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How martech is revolutionising franchise local marketing

Want to reduce the time it takes for your franchisees to activate brand-wide campaigns from several weeks to less than a day? With the right martech you can, says Storyteq Chief Strategy Officer John Kirk.

Over the past 10 years, my teams and I have carried out in-depth audits of the marketing operations of hundreds of global brands. And while we encounter the same problems time and again, what I find truly exciting is that the martech solutions we deliver today are so much more advanced than those we delivered just a few years ago.

It’s no exaggeration to say that martech is undergoing a revolution. Not long ago, we were happy to introduce technology that halved the time from global campaign masters being created to local teams executing those campaigns. We could do this while reducing costs and increasing visibility of global activity.

Today, instead of reducing global campaign execution from, say, 30 days to less than 15 days, as we did for global brands such as Haleon and Heineken, we can now offer them 15-second, multichannel, campaign-asset creation and rapid-channel distribution by giving local marketers and franchisees personalised portals to create fully customised, multichannel marketing and advertising assets.

This has been driven by the increasing sophistication of content automation – something that will continue to take massive strides as generative AI comes of age.

Distributed marketing

Large brands with often thousands of franchises have always faced the same dilemma: do I manage the marketing centrally to optimise efficiency and brand integrity? Or do I leave franchisees to their own marketing and advertising, leveraging their local knowledge, but risking poor marketing skills and a cavalier attitude to brand integrity?

The approach I usually recommend is distributed marketing – a middle route where central marketers create branding, guidelines and masters­, while franchisees brief locally relevant customisations to these master assets.

Distributed marketing leverages franchisees’ knowledge of their local areas, while keeping all assets on-brand and on-message across all channels and regions. The downside is that it can prove painfully time-consuming.

How it works

Central marketers create multi-language campaigns, guidelines and master templates and send them to every franchise. Local marketers then review the documents and brief in their requirements to the central team.

One of the key issues I often encounter is that workflow methods are extremely inconsistent. There can be multiple briefing platforms, while some franchises rely on email and even verbal briefing and approvals.

Central teams spend vast amounts of time on tedious admin and checking that briefs conform to guidelines (they often don’t). Audit trails are frequently non-existent, which makes it difficult to assess what is working and what isn’t.

Poor briefing means local briefs and proofs go back and forth several times before they’re approved. It’s easy to see how it can take a month from sending out the masters to execution in the market.

Workflow technology

The first stage in solving the problem is to introduce consistent processes and technology – a good Marketing Work Management (MWM) platform that delivers consistent briefing and approvals, unifies global processes across all franchisees, and provides an audit trail of all asset production and usage.

We would typically link an MWM platform to a DAM for access to assets, interactive brand guidelines and playbooks. We can also hook up resource scheduling software to deliver content adaptation efficiencies.

Content automation

While MWM technology delivers huge cost and time savings, it won’t deliver the same-day campaign execution enterprises are clamouring for to meet the demands of ‘always on’ channels and customers.

For that, you need full content automation, and this is where the real revolution has taken place.

My company, like others, has been developing self-serve customisable templates for over a decade, but the early templates were somewhat rudimentary compared with what we can do today. They were largely aimed at print channels and offered limited customisation.

Today, our templates are no longer limited to static content. They offer multi-layered video and animation, multiple channels from a single template, and huge scalability. With video templates, it is simple to create multiple ‘edits’ and change individual elements within the video, without having to go back to the editing suite. This is especially useful given the increasing popularity of video ads and content.

Launchpads

We have been providing local marketing portals to hospitality brands and automotive franchises such as VW Group, Renault, Kia, BMW and Rolls Royce for over a decade.

The difference is the level of automation available now. Pretty much everything can be done through the portal (what we call our ‘Launchpads’). This vastly reduces the size (and expense) of the teams traditionally required to support franchisees.

The idea is to make advanced marketing accessible to all franchisees – to give them an agency in their pocket.

In Europe, Launchpads have revolutionised KFC franchises’ ability to create and run effective local marketing campaigns, despite many franchisees having little marketing experience.

Launchpads are built around a familiar e-commerce-style experience, with downloads available via shopping carts. Flexible dynamic templates enable franchises to create bespoke artwork at the click of a button, using a rules-based system that ensures all content remains on brand.

Local marketers don’t have to customise each individual channel asset. They can tell the system which channels they want to include in their campaign, choose design and messaging parameters, then instruct the portal to create the assets.

Managers can request support through the portal with multiple campaign types, such as ‘local awareness’ or ‘restaurant opening’, and immediately access assets and activity suggestions.

Launchpads can also manage ordering, co-funding and bespoke asset briefing. With the right integrations, they can also distribute instantly created assets directly to channel.

This results in faster, more reactive, campaign activation, the ability to increase the number of assets across all channels without increasing production costs, and a much-reduced requirement for local marketing teams. It also provides central teams with real-time visibility of all activity.

John Kirk is Chief Strategy Officer at Storyteq. He is also a senior visiting fellow and lecturer in Strategic and Advanced Strategic Management, guiding postgraduates and executives through their MBAs.