Five Common Franchise Marketing Challenges

Marketing a franchise brand comes with its own unique set of challenges. Not only are franchisors trying to make an impact in an increasingly competitive and noisy landscape, but they also have to balance the respective individual needs of the franchisees within their network with their responsibility to keep the brand image both consistent and ever-present in front of their target audience for their product or service. In addition, they are effectively marketing two separate businesses - the overall brand and the brand’s franchise opportunities.

So what are the five most common marketing challenges that most franchisors face, and how can they develop strategies to overcome these in order to achieve marketing success?

Brand Consistency

Most franchisors will tell you that as their franchise business grows, maintaining brand consistency across the board is one of their biggest challenges. The franchisor will have invested time, money and energy into developing a unique brand identity, bringing together logo, colours, messaging and tone. It is in this brand that customer confidence and trust is invested. Yet that brand and marketing message is delivered by a diverse network of franchisees and business owners, many of whom will have strong ideas and opinions of their own. From the very outset of the franchising journey, the franchisor will need to ensure that franchisees understand how, and very crucially why, the brand must be consistently represented across the various locations. A comprehensive set of brand guidelines to be adhered to is a vital tool to ensure compliance by franchisees across the board, and the franchisor must be prepared to take remedial action if a franchisee goes off course.

Adapting to Local Markets

Whilst enforcing brand consistency is one challenge, another that must be addressed as any franchise brand expands into different locations is the need to be flexible and adaptable to meet the requirements of local markets. Regionally, nationally and internationally, the culture, language, demographics, tastes and other factors characteristic to a particular location can significantly influence and impact the success of marketing campaigns and strategies. At the end of the day, each franchise brand and location is a local business operating under a national or global umbrella and franchisees must be given the ability to adapt the central marketing resources and initiatives to suit their local audience, whilst maintaining that overall brand consistency and tone. Getting this balance right is certainly not easy and good communication, understanding and harmonisation on the part of both franchisor and franchisee is key.

Franchisee Training

In most franchise businesses, franchisees will join the network from a wide variety of professional backgrounds with differing skills and experience and, in the majority of cases, without any prior marketing experience. Yet those new business owners need to become the local marketing team for their fledgling franchise straight away. A franchisor needs not only to meet the challenge of ensuring that all franchisees are brought up to the required level of competence and skill through tailored marketing training, resources and support in order that they can hit the ground running, but also to ensure that the entire network are kept up to date with training in a world where digital platforms, algorithms, metrics and technology change so very quickly.

Overseeing multiple channels

Backtrack a couple of decades and marketing a franchise brand was a much simpler affair. Franchisors now have the challenge of navigating an ever-growing number of social media platforms and identifying which to invest both time and money in, as well as web presence and SEO, review platforms, directories and other forms of digital communication. Not to be neglected is also "old school" community and in-person marketing and relationship building. Franchisors need to support their franchisees to utilise these multiple channels efficiently and productively whilst overseeing that they are being used in a brand consistent manner - a significant challenge as the network expands. Providing the necessary tools with a centralised system to help franchisees manage and coordinate their cross channel marketing efforts can provide a solution that reaps rewards for both franchisee and franchisor.

Communication and Motivation

Good, open lines of communication will be the heartbeat of any successful franchise network. The challenge facing any franchisor is to win over the hearts and minds of their franchisees, not just to get them fully on board with understanding the need for and value of brand consistency and a uniform approach, but also to persuade them that marketing is a worthwhile activity and investment both in terms of time and money. If franchisees are given a forum to communication with each other and share ideas and marketing experiences, this will make them feel empowered and in turn more motivated and enthused. Equipping them with the information, tools and understanding to interpret the metrics used in gauging the impact and success of marketing campaigns will in turn help to get the network fully behind initiatives rolled out by the franchisor.

So whilst marketing a franchise - a national (or international) brand made up of local business owners across multiple locations - requires a unique mindset and approach, franchisors who can identify their challenges and are agile and adaptative can then develop strategies to overcome them and and in turn create a growth success story.