How to Select a Franchise Marketing Agency

Getting noticed can be both easy and challenging for businesses. With technological advances utilizing more of the internet, a business owner has to be vigilant in taking the right steps to ensure that their business is noticed. With numerous other businesses competing for customers’ attention, marketing can quickly become a nightmare for the unfocused business owner. A franchise marketing agency can be the solution to circumnavigate such problems.

What is a Franchise Marketing Agency?

The franchise business model can be a little more complicated than running a regular business. A franchise involves expanding an existing business by selling the rights to run the same type of business to different individuals. For example, a restaurant can sell the right to open other restaurants under its brand name to an entrepreneur wishing to venture into this line of business. 

A franchise marketing agency helps franchise owners to expand their business by utilizing both traditional and digital advertising methods. A brand is crucial to the success of any franchise. To ensure a strong and positive brand image, franchise owners are always looking for ways to bolster worries of anything that could hurt their brand, and hence, their bottom line in the long run. This is where a franchise marketing agency comes in. It helps to craft effective marketing campaigns aimed at building and expanding a franchise’s brand awareness, both among existing customers and potential franchisees.

Choosing a Franchise Marketing Agency

Unlike a regular business, a franchisee needs a more focused marketing plan. This is achieved through an in-depth analysis of all the critical factors that will contribute to growth. This requires a more delicate touch than for an average business.

A franchise marketing agency provides this delicate touch by creating a solid marketing plan using social media platforms and other marketing strategies to ensure that there’s increased awareness of the franchise. When choosing one, follow these guidelines:

1)Assess Your Needs and Targets

Knowing your franchise inside out and your objectives makes it easier to choose a franchise marketing agency that can better help you accomplish those goals. For example, you need to ask yourself if you need to expand into a new market or simply triple your sales figures. Maybe you want a complete overhaul of your brand image. Such questions, when answered honestly, will better guide you on how to choose the best franchise marketing agency for your franchise. For example, your team may be adept at utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) but may be found wanting in other marketing areas like social media marketing. In such a scenario, choosing a franchise marketing agency with a reputation for crafting superb social media marketing campaigns will better serve your franchise’s purposes.

2) Find a Franchise Marketing Agency That Understands Your Needs

It’s not enough to know that a particular agency is good at marketing campaigns. You need to ensure that they can meet your defined franchise needs and goals. For instance, you may need to expand into a new geographical area. In such a case, it makes sense to look for marketing agencies in that area. If they’re specialized in the kind of services you seek, they’ll be better suited to handle your marketing campaigns. This is because they’ll be more familiar with things like franchise laws there as well as collective or individual franchise marketing techniques.

Once you’ve determined if such an agency has the basics that you’re looking for, it’s time to dig deeper. Look into the company’s online reputation and what former clients are saying. Don’t only focus on positive reviews. Negative ones can provide useful information too. If possible, ask for a portfolio of their work with former clients. These, and several other things, should be part of your thorough research before choosing any franchise marketing agency.

3) Send a Request For Proposal

This is a document that outlines your business goals and how a franchise marketing agency can help achieve them. After compiling a shortlist of your ideal agencies, the idea is to request a proposal (RFP) document to elicit bids from the different contenders. For example, you can send an SEO or digital marketing RFP to the potential bidders that you think would fit your business goals best.

Along with the RFP, you can also send an assignment for them to perform. This helps you gauge their creativity and the prospect of working together. The assignment could be the preparation of an audit report about your franchise’s business strategies and ways to improve it or something similar.

4) Assess Their Assignments

Once all the potential bidders have completed your assignment, it’s time to assess each of them. You need to have criteria for rating them. Such criteria should have your aims and business goals as their main theme. For example, you can assess how quickly and effectively they executed a marketing campaign or how coordinated their team effort was.

Ultimately, you want to ensure that your search for the right franchise marketing agency is always filtered through the lenses of you