The latest industry research shows, that while national franchise brands continue to invest heavily in national advertising to build brand awareness and favorability, they’re increasingly taking their marketing programs to the local level to drive engagement.
In a new report titled, 2019 Brand and Franchisee Advertising and Marketing Insights, research firm BIA Advisory Services forecasts national brands will spend $62.7 billion in advertising targeting local consumers in 2019.
The research report suggests, additional local activation can help tie brand favorability to desired outcomes. This includes, for example, knowing where the nearest local franchisee is, regional or local specials and discounts to drive desired behaviors and help launch new products on a local and regionalized basis.
Beyond Advertising: Keys to Local Marketing Success
Of course, the most successful local marketing programs are not only about advertising and branding, particularly in a growing franchise organization. As you grow, you have to be concerned with how you scale your marketing programs to support franchisees at the local level. How do you put more responsibility in their hands while ensuring brand-compliant materials and campaigns that support the branding you’ve worked so hard to establish? How can your franchisees customize things like pricing to align with what their local market demands?
The answers to these questions lie in having the right processes and systems in place for managing brand-compliant campaigns, materials and products. These processes and systems are also essential for creating efficiencies, which is particularly important for a growing franchise brand that is attempting to scale marketing support for an expanding network of local franchisees.
This is where “Local as a Service” (LaaS) companies play an important role. BIA describes LaaS as the convergence of marketing technology (martech) and data to reduce workflow complexity and friction, improving data-driven targeting, and ultimately driving higher lift in brand and engagement campaigns.
LaaS solution providers work with brands to maintain control over brand policies, assets, and business rules as well as facilitating policy-based media activations and co-op reimbursements for franchisees.
According to the BIA report, “LaaS solution providers are elevating the game play for brands and their multi-location retail outlets in local markets. We see this driving increasing marketing investments in both brand to local direct marketing spend, as well as flowing additional marketing monies through co-op and other market develop fund programs. The ROI for these programs is quite high, driving substantial lift for both brand and engagement campaigns.”
More Insights – Get the Report
More franchise local marketing trends are examined in BIA’s 2019 Brand and Franchisee Advertising and Marketing Insights report. The report includes results from franchisee respondents to BIA’s Survey of Advertising and Marketing including advertising budget allocations, top media channels and ROI by marketing channel. You can download it for free here, compliments of Vya.
