can look at the rise of urgent care centers. Those with brand names, like Patient First or UPMC, are backed by well-known names and reputations, so patients wouldn’t hesitate to go there in an emergency.
Understanding the Basics of Franchise Marketing
To start our business franchise guide to marketing, let’s look at the fundamentals of franchise marketing.
What Is Multi-Location Franchise Marketing?
This type of marketing involves promoting businesses with several locations nationally or across the globe, keeping all branding aligned and consistent while adapting to the needs of franchisees and customers in each location.
There are currently around 806,270 franchise establishments in the U.S. alone, across many industries from quick service restaurants and fitness to automotive and finance. That’s over 10% of all businesses in this country, and those figures continue to grow.
A franchise comprises two primary stakeholders, including franchisors and franchisees. While franchisors own the entire franchise and all locations, franchisees own and operate a business under the franchisor while using that franchisor’s licensed brand, name, and system.
To establish a strong brand identity, multi-location franchise marketing must maintain consistency of visuals and messaging across all locations while adjusting accordingly to speak to different markets.
The Franchise Marketing Ecosystem
There are a few primary components of franchise marketing systems that can help you get the results you want. These include:
1. Target Audience Analysis
The first step in developing your strategy is to conduct a target audience analysis. You need to consider the specific needs of audiences across all of your business’s locations.
In doing so, segment your audiences based on certain demographics and psychographics, and build a persona for each. Also, consider the pain points that are unique to audiences in each area—what features or offerings would be best to promote for each location?
Brands now use AI tools, like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+, to understand consumer actions, predict trends and refine ad targeting using available data.
Based on the insights you gather about your audiences, you can then adapt your marketing while keeping the broader elements of your franchise consistent and uniquely yours.
2. Goal Setting
Just like any other business, you’ll need to come up with a set of goals when marketing a franchise. Keeping these goals in mind will help you understand your success.
There are various goals you can set at different points, including:
- Brand awareness
- Conversions and customer acquisition
- Sales
- Retention
These goals can then dictate which key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to monitor to measure success.
3. Budget Allocation
Before implementing your franchise strategy, you’ll need to establish two separate budgets: a national budget and an individualized budget for each location. Start by considering all of your costs, including initial and ongoing costs, along with revenue projections.
Upon review of your budget, you can determine how much to set aside for marketing for individual franchises and the business as a whole. As you optimize your franchise marketing systems and get results, you can expand your budget for even better performance.
4. Brand Consistency
Maintaining a unified brand message across all franchise locations helps build trust. It also builds recognition. By 2025, digital asset management (DAM) platforms, such as Bynder as well as Brandfolder, have turned into a true necessity for many franchises, since they permit marketing teams to efficiently centralize, organize and distribute branded materials.
5. Local Marketing
Localized marketing efforts guarantee franchise locations cater specifically to all of their immediate communities. To reach possible customers, hyper-local marketing now uses geofencing and location-based push notifications to send personalized deals when they get near a franchise.
National Marketing Strategies – Franchisor
Here are some essential strategies to incorporate into your marketing strategy at a national level.
Here is a business franchise guide to each component:
SEO for Franchise Businesses
One of the first items to consider is franchise SEO. An overarching national SEO campaign supports every good hyper-local SEO strategy. Search engine optimization, or SEO, involves optimizing content to rank high in search engines. Consider that over 50% of shoppers use Google to discover new brands, including franchises. National SEO is necessary to build overall site authority for key areas of the website, including the homepage, regional pages, services pages, and product pages not controlled at the local/franchisee level.
National SEO will require in-depth keyword research using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, with other elements to consider, such as:
- Internal and external links
- Backlinks on other websites
- Image alt text
- Title tags and descriptions
A strong SEO strategy makes franchise locations appear in search results. Google’s newest algorithm updates, such as the Search Generative Experience (SGE), strongly emphasize genuinely helpful, firsthand content and extensive real-world expertise.
A well-written national site that uses links, alt text, and keywords will help you rank on search engines. You can also boost your national SEO by incorporating blogs into your marketing strategy, such as this one from Anytime Fitness.
Content Marketing
For national marketing, you’ll need to focus on developing content that resonates with each of your audiences while remaining consistent with your branding and overall messaging.
For example, you might write blogs targeting specific segments of your audience, addressing individual talking points that apply to a particular location. At the same time, you’ll want to use language and visuals that are aligned with the rest of your brand.
Let’s revisit the Anytime Fitness blog example. The national site will focus on providing overarching workout support, rather than blogs written about specific trainers or equipment available only at select locations.
Ultimately, there are many types of content you can use on and off your website, including:
- Service and product pages
- Primary web pages
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Guest posts
- Images
Other content ideas include video testimonials for wellness brands, discussing your services, or creating keyword-optimized case studies featuring happy customers for home service brands, such as plumbing or electrical franchises.
PPC Advertising
Your franchise marketing strategy should also entail franchise pay-per-click (PPC) advertising using different types of paid media.
One critical tool to use for PPC campaigns is Google Ads. Using this platform, you can build Search and Display campaigns that maximize your ads’ reach across the web. Search ads would appear in search engines, often showing up above organic search results. Meanwhile, Display ads include image and video ads that show up on websites that your audience browses, including retargeting ads that can bring people back to your website after an initial visit.
Don’t neglect social media ads, either. Tools like Facebook and Instagram Ads can help you build highly targeted campaigns on these channels.
Like the rest of your content, ads should use a blend of centralized and localized campaigns. People generally interested in your brand could come across broader ads, while people in specific areas might see ads for particular locations.
Video Marketing
Another invaluable asset in a franchise marketing plan is video marketing, which is extremely popular among audiences. According to one survey, 81% of respondents either “Somewhat” or “Very much” enjoy watching brand video content.
Video marketing covers all types of video content, including long-form videos on YouTube and short-form social media posts and ads.
There are plenty of videos you can create across platforms, such as:
- Explainer videos
- Local ads and promotional videos
- Broad franchise ads
- How-to guides
- Live streams
- Tutorials
- Product or service introductions
Testimonial videos about your brand as a whole are particularly helpful to build brand-level authority on your national website.
Local Franchise Marketing Strategies – Franchisee
Any national strategy should be accompanied by a localized franchise marketing strategy led by the franchisee. Here are some ideas for hyper-localized marketing strategies to pair with your national ones.
Local SEO
We already discussed how to boost your SEO on a national level, but what about on a local level? There are numerous ways to achieve extreme granularity with your local SEO, including utilizing localized keywords, targeting “near me” searches, and leveraging tools like Google Business Profile to increase visibility in local searches.
Franchises will want to optimize their SEO to rank nationally and locally, using a combination of broad and local SEO. For example, a fitness brand with multiple locations would want to show up for top searches in their industry, such as “best gym membership,” along with hyper-local searches like “best gym in [city].”
You also want to develop high-quality content that’s readable and keeps people engaged, which will further signal to Google that your website is worth ranking.
Additionally, each location should have its own detailed Google Business Profile to enhance your SEO efforts further. Here, each franchisee can post localized content, photos, and updated promotional content. You should also solicit and respond to customer reviews.
Social Media Strategy
Any franchise marketing plan should also include social media.
First, consider which platforms your target audience uses. For instance, a local gym might have an audience on visual platforms like Instagram and YouTube, where people are often looking for workout videos and guides. Meanwhile, financial institutions may want to connect with professionals on platforms like LinkedIn.
Second, utilize an AI-enabled social media management platform for content distribution at they hyper-local level. We have found the Rallio platform, which was built specifically for the franchise space, to be highly effective.
Social media is considerably relied on for franchise brand awareness. Short-form video content remains popular, and TikTok and Instagram Reels maintain high engagement. For example, Carl’s Jr.’s Super Bowl ad with TikTok influencer Alix Earle shows how well brand storytelling works in current influencer campaigns.
You should use a combination of national-level posts, as well as localized photos and content, to maximize your exposure and reach. All of which can be managed via the Rallio platform.
Bonus: Traditional Marketing Tactics for Franchises
You don’t just have to focus on online franchise marketing. You can also supplement your digital marketing efforts with the following traditional strategies:
Direct Mail and Print Advertising
Print ads and direct mail are still integral to franchise marketing, as they give people something more tangible that helps them remember brands better. After all, in this digitally saturated world, physical media is a good way to stand out.
More and more businesses are using direct mail for these reasons, with one company finding that weekly mail volume increased 39% within a recent three-year period. These pieces can include coupons and brochures to introduce people to your brand on a local level.
Meanwhile, print ads in magazines and other locations could further help differentiate you from your strictly online competitors.
Community Engagement and Sponsorships
You should also get your brand involved in various sponsorships and community events, which will help you align your business with local causes. In turn, audiences near specific franchise locations will come to associate your brand positively with the community.
There are plenty of events you can take part in, including food drives, charity runs, celebrations, seasonal events, and more.
Promotions and Loyalty Programs
Entice your customers with certain promotions and loyalty programs that keep them coming back.
For example, a gym could offer a seasonal promotional discount to become a member, while a fast-food restaurant can allow customers to earn points toward free or discounted menu items.
If people know they’re getting a good deal, they’re far more likely to stay loyal to you in the long term. The stats prove this, with 85% of people saying that loyalty programs make them more inclined to continue shopping with a brand.
Competitive Analysis
See what your competitors are doing to find out how you can outperform them. You might discover that they’re not addressing issues specific to certain locations or that they’re neglecting a certain audience segment.
You can also see what they’re doing right to inform your campaigns for better performance.
National-to-Local Strategies
Before you can create an exceptional franchise marketing campaign, you have to understand the importance of a national-to-local strategy. By combining national brand-building efforts with localized marketing tactics, it will drive performance at a local level.
To make this work, you’ll need:
- Localized content that aligns with your national branding
- Ads that cater to local demographics and preferences
- Centralized analytics that will monitor and optimize performance across all locations – not just your national one
This application is particularly useful for franchisors who need to ensure that their content is relevant on a national level, while still resonating with a local audience. When you nail your national-to-local strategy, it can improve local relevance and engagement, boost your return on investment, and streamline operations with certified oversight.
Consumer Journey in Franchise Environments
Another key part of a successful franchise marketing strategy is understanding the consumer journey.
For more franchise customers, there are four journey phases:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
- Retention
You need to develop ads and content that reach your target audience at each phase of their journey. Running paid ads is a great way to reach those still in the awareness phase, while keyword-optimized landing pages will connect with those in the consideration phase. Promotions and discounts are effective in connecting with those in the conversion phase, while reviews and excellent customer service will inspire customer retention.
Measurement and KPIs
You can’t effectively manage a franchise marketing campaign without understanding how to measure your success. Some of the most popular KPIs to monitor include:
- Traffic
- Lead volume
- Brand sentiment
- Review scores
- Customer retention
Remember to track these KPIs across both your national and local levels to ensure that you’re doing your absolute best in both areas.
Leverage Technology for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy
Certain technologies can also help your franchise marketing strategy excel, such as:
- Marketing Automation: Automating franchise marketing systems can streamline nearly every aspect of your campaigns, including emails, social media posts, and content posting.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): You’ll also want to use a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot to track customers across the entire journey from the top of the funnel to the bottom.
- Analytics and Reporting: Tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console can help you monitor key metrics and measure them against your marketing goals. In the process, you should monitor your broad and local franchise marketing strategy.
Common Challenges for Franchise Marketing
There are several key challenges that franchises face with marketing. These potential issues include:
1. Maintaining Brand Consistency
On your website and across all marketing materials, your branding must be consistent to build trust, recognition, and loyalty among your audiences. To ensure brand consistency, introduce proper training and onboarding for new franchisees, which will help align branding with local needs.
You must also manage your online reviews and maintain a good reputation. Address negative reviews humbly and show your dedication to addressing certain issues, whether at the national or local level.
Also, issue press releases and other content to address hits to your reputation and willingness to continually improve.
3. Communicating Between Franchisors and Franchisees
To facilitate brand consistency and cohesion across your entire franchise, you need to facilitate good communication from franchisors to franchisees and vice versa. Take steps to maintain regular communication and ensure every branch of your business is on the same page, such as scheduled virtual meetings or calls.
4. Remaining Competitive
Find out what your audience wants from you through market research and competitive analysis. Taking cues from competitors while standing apart with high-quality services that meet each audience segment’s needs will help you maintain a competitive edge.
5. Keeping Up With Changing Consumer Behavior
As customer needs and wants change over time, you need to adapt. See what customers are saying on social media or request feedback through surveys and other content, which will help you determine what to do to stay ahead in your industry.
Develop a Successful Franchise Marketing Strategy With Ignite Visibility
Now that you understand the importance of developing two different franchise marketing strategies (one for franchisees and one for consumers), as well as the importance of both a local and a national plan, it’s time to get to work and design a solid strategy that helps your business thrive. However, you may also benefit from some extra help, especially if you want solutions that allow for long-term growth.
With Ignite Visibility, you’ll get a complete franchise marketing plan that fuels your business’s success. Specifically, you’ll benefit from:
- National-to-local strategies that connect with local audiences while maintaining consistent branding
- High-quality content across multiple relevant marketing channels
- Consistent communications between franchisors and franchisees
- A strong presence on social media, Google, and other platforms
- And more
Does all of that get you excited? Reach out to the experts at Ignite Visibility to get started on your next strategy.
FAQs About Franchise Marketing
How do national campaigns help local franchisees?
National campaigns do a lot of the heavy lifting for local franchisees. By establishing a solid national presence, you build brand awareness that you just won’t find anywhere else. National interest will fuel local interest and vice versa. The two go hand in hand to promote success and generate additional revenue.
How do franchises manage local SEO?
This specific answer depends on how your national headquarters wants to handle local SEO. However, by getting hyper-localized with keywords and optimizing for “near me” searches, individual locations can see a surge in leads and conversions. Things like localized blogs and optimized Google Business Profiles will also help improve local SEO and drive more traffic to individual franchisees.
What is the best way to manage social media for multiple locations?
To effectively manage all locations in your social media strategy, it’s best to have a professional franchise marketing company help you. The right company can foster consistent communication across all franchisees and help you maintain consistent posting and advertising for each.
How do you balance corporate and local marketing efforts?
When developing a multi-location franchise marketing strategy, you’ll want to adapt to each location’s specific requirements and pain points while maintaining consistency across all of your branding. Your brand should be recognizable and unique while feeling personal to each audience segment.
What marketing channels work best for franchises?
You have plenty of options when it comes to marketing channels, with some of the most effective including SEO, PPC, social media, direct mail, and content marketing.
How do you do market research for a franchise?
You might ask about how to do market research for a franchise when you get started. The key here is to look at any existing customers as well as your competitors. Look at industry studies and research to figure out how you can speak to your audiences, and look at the needs of each location.
How does franchising work as a marketing strategy?
Franchising can help your business connect with all of your target audiences and expand your overall exposure. The right strategy will incorporate many elements to help you maximize growth and ROI.
