HOW TO MEASURE YOUR MARKETING

While marketing is a partnership between franchisor and franchisee, there’s plenty you can do to get the most out of any campaign and increase your chances of success.

Learn the crucial indicators that help your campaigns succeed

Marketing makes up an essential component of any business. Get it right, and you’ll have a strong brand compared to your competitors and an ongoing stream of customer enquiries. Get it wrong, and you’ll be scratching your head wondering why the phone isn’t ringing.

When it comes to the franchise sector, marketing is a partnership between the franchisor and the franchisee. Both parties have a key part to play. In most franchise systems, franchisees contribute a percentage of their turnover to what’s called the national marketing fund. Every single franchisee in the network will benefit from this fund.

For the most part, this fund is invested

in national campaigns the franchisor will decide such as T V, radio, national promotions or digital campaigns. Franchise partners are also expected to develop their own marketing plans and programs within their selected territories and this commonly is known as LAM or local area marketing. Local area marketing is essential to the growth and success of the franchisee within their community and aids in building brand awareness, developing relationships and creating leads that will ultimately result in sales.

Successful marketing in any industry or segment comes down to understanding your target market, defining your objective, planning and consistency.

A question commonly asked is, can marketing campaigns be measured? The answer is yes, they can. The best ways to evaluate the success of a marketing campaign can be explained as follows.

WHAT ARE THE CRUCIAL

MEASUREMENTS?

Have a clear objective! What is the purpose of your campaign? Is it to create brand awareness? To generate leads? To increase sales? A defined objective and purpose allows you to be clear in what you’re trying to achieve and gives you something to refer back to.

What’s your budget? Set aside a reasonable amount for the marketing campaign and try to stick to it. The budget for local area marketing campaigns is from your own investment, not from the national marketing fund.

Always have a multi-channel approach. So don’t rely on one channel to do all the work for you. For example, if you’re trying to increase brand awareness within the local community, investing all your campaign budget on Facebook campaigns is probably not going to get the results you’re after. Investing in a combination of Facebook ads, print and a community driven initiative would be a better way to approach the campaign.

WHAT SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES ARE

REQUIRED?

Being part of a franchise network means franchise partners benefit from existing brand assets, programs, systems and marketing collateral. They can use these assets to set up their individual campaigns. It’s most likely other existing franchise partners would have tried to do a similar marketing campaign to you, so use the support around you to help and guide you in your planning. Never suffer in silence!

Follow this helpful five-step planning process to avoid a marketing crisis.

1. Concept. What’s the objective of the campaign? How and why is this campaign going to benefit you and your business?

2. Education. How are you going to educate your customers and prospects on this campaign? This stage is your planning framework, keeping it aligned to the campaign objectives and marketing channels to execute the campaign as effectively as possible. This stage takes time and thought.

3. Implement. It’s time to launch! Always stay on top of the campaign, making tweaks if required and if possible.

4. Evaluate. This is really important, even if the results exceeded your expectations. Feedback is critical in small business and this is your chance to understand how you can improve for next time.

5. Leverage. Take advantage of your results (more on this below).

WILL THE FRANCHISOR HELP YOU?

Yes, absolutely. It’s in their best interests for you to do well, so they will help support a campaign and work with partners in idea generation. This also extends to a financial investment if the franchise partners are seeking a financial contribution and the idea is good enough for the franchisor to support.

TIMING

It’s a broad generalisation but most marketing campaigns have a life cycle of six to eight weeks. Regardless, you need to give your campaign enough time in the marketing process to be seen, experienced and to get in front of your customers or prospects.

In the marketing world, there is a well-known concept called “the rule of seven” meaning prospects need to hear your campaign at least seven times before they take action to buy your product or service. However, in this current era of thousands of marketing messages slapping us in the face every day, I’m sure that seven is more like 20! Despite that, this concept provides context around the importance of campaign consistency and timing.

FINALLY, WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE

RESULTS?

Firstly, go back to the objective. Did you achieve your goal? Depending on the objective, the results usually look like content, customer leads, customer data, phone enquires or sales.

Leveraging and repurposing these results can include a variety of things such as:

CONTENT: If your business was featured in local press, social media or other channels you can repurpose this by sharing it within your local database, instore, digitally or through your own social networking. This gives your business credibility. These days content is king so share, share and share some more! Most of the time you can repurpose this content into a Facebook ad campaign.

CUSTOMER LEADS: Call/follow up these leads ideally within 24 to 48 hours. Include their details in your sales funnel and use to remarket. Always keep in mind that a prospect does not turn into a paid customer straight away. Think of every lead as a way to build new relationships – these always take time and consistency.

PHONE ENQUIRIES: These offer a perfect opportunity to talk to your customers and get to know them.

SALES: Nothing beats the feeling of closing a sale. Ensure you provide your customers with the best customer experience so they become return customers.

Didn’t get the results you expected from your marketing campaign? Don’t worry. Find out why the campaign didn’t work through your evaluation and feedback process and go again. Most importantly, never give up.

Kelly Nikolakopoulos is director of marketing at Sport Star Academy franchise. Kelly is one of the Top 30 Franchise Executives for 2019.