We recently surveyed 100+ franchise companies about local marketing and how they supported their local franchisees with local online marketing programs.
Online Local Marketing Survey Results
01. What’s your greatest challenge in generating local leads for your Franchisees?
(Please rank, 1-4, 1 being most important.)
- ~ 1.3 (average rank) Franchisees have limited time and budget to produce local marketing campaigns
- ~ 1.9 (average rank) Local franchisees have little expertise to effectively implement marketing campaigns.
- ~ 2.9 (average rank) Local marketing solutions rely on the franchisee to implement with little time & few resources.
- ~ 3.9 (average rank) Independent competitors are dominating the local lead generation sources.
02. How do you control your brand at the local Franchisee level?
- ~ 87.5% of surveyed franchisors have implemented a strict process with brand standards and approvals required for any locally generated marketing materials.
- ~ 62.5% of surveyed franchisors said that branding is controlled tightly at the national level with no ability for the Franchisees to customize any aspect of marketing for their local level.
- ~ 37.5% of surveyed franchisors allow franchisees to use approved brand assets, campaign programs and online tools to create customized, online local marketing campaigns.
- ~ 12.5% of surveyed franchisors have not implemented brand standards; franchisees target their own local markets.
03. How would your Franchisees rate their local online presence: 4.88 (average rating between 1 & 10)
- ~ 50% of surveyed franchisors responded that their franchisees were not represented online. (1-4)
- ~ 37.5% of surveyed franchisors responded that their franchisees had some representation online. (5-7)
- ~ 12.5% of surveyed franchisors responded that their franchisees were well-represented online. (8-10)
04. How are your Franchisees represented online now:
- ~ 98.6% of surveyed franchisors give each franchisee a page on the corporate website for local clients to find.
- ~ 28.6% of surveyed franchisors give each franchisees a 2- to 5-page micro-site that we list in the ”sponsored links” section of the search engines and the Franchisees pay for each lead that comes from their micro-site.
- ~ 42.9% of surveyed franchisors said Franchisees have their own website(s), domain(s) and email marketing which complies to brand guidelines, so Google ranks them very high in their local communities.
- ~ 14.3% of surveyed franchisors responded “none of the above.”
Based on these results, franchise companies are not taking full advantage of their national market segment and corporate branding by messaging in their local communities with targeted local online marketing strategies.
