Speak to any franchisor who is the founder of the franchise and they can tell you story after story of how many times they have run their business on the smell of an oily rag.  The number of times they have had to get totally scrappy and pull things together, work all hours of the day and night to pull something off because they had to do the work because they couldn’t afford to pay someone or they have maxed out their personal credit cards…. More than once…

If you are a franchisor who remembers what life was like when you had very little ‘spare’ money or cashflow, I bet you learnt a thing or two about how to make a dollar invested give you plenty of dollars in return.

Make your marketing dollars go further

Why am I saying this?

Well, I’ve seen many franchisors end up with very healthy national marketing funds and even though you probably have a franchisee committee to help you decide how to use that money, sometimes the question that is NOT asked is actually the most important.  What is that question?

Is this the best use of this money?

Let me tell you a story….

I know of a franchise group that spent nearly a million dollars on a TV campaign.  They had the money in the fund and you have to admit, TV is pretty sexy.  But, was this the best use of this money?  Even though they had the money, was it the best use?

Well the simple answer is no.

They run the TV campaign and I won’t give you the stats, but let’s say it failed….. they brought in about $200,000 of business from that one million dollar investment.

Return on investment

When they told me about it, I sort of didn’t want to rain on their parade because it was already a wash out, but I simply asked, why did they choose TV?

Now my suggestion (after a bit of chatting first as I didn’t want to rub their nose it) was to hire a professional video company to do up 20 or 30 short videos.  Ads, education, promos, fun, testimonials – so many choices.  Even if they spent $2,000 to $3,000 per video that would be no more than $100,000 (and that would be way expensive right?).

Then use all those little videos on social media.  Use some marketing dollars to promote them or use them as social media advertising rather than just posting them. Franchisees could play them in their stores, people would share them, franchisees could post on their own social media pages.

Even if they hired someone full time to just run those videos, make social media ads and use targeting to get in front of their ideal client… who by the way was far more likely to be on social media than watching the morning TV shows where they put their TV ads… how much business could that have generated with LESS investment upfront – even if they did it the most expensive way!

It is so easy as a franchise gets bigger to have a large national marketing fund so the first thing everyone wants to do is spend it.  I joked with the above story that they would have been better off just giving every franchisee $20,000 than spending any of it on TV.

Local area marketing

If you have a great strategy, but it is a local area marketing strategy rather than a national one, then run a national local area marketing campaign!

Remember what it is like when you have no or little money to put into marketing and how creative you get.  Just because you have the money to spend, don’t lose that thrifty, creative marketing brain because maybe, just maybe, that strategy will trump the million dollar spend strategy.

Marketing – return on investment.  That’s all I have to say.

This article first appeared as a blog on www.traceyleak.com.