5 Tips For Small Business Consulting: Franchise Marketing Made Easy

Published on this site: February 4th, 2009 - See more articles from this month

If you are an internal or external small business consultant for a franchise organization, you are constantly looking for ways to help your clients improve their marketing efforts in order to increase revenues.

The value of marketing efforts for franchises should be measured by both their cost-effectiveness and their results in terms of increased sales for the organization. Improved cost-effectiveness can be achieved by implementing better marketing systems. Such systems need to be designed to minimize the time required by the corporate office to oversee the management of local franchisee marketing campaigns, while at the same time they need to contribute towards an increase in the corporate office's visibility into the campaigns and towards increased brand consistency across the organization.

Here are 5 tips for small business consulting franchise marketing made easy:

1. Unify your brand image across all franchise locations by using consistent collateral:

Fast-growing franchise organizations often find themselves quickly outgoing their own marketing systems that worked so well during the early stages of growth. The modus operandi for marketing within a franchise organization must necessarily change when the organization goes from 10 locations to 50 or more, but unfortunately many organizations fail to keep pace with their own growth. One of the riskiest consequences of this type of rapid growth is the loss of control over the organization's brand image due to individual franchisees taking on the task of managing their own campaigns using inconsistent marketing collateral. Therefore, it is important to advise your client to find ways to unify the company's brand image across the entire organization.

2. Put the power of ordering direct mail and promotional goods directly into the hands of franchisees:
   
   By letting individual franchisees control their own, independent direct mail campaigns, you give them the power to mail to whom they want, when they want. However, at the same time by doing so you may be giving up the economies of scale associated with centralizing your direct mail and promotional goods sourcing. The best bet for your client's growing business, then, is for them to continue to empower their franchisees to remain in control of their own direct campaigns, but at the same time you need to help your client find to streamline the fulfillment of direct mail through a single source.
   
   
3. Contract directly with vendors at the corporate level in order to leverage volume buying opportunities:
   
   By advising your client to contract directly with vendors who will fulfill promotional goods and print-related orders, you are helping your client to lower operational costs by giving them the ability to leverage volume buying opportunities.
   
   
4. Centralize mailing list generation for maximum quality control:
   
   Many individual franchisees have very specific ideas about how and to whom they want to mail coupons and other offers. And, by all rights, they should retain control of this process. At the same time, franchisees tend to have varying degrees of aptitude for list management. And, often mailing list data that is locally sourced is of poor quality, full of errors and outdated. By centralizing the generation of mailing lists but at the same time allowing franchisees to choose their list quantities and demographic selects, your client's organization will enjoy better ease of list generation and higher response rates.
   
   
5. Automate the entire ordering process to minimize the delays and errors associated with human interaction:
   
   Finally, your client will also benefit from setting up an Internet-mediated, automated system that enables franchisees to execute customized direct mail and promotional goods campaigns the features only corporate-approved collateral. Such a centralized system gives your client's corporate office full control and visibility into the ordering habits of individual franchisees, but it also safely leaves the decision-making authority about the specifics of each local campaign in the hands of franchisees.
   

When conducting small business consulting for franchise organizations in the area of marketing, it is important to advise your clients on how to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of organization-wide marketing. At the same time, your recommendations should find ways to empower franchisees at the local level to run their marketing campaigns on their own terms.

Gene Adelson: Visit http://www.venturemanagersolution.com to view an online demo that shows you how to implement a custom online ordering system for your franchise network.