New franchisees can often be fearful of one key element of running a business – the marketing – and choose to invest in a franchise for the advice and guidance available. Here’s five reasons why you should never undervalue your marketing.

1. Marketing is more than advertising

What is marketing? According to the University of Sydney, “Marketing creates value for customers, organisations and society by understanding market needs and aligning what companies offer based on market insights”.

This makes it a crucial tool to running a successful business, and it crosses advertising, branding, customer communications. The goal is increased revenue, whether through a direct message or as a by-product of improved brand awareness. First-class marketing appears seamless and integral to the brand.

2. Marketing is a science

Business owners need to apply market knowledge to their customer interactions, and in a data-driven world this is easier than it has ever been. Testing what works is an important step to fine-tuning the processes that a business uses to garner information and increase revenue, whether that’s achieved through more customers or a bigger spend among existing customers.

Data is crucial to successful marketing and any go-ahead franchise will be creating or adopting tools to give franchisees insights into customer behaviours, product preferences, sales trends …

3. Marketing is measurable

It’s vital that any marketing initiatives are not just fully implemented; effectiveness in driving business also needs to be measured and analysed. An ineffective campaign is simply a waste of money.

Trials to test what works are valuable, as mentioned, but franchisees need to know when to pull out of a program that isn’t bringing in results so funds can be reassigned.

Some campaigns with a call to action are easy to evaluate, while some with more subliminal branding messages are more difficult to monitor so it’s important to learn what can be achieved with different tools and channels, and which suits the type of promotion or campaign you are running.

4. Marketing starts before your business opens

When you open the doors to your new franchise operation who will be your customers? Getting the word out about a change of ownership or a brand new business in the neighbourhood is an important part of building up a customer base. And it starts early with, if appropriate, pre-sales marketing. It sounds complicated but it’s just about communicating your new business to potential customers to give yourself the best start.

5. Marketing back-up

Marketing is crucial for any business, and with a franchise some of the hard work is already done through head office. Many franchisors will employ a marketing department to create branded campaigns to promote the business nationally, and franchisees can tap into this expertise to promote their own businesses on a local level.

Good franchise systems will also be applying technology to ensure there is plenty of data to help drive marketing and product or service growth.

With a franchise marketing team on hand, and franchisees who have tried and tested different methods of marketing willing to share their knowledge, a new franchisee can gain the upper hand when it comes to building a new business.