Because franchise advertising packages are available in so many various styles, selecting one might be difficult. From conventional to digital marketing, free to paid promotions, and franchisor or franchisee marketing—how do you know where to begin or which program is appropriate for your needs?

The good news is that choose amongst the several franchise advertising packages available isn’t as difficult as it may seem. It all boils down to two factors:

Do you work as a franchisor or a franchisee?
Who are your advertising campaigns aimed at?
Picking the correct advertising programs becomes easy after you’ve answered these questions.

Marketing between franchisors and franchisees
Franchise marketers encounter a number of distinct marketing obstacles. Among the most frequent are:

Keeping a consistent brand identity
Franchisee empowerment
Keeping control at the corporate and franchisee levels
When deciding between franchise advertising packages that address these issues (and others), ask yourself: Are you marketing as the franchisor or the franchisee?

It may not seem to be a big deal, but it is. You may pursue several various marketing tactics depending on which category you fit into.

Franchising marketing
If you’re working at the franchisor level to build franchise advertising strategies, the good news is that your efforts will be put to good use across all of your locations. When done appropriately, this helps to alleviate many of the issues stated before.

If you’re just getting started with your franchise marketing strategy, bear in mind that at this stage, your marketing plan will incorporate a variety of advertising campaigns. These initiatives will be used by franchisees to ensure brand consistency. You should think about the following programs:

Marketing using digital/social media
Email promotion
Traditional advertising
Content promotion
These are some legitimate franchise advertising packages worth considering that will benefit franchisees.

As a franchisee, you will market
If your job is to develop franchisee promotional plans, you’re already ahead of the game, whether you recognize it or not. As previously stated, personnel in charge of marketing at the franchisor level are in responsible of creating advertising programs and campaigns that franchisees employ to maintain brand consistency. What’s fantastic about marketing at the franchisee level is that you can start to tailor these concepts to your specific market.

As a franchisee, you target members of your local audience. This implies you may concentrate on a much narrower section while worrying less about appealing to the majority. All you need to know is who your intended audience members are.

Marketers at the franchisor level are familiar with the broad target audience. At that level, the following factors are taken into account:

Age group
Gender
Individual preferences
You’ll become a bit more specific when it comes to knowing about your franchisee’s intended audience member. At this level, factors such as:

Geolocation
Income ranges
Job descriptions
Culture
Consider this: franchisees must know their consumers on a more intimate level since they are in charge of direct interaction.

Knowing the difference between franchisor and franchisee marketing is a great place to start, particularly when deciding between several promotional plans (and how in-depth you should be going with them).

The alternatives for franchise advertising programs are the same regardless of the level you’re marketing for. They just need to be changed to match your marketing objectives. Having said that, here are four franchise advertising initiatives to consider.

1. Electronic mail marketing
   Email marketing is one of the most important advertising programs accessible to marketers, in case you haven’t heard. This is particularly true if you want to save costs on your advertising budget.

Email marketing has the best ROI of any marketing channel accessible to you. Marketers receive an average ROI of $38 for every dollar invested.

Email marketing is ideal for franchise advertising initiatives since it adds little to no expense (depending on the software you work with). Some businesses provide free email generation and delivery, while others charge a fee but provide additional benefits like as analytics, insights, and more.

Email marketing is great because of its versatility—not just for disseminating franchise news, but also for getting to know your consumers on a more personal basis. Pizza Hut, for example, sends out highly tailored emails to its consumers in the form of birthday emails.

2. Marketing using social media
   Social media marketing has swiftly acquired popularity among marketers, particularly those in the small company sector. When our partners at Campaign Monitor asked their small company users where they saw the greatest potential for not just expanding brand awareness but also obtaining new consumers, social media marketing received the overwhelming answer.

Why? Because individuals spend a significant amount of their free time on social media—an average of 136 minutes every day.

Olive Garden, a prominent restaurant business, is active on various social media platforms. Indeed, in this example from their Facebook page, they employ targeted marketing to promote the opening of a new facility in the Minnetonka, Minnesota, region. This is a great example of focused franchisee marketing at work.

3. Referral and customer loyalty programs
   Who doesn’t appreciate freebies? Or even special promotions? Customer loyalty and referral programs are excellent ways to attract new consumers when building franchise advertising initiatives (and their friends and family).

Loyalty programs are beneficial because they encourage existing consumers to stay with a business. And referral schemes encourage your existing customers to urge their friends and family to join them, even if just for a limited time.

These programs provide customers extra benefits that motivate them to return for more. One free coffee provides them a taste of what you have to offer, and if they like it, they’ll come back for more. When you provide people the option to promote your goods with their friends and family (and reward them for doing so), you are encouraging them to conduct your promotion for you.

A well-known apparel subscription service Stitch Fix does an excellent job of encouraging existing customers to promote their friends by offering a simple social sharing option.

4. Content promotion
   Material marketing is the process of distributing relevant content to your audience members in order to keep them engaged with your business. While most of this material will be promotional in nature, it is critical that you add non-promotional information on a regular basis.

Take the Marriott franchise as an example. They not only supply the reader with relevant travel deals in their email content, but they also provide travel news that they believe the reader would find useful.

What’s important to remember is that having unique content to offer is fantastic—but many franchisees don’t have that kind of stuff on hand. Consider providing relevant, handpicked material with your customers instead. This demonstrates to them that you’re in it for more than just a sale and helps you establish authority in your chosen sector.

Finish up
We’ve discussed numerous franchise advertising schemes worth considering. It’s now up to you to decide which is ideal for your franchise. Don’t know how? Here are some things to think about:

How much money do you plan to spend on advertising overall?
Who is your intended audience?
Do you meet your audience where they are?