Local Digital Marketing: Creating an exceptional customer journey

After 212 years of disruption and the adoption of automation, franchise brands are adjusting operations with a renewed appreciation for local digital marketing.
Donna Josephson says that the customer experience is the most important aspect of the brand. It’s important for brands to interact with their existing customers and attract new ones on social media. Building relationships and trust with our consumers is the core of any marketing campaign.

Meeting the changing needs of customers is one of the things this means. Consumers don’t differentiate between bricks and mortar and digital. The franchisor-franchisee partnership is more important than ever for delivering the brand promise from the first to the last mile.
According to a local marketing tech firm, franchisors use local multi-channel marketing programs to empower their frontline owners to support a consistently branded and executed customer journey.
The report states that an exceptional customer journey requires an exceptional local experience. To succeed at this requires support in the form of funds, assets, and tools so partners can drive awareness and traffic to their locations.

Localization is centralized.

Finding authentic ways to flex a customer-centered local marketing muscle at every stage of the customer journey is keeping marketing pros like Brooke Mallick, Big Blue Swim School’s CMO, on her toes and open- minded to continually test and learn. It is a busy time for the brand, which continues to open new locations across the country every month and projects over 200 pools by the end of the year.

Mallick says that local marketing has come a long way from where it was before the recession. Before she joined Big Blue, she worked for more than 6 years with the company.
Big Blue uses a centralized, data-driven approach to drive both creative and tactics for each local pool, as well as tools to manage review responses, all designed to ensure brand consistency.

Mallick says that he is laser focused on how his brand comes to life on social media. It is possible to build awareness in a new community through each interaction. It is important to show up the right way on social media since it is where we are frequently discovered.

Mallick’s marketing team can pressure test what is working and what isn’t in each individual market by using real-time data from Big Blue.

Everyone has a seat at the table so they can do what they do best. We look to our franchise partners as the experts on their community and the ones responsible for grassroots marketing and a great customer experience to drive conversion, while central marketing drives planning and execution on the vast majority of the marketing programs.

The solution is five star.

Ben Fox, head of customer experience at Five Star Franchising, says personalization and brand affinity are key to performance on any channel. Five Star has a growing portfolio of seven home service brands.

The president of ProNexis is Fox. Five Star uses ProNexis to centrally communicate through voice, text, and chat and relies on the central marketing team to manage social media across all its brands. The platform is used by many home service brands.

Digital psychology and persuasion will be useful. People are not companies. We are working on developing our brands’ human personas and portraying them. It’s important to spread that across all channels and we feel it needs a centralized approach.

Learning and testing.

Shipley Do-Nuts, with more than 330 restaurants across 10 states, is undergoing a martech transformation to support its rapid growth, which will more than double in size over the next 5 years.
Donna Josephson brings a lot of experience to the table, having worked at Corner Bakery, Fazoli’s, and McAlister’s Deli.

After more than 85 years of serving up gourmet donuts made fresh daily, Shipley is now mapping out a marketing future that will allow the company to be quick to react to change. Shipley hired its first branding agency of record, launched its first systemwide digital marketing campaign, and is updating its systems in a number of ways.
Josephson says that each program has to have a positive impact on guests, operators, and franchisors. Josephson said that they test and learn what works best for them. Sharing user-generated content is what Shipley Do-Nuts is all about, because it celebrates the ‘Do- Happy’ we bring to the community.

Constantly vigilant.

With the local marketing landscape constantly adapting to keep up with the changing demands of today’s customers, it’s becoming more challenging to remain effective across multiple channels.

“We are constantly evaluating our promotions and our business to see what is and isn’t moving the needle”

She says that in owned media, we track and A/B test different variables to ensure that the message, timing, media, and creative are well received. One of the benefits of consolidated media buying is that it allows us to see everyone’s data, setting, and measuring the same way across the system.

Correa’s team encourages all local stores to become part of the community they serve, highlight their store history and local guests on social media, and contribute charitably to their markets.
She says that all brands have access to tools and resources they may not have as a single brand or a single location: things like consolidated media buying, which drives more value for every dollar spent, and an internal creative studio.

A multi-pronged plan.

Winning brands have well balanced marketing efforts that pay close attention to search marketing, reputation management, and social media engagement.
BrightStar Care used the multi-location marketing platform from SOCi to engage with current and prospective customers. Despite a 20% increase in review volume, the franchise increased its social media posts by 75%.

Along with email marketing, BrightStar advocates for its franchise partners to take advantage of search engine and online listing platforms.
BrightStar’s VP of consumer and employer brand marketing says that successfulseo strategies improve local brand awareness and drive website conversions overall.

The journey isn’t just for customers anymore. BrightStar has made an unprecedented move to pourcountless dollars into recruitment, employee branding, and elevating our candidate journey.
Retention and recruitment are important parts of the customer journey and must be invested in by brands. Corporate entities and franchisors need to support their owners down the funnel in reaching the appropriate audiences when hiring.

It takes a lot of work.

Follow-up support and the right tools are required to adapt to constant change. Five Star relies on the brand’s marketing directors to educate, train, and coach owners.
The key metric for evaluating a location’s performance is the percentage of revenue spent on marketing. Providing owners with visibility on these metrics and results leads to the most adoption and performance.

Fox is on to a topic. Only half of local partners invested more than 1% of their revenue into marketing. The study showed that revenue growth was higher for those who did.
It is important to demonstrate the value of any spending through its return on invested capital. According to the BrandMuscle report, only 18% of brands share their data with their partners.
Five-star recently collaborated with transitiv to provide additional visibility and comparable data so that they can see what their peers are doing and drive their competitive spirit
Everyone enjoys winning. Fox says that having a clear scorecard of the key performance indicators has had an impact on growth for the brands.

He says that there is no easy way to make sure you own every step of the customer journey.
Fox said it was a grind. The hard work of capturing first-party data, customer interviews, and business owner interviews help us understand the customer. Top-level performance can be achieved with customer journey mapping and in-depth personas development. The team in-house has been invested in to understand and execute on every path of the customer experience because we feel that no one is going to know our customer better than we do.

Stay on top of what’s happening.

Local social strategies and nurture and conversion email campaigns are part of Big Blue Swim School’s integrated messaging toolkit.

Where franchise partners want more out of their marketing plan, we give it to them through the latest digital offerings, such asgeofencing and additional social media platforms. We are always running with a proven tactic or piece of creative. You have to be open minded and curious and be ready to leverage whatever is happening without giving up on what you know works. Staying true to our brand creative and messaging makes it easy to shift an element that is working on one platform into another. We have had some of our best social media creative lifted from our most successful email campaigns.

Brooke Mallick is the chief marketing officer of Big Blue Swim School.

The best tools and practices.

BrightStar Care depends on social media for customer retention and acquisition. Franchisees can use email templates to amplify their marketing impact and drive local results by more efficiently communicating with inquiries, customers, referral sources, and employees.

The most effective social platform for our franchisees has been provided by our local team, which includes tools, best practices, and guidance to recommended social platforms. We provide them with a library of social creative/ads to use as part of their local social strategies, as well as assistance with responding to online reviews, which is time-Consuming and Critical to building a positive online reputation. We publish national social content and ads on a national level. The posts are automatically published to the franchisee’s local Facebook page.

Teresa is the VP of consumer and employer brand marketing.

Both centralized and local are present.

The centralized control for Five Star’s seven home service brands has been created with the help of the platform. As new brands join the fold, the franchisor is evaluating additional tools to fill in the gaps as they use Hubspot andWordPress.

It is important to present to the consumer a unified and consistent brand experience but with a local feel. We have had great success with follow and share for our local community content and individual group memberships. We work closely with franchise owners to educate them on grassroots efforts to get in front of their target audience, even though our centralized approach is important for consistency with the brand. One franchise owner in Mosquito Shield doubled their new account growth when they joined a large Facebook group in their market area, because it was the only lead source they could get.

Ben Fox is the head of customer experience.

The board has all the channels on it.

As the rapidly growing legacy brand undergoes a tech-driven makeover, including a new website, a unified, systemwide POS system, online ordering, third-party delivery, and the brand’s first systemwide digital marketing campaign, the local marketing strategy continues to evolve. If they don’t want to run their own pages, franchisors can take advantage of monthly content at the local level and a platform to connect local Facebook pages to the national content.
We use all of our channels for brand awareness and to bring the ‘World’s Greatest Do-Nut’ to consumers through images and videos on their phones. We analyzed how and what we communicate to each of our audiences on the various platforms and recently have taken a different approach toTwitter The language we use was changed to be more fun. The focus for our brand is still on Facebook andInstagram. The visual parts of Shipley can be brought to life using these platforms. Videos and reels help us get this. We have added more visual content on all platforms. TikTok is a growing and popular social media channel. We will be watching to see how we can use it. We are in the early stages of partnering with people in the local market. We are looking for visual user-generated content that we can share on our brand pages.

Donna Josephson is the chief marketing officer of Shipley Do-nuts.

There are templates with flexibility.

With a growing portfolio of family-focused brands like Urban Air and The Little Gym, Unleashed Brands offers the power of a large national brand with lots of synergy to make the business easier and more successful for its local franchisees.

There are brand standards for each brand. To make sure brands use them consistently, we build out a robust set of templates they can modify. In a controlled environment we can ensure brand and creative consistency. We give them a national calendar as well. There are some key full participation promotions, but outside of that, franchisee are free to run any promotions they want from an approved set, and we provide creativity for those promotions. We have a system of compliance management that we use to remind people that we are more powerful when we deliver a consistent product.

Jessica Correa is the chief marketing officer of Unleashed brands.