As CEO, Alex Porter oversees the strategic direction for Location3 clients and the agency as a whole.
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Developing strategic marketing plans can often be complex endeavors for any business, regardless of industry or category. Multi-unit brands and franchise systems face additional challenges when it comes to creating scalable, efficient marketing programs that focus on increasing unit-level revenue for their respective business owners.
In balancing national strategies with localized tactics in order to achieve key business goals, multi-unit brands are often faced with a common strategic decision-making process: build it, buy it or partner with someone. This strategic planning framework is well-known in the ad tech space, regularly leveraged by software engineers and developers. Let’s examine how this framework can be applied to multi-unit marketing in a practical way to help you achieve your goals.
Your Brand Website and Business Location Pages
Your website and the respective business location pages integrated within are a digital window into your business. They showcase your services and products, your value proposition, your company culture and more. They also give you the opportunity to collect incredibly rich data sets about your target audience and prospective customers that visit your site — where they came from, what content they engaged with, whether they took a desired action or left without doing so, and more.
The second point here is key. A lack of ownership over your website and digital properties may create a lack of ownership in the data itself. Outsourcing your website management and/or hosting to a third-party will likely put you in the precarious position of losing valuable historical data about your customer base should that relationship end. If you partner with a third-party to design and develop a new website, triple-check that all assets and hosting will be under your control and administration as part of the contract, and make sure you have at least a few in-house resources to manage ongoing site maintenance.
Our Recommendation: Build it first. If you buy, make sure you actually own the complete solution.
Content Development and Social Media Management
The digital content you create is an extension of your brand and your value proposition. Social media allows you a wide variety of channel options to both create and further distribute your content to your audience in a unique way. Generally, there are few people who understand your brand more — at its core — than those who live and breathe the business every day, whether they be a corporate team member or a franchisee on the front lines engaging directly with customers.
While there are myriad tools and technology platforms that can help you distribute content at scale and engage 1-to-1 with local customers online, one of the biggest factors in determining the success of a content strategy is authenticity. Creating branded content in-house and empowering franchisees to interact personally with customers on channels like Facebook creates a level of authenticity that is often hard to replicate. That said, there are instances in which buying tools to help achieve scale or hiring partners to consult on creative or social media best practices can absolutely be effective for your business.
Our Recommendation: Build it first. Buy/partner to increase scale and efficiency where necessary.
Media Buying and Advertising
While you know your brand and your target audience better than anyone, reaching them in a complex and ever-evolving media buying environment may require the help of a proven performance marketing partner. Finding the right partner for your business isn’t always easy. Here are some questions that you should consider asking during your search:
• Do they have cross-channel expertise (connected TV, search, social, video, programmatic)?
• Can they unify unique data sets like CRM or POS data and integrate that into media tactics?
• How are placements decided upon, and what does audience targeting look like?
• How do they optimize ongoing campaigns and buys?
• How do they track and measure performance? What KPI data will you receive?
• Are they transparent with costs and fees?
• Will you own the accounts?
It is critical to maintain complete transparency and accountability on behalf of any media buying partner, and that mutual understanding should also account for franchisee-funded local campaigns. Make sure your partner can also demonstrate value to your franchisees and show them what they’re getting in return for their own ad spend. Whether it’s an eight-figure national buy or a franchisee campaign with a $500 monthly budget, be sure that clear benchmarks and goals have been established in advance.
Our Recommendation: Partner with someone but vet them properly.
Data Analytics and Business Intelligence
The ability to make sense of complex data sets across owned, earned and paid media channels is a key aspect of any successful, integrated marketing strategy. It’s one thing to have access to all of that data, but making sense of it in a way that informs overall business decisions is another. Having a full team of data analysts in-house is beneficial, but there may be some limitations that arise due to a lack of expertise across all channels being leveraged for marketing and sales.
This is where an agency or partner can step in and help you make better sense of your own data (i.e., website, CRM data) while also incorporating channel experts who are certified in tools and platforms like Google Analytics, Search Ads 360, Facebook Business Manager, call-tracking providers, reporting dashboards like Data Studio and Tableau, and more. You likely have more data points at your disposal than you even realize, and having a solid team of data experts on hand will help you exceed your goals for marketing and outpace your competition.
Our Recommendation: Buy the necessary tools and partner with experts who know them best.
In Summary
Virtually every business in America has undergone at least a few big changes as a result of the events of the past six months. As we go forward, leveraging the “build, buy or partner” framework can help your brand better develop effective road maps for the back half of this year and 2021 and set you on a path to exceeding your goals.
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Author: Alex Porter, Forbes Councils Member
