Marketing for Franchises: Benefits of Boosting Ad Spending

BY Kathy Crosett
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Franchisees make great targets for your media sales efforts. These small and medium-​sized (SMB) owners use an average of up to 16 media formats to connect with target audiences in local markets and they know there are benefits for franchises to boost specific ad spending. This combination of existing effort and interest in increasing their ad spending in represents a great opportunity for you in marketing for franchises. In addition, BIA analysts project that over 60% of these franchised businesses already intend to boost ad spending this year, even without the urging of media sales reps.

The BIA 2019 Survey of Advertising and Marketing reveals that the typical franchisee will spend $64,000 on advertising this year. That spending will be allocated to the following advertising media formats:

  • Traditional advertisements 29.3%
  • Digital advertisements 25.7%
  • Mobile advertisements 21.0%
  • Social advertisements 12.1%
  • Other advertisements 12.0%

Utilizing New Media Formats in Marketing for Franchises

Franchisees often contribute a portion of their revenue to the parent organization for marketing purposes. That organization may pool the funds and develop regional and local campaigns to support the brand with marketing for franchises; an effort that provides benefits to franchises. 

In addition to the parent company's marketing for franchises spending and efforts, local franchisees also tend to buy local market media of their own. BIA analysts report that these SMB owners are also willing to experiment with media formats they may not have experience with. For example, 84.2% use targeted social ads and 71% use mobile location aware ads. Because local market advertising is often intended to drive traffic, at least 35% of franchisees use mobile digital deals and coupons. If they're not already taking advantage of these media formats, it will be easy to show them the benefits these can bring to localization.

Marketing for franchises doesn’t just rely on digital media efforts, though. The BIA SIM finds that nearly 50% of these businesses use direct mail. And this format delivers benefits to franchises through a 72% return on investment for them. So, if your franchise clients are among the many Americans who believe that direct mail advertising is on its death bed, it's about time they learned better.

ROI

In today’s data-​rich environment, franchisees aren’t content to guess at how well their marketing for franchises efforts are providing benefits to their franchises. At least 33% are using Google analytics to keep track of how well Google’s tools are working for them. And nearly half, 46.4%, are currently using other vendor data to determine their return on investment (ROI). Additionally, about 25% of these businesses are evening tracking their own data themselves. Taking the time to monitor an entire business' advertising data themselves is a huge effort and could be a potential source of business for companies offering digital marketing services.

Franchisees point out that their top ROI comes from internet yellow pages (83.9%.) Close behind is native/​sponsored advertising at 80.0% and online display ads at 79.1%.

To learn about the ad spending requirements for specific franchisees and each of their locations, check out the hundreds of Major Account Intelligence Reports available on AdMall from SalesFuel​.com.


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