Marketing Plan for a Franchise: What You Can Expect from a Franchisor

marketing plan for franchise

As a franchise owner, your bread and butter is attracting new customers while simultaneously maintaining your current customer base. That’s why having an effective marketing plan for a franchise is vitally important for your success. Not only do you as a franchise owner need an effective way to promote your franchise unit, but your franchisor should be assisting with a strong marketing or advertising plan.

The Need for a Marketing Plan

A franchise marketing plan is any activity that will be used to promote and essentially grow the brand. It’s a prepared strategy to build brand standards, acquire customers and generate leads. Building awareness of the brand ultimately drives revenue. Most of the time, the franchisor will create a brand marketing plan that can be used in local markets for each franchise location. Maintaining brand standards provides consistency across the board. Why is this important?

As a brand grows with new units, to maintain brand quality and standards the messaging must be consistent. Which is why having a franchise-wide marketing plan keeps everyone on board. It starts with knowing your target audience and how to meet them.

Traditional and Digital Marketing

The marketing plan for a franchise is a complex strategy that includes traditional and digital marketing. Digital is an effective platform to cast a wide net and attract prospective customers in a personal way as the public receives that messaging on their phones, tablets, and computers. In a competitive marketplace, digital marketing can help your brand stand out from the rest.

As part of your digital marketing plan, you will utilize search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing social media marketing and PPC or pay per click. For many customers, digital will be their first introduction to your brand as thy google brands and click on yours perhaps looking for the address or to delve deeper looking for details about products and services you offer. To maintain brand consistency, a franchisor wants that google search to be uniform no matter what city or state.

Email marketing is a good strategy to send your message directly to a customer in box. You can pinpoint what you want to say and stay in contact for a long period of time.

Social media marketing is a must have in the marketplace today. Utilizing platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram is an effective way to utilize organic and paid reach to send your messaging to your target audience. Different platforms attract distinct audiences so you can direct your messaging accordingly.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is another online strategy. This is a calculated effort to pay for ads that will reach your target audience instead of relying on organic reach.

Traditional marketing remains an effective component of your marketing strategy. Under this umbrella you will focus efforts on mediums like print, tv, radio and direct mail. Utilizing traditional marketing has budgetary constraints and is not as easily measured as when you market using social media, for example, however it does remain an effective tool.

Building a Marketing Plan

As a franchisee, you create your local marketing plan off the larger brand schedule. Whether as an overall franchise or a franchise unit, your strategy should include:
• Building brand guidelines
• Creating clear consistent messaging
• Know your target audience
• Create a working budget
• Utilize both traditional and digital marketing

As a franchisee you are a stakeholder in the marketing plan for a franchise. Often the franchise marketing fund is structured by obtaining payment from each franchise unit as a percentage of gross sales to add to the kiddie. Most franchise marketing funds are set up as a monthly percentage of gross sales like 4%, for example.

AAMCO Goes the Extra Mile

AAMCO franchise owners can enjoy a dedicated strategy for maintaining and boosting client acquisition. Not only do we have a national and regional marketing campaign, we help our franchise owners develop their own strategic marketing campaigns that are compatible with their specific market. Plus, we help owners determine the cost of customer acquisition and help measure the ROI to discern what’s working and what’s not.

But part of our strategy is not confined to traditional or digital marketing. It is those real-life customer interactions that can win the brand, so we also focus our efforts on positive exchanges with customers as well.
It is our leadership as an iconic brand that has made us a top franchise in the aftermarket auto repair industry and a top franchise with our franchise owners.
We’d love the opportunity to tell you more about our marketing and our overall brand. If you want to learn more, request info and we will start that important conversation.

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