Franchise business models add unique complexities to marketing, from deciding who should own campaigns—franchisor or franchisee—to safeguarding brand consistency. Franchisors must also figure out how to efficiently disseminate creative assets and track related communications. The more locations and regions join their network, the more difficult it is to cleanly scale marketing tactics and operations.
Using marketing software to manage promotional efforts seems like an obvious choice, but which one should you choose? After all, not every tool is equally equipped to support your franchise business’s local marketing strategies.
To assist in your decision-making, we’ll examine the types of tools that can enhance your marketing tech stack and highlight specific software solutions tailored for franchise businesses.
What to Look for in Your Franchise Marketing Tools
Almost all of the marketing tools we list share commonalities that make them particularly franchise-friendly:
- Minimal onboarding or opportunities for confusion
- Particularly accommodating to multi-team dynamics
- Scalability to quickly adapt to a growing franchise network
- Different access levels based on roles
- Applicable for in-person transactions
- Hands-on integration support from the software provider
Social Graphic Tool for Franchise Marketing - Easel
Why We Chose Easel
Easel is an intuitive tool that empowers users to harness existing visual templates for creating a wide array of creative assets, including social media posts and advertisements. Its design strikes the perfect balance between fostering creativity and upholding brand controls established by administrators.
For franchisees, Easel offers pre-made brand templates and materials that can be easily customized with a simple drag-and-drop interface, ensuring that social posts remain on-brand. Additionally, the platform includes “approval” tools to implement further quality control measures, enhancing consistency across all marketing efforts.
With a variety of social-friendly templates, Easel also provides options for other creative assets, such as newsletters, printed flyers, business cards, and more, making it a versatile choice for franchise marketing needs.
General Tips for Using Social Graphic Tools For Your Franchise
To maximize your franchise’s social media impact, aim to craft localized marketing strategies that blend national messaging with regional references. Therefore, you’ll want to select a social graphic tool that provides your franchisees with the appropriate level of creative freedom.
Determine whether you want franchisees to customize posts from scratch or populate existing templates. Regardless of your choice, it’s crucial to incorporate pre-programmed brand guidelines, such as colors and fonts, to ensure consistency.
Finally, choose a social marketing platform that minimizes the need for extensive onboarding or prior knowledge of photo or video editing software. After all, your franchisees and their teams will have varying levels of experience.
Social Scheduling Tool for Franchise Marketing - Sendible
Why We Chose Sendible
Sendible is an all-in-one social management platform with features that include scheduling, content management, and analytics. Importantly, this marketing tool caters to franchise and multi-location business models with capabilities like centralized calendars, shared inboxes, formalized content approval controls, bulk campaign uploads, and customizable access levels.
For an example of how Sendible can scale for a multi-location business, check out their case study for RE/MAX.
General Tips for Using Social Scheduling Tools for Your Franchise
What’s our top piece of advice for franchisors choosing social scheduling software? Choose a marketing tool that allows for flexible analytics views—both at the company-wide level as well as at the regional or franchise-specific level. This will make it easier to refine strategies based on detailed data rather than regarding all audiences as a single entity.
If you encourage franchisees to manage their own social media presence, choose a tool that grants you visibility—and potentially approval-power—into their future posts. As a bonus, the marketing software should allow in-portal communication between franchisors and franchisees for feedback and brainstorming.
Lastly, choose software that provides consolidated inbox views, allowing the franchisor’s corporate team the option to view (and potentially handle) customer interactions.
Franchise-Friendly Tool for SMS Marketing - Voxie
Why Choose Voxie
Voxie is the only SMS marketing tool designed with franchisors in mind. Useful software capabilities include:
- Granting varying levels of software access to different users, allowing franchisors to achieve the perfect equilibrium between franchisee marketing freedom and corporate oversight
- Nurturing scalable 2-way text communication powered by Voxie’s SmartAI
- Automatic message personalization based on stored information
- Automated audience segmentation for effective targeting
- Establishing sophisticated SMS drip campaigns
- Zero-party data collection
- Designated customer success team members to assist with the account setup, tool integration, and ongoing management
We invite you to learn more about Voxie’s franchise-friendly software capabilities by clicking here.
General Tips for Using SMS Marketing Tools for Your Franchise
Take your SMS strategy from basic to advanced by finding a franchise-friendly tool that automates audience segmentation based on factors like region, purchase history, and customer engagement level. This will enable you to deliver more personalized messages, boost engagement, and drive stronger local connections across all franchise locations.
To further maximize your franchise’s SMS ROI, take full advantage of your software’s data collection and visualization. Your marketing team should regularly seek insights for questions like “What time of day will generate the highest engagement rates?” and “Are there specific regions responding better to certain promotions?”. This proactive approach, combined with data-driven tests, will help shape informed hypotheses and optimize your strategies.
For a deeper dive into SMS marketing for franchises, read our guide to creative SMS marketing ideas and our Text Message Marketing Playbook for Franchises.
Franchise-Friendly Tool for Email Marketing - MailJet
Why We Chose MailJet
Much like how Voxie is the go-to tool for SMS marketing, MailJet serves as a comprehensive email marketing platform tailored to franchise needs. For starters, MailJet offers subaccounts that are overseen by a master account, allowing franchisors to maintain brand consistency across all locations. The marketing platform also includes user-friendly drag-and-drop email templates designed to align with brand guidelines, along with customizable user settings and optional built-in controls for extra oversight.
What else do we love about this software? MailJet’s in-tool commenting feature streamlines feedback and collaboration which enables franchisors and franchisees to work together on email marketing campaigns. With advanced segmentation capabilities and automated drip campaigns, MailJet makes it simple to reach targeted audiences with the right message at the right time, maximizing engagement.
General Tips for Using Email Marketing Tools for Your Franchise
Customer segmentation and automated subscriber list management are crucial for franchise-friendly email marketing tools. These features allow franchisors to target specific audiences based on location, purchase behavior, and engagement levels.
For the greatest ROI, integrate your email marketing into a broader omnichannel strategy. By aligning email with SMS, social media, and in-store promotions, franchises can create a unified customer experience that reinforces brand messages across all touchpoints.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) Tools for Franchise Marketing - Brand Folder
Why We Chose Brand Folder
Brandfolder is a brand-management platform designed to support franchises with a centralized marketing asset library and content management tools. It streamlines creative asset sharing, allowing franchisees to modify content while staying within brand guidelines. Additional features include content-specific reporting and automated content expiration, ensuring all marketing materials stay fresh and on-brand across locations.
General Tips for Using DAM Tools for Your Franchise
Consistent usage is key. After all, a Digital Asset Management tool is only effective if it holds all necessary marketing assets. Additionally, look for software options with AI-powered tagging and search features, making it easy for franchisees to organize and quickly retrieve marketing assets when needed.
In-Store Analytics Tool for Franchise Marketing - RetailNext
Why We Chose RetailNext
RetailNext aims to be the ultimate solution for granting high-level visibility into in-store interactions beyond mere transactions. It captures insights on general foot traffic, window-display effectiveness, and customer behavior trends, empowering companies to shape and refine their in-store marketing strategies for maximum impact.
By understanding these dynamics, franchises can optimize layouts, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately drive higher sales. The tool’s ability to analyze patterns over time also allows for more informed decision-making. For example, if you want to boost your franchise’s loyalty program, you can leverage insights from RetailNext to influence where you place signs and QR codes throughout your franchise locations.
General Tips for Using In-Store Analytics Tools for Your Franchise
Choose in-store analytics tools that can consolidate data across multiple locations for a comprehensive view. Additionally, ensure the tool complies with GDPR and CCPA to protect customer privacy while gathering valuable insights.
QR Tool for Franchise Marketing - Flow Code
Why We Chose Flow Code
QR codes provide franchisees with a versatile marketing tool for boosting customer engagement and collecting valuable data across various touchpoints. Want to drive people to your loyalty program or a web page to leave a review? A QR code is the path of least resistance!
Flow Code offers several noteworthy benefits, including easy integration into your greater marketing stack and customer engagement tracking. Their software even enables dynamic QR codes that tailor the landing page based on known customer information.
General Tips for Using QR Tool Software for Your Franchise
- Leverage Diverse Applications - Embrace the many opportunities QR codes offer, such as digital menus, product information, customer surveys, promoting your branded app, and facilitating contactless payments.
- Integrate QR Codes With Your Loyalty Programs - Make QR codes one of the primary ways you promote your loyalty program within your franchisees’ locations to drive engagement and reward customer participation.
- Customize QR codes per franchise location and campaign - The resulting data will improve tracking and gather specific data insights.
Loyalty Program Tool for Franchise Marketing - Tap Mango
Why We Chose Tap Mango
Tap Mango specializes in creating and promoting loyalty programs tailored for multi-store utilization, offering a comprehensive approach that goes beyond just digital experiences. This is particularly valuable because a significant challenge in franchise marketing is linking in-person revenue to various campaigns. Tap Mango makes strides toward solving this problem by consolidating all customer interaction data into a single customer profile view, enhancing tracking capabilities.
Customers enjoy versatile options for accessing and using the loyalty program, with multiple sign-up methods available, including customer-facing tablets, onsite enrollment, and app downloads. Moreover, they can engage with the program through a branded app, promo codes, or digital punch cards.
Additional practical features include event check-in, an e-wallet for converting points to store credit, and easy-to-understand performance tracking of the loyalty program.
General Tips for Using Loyalty Program Software for Your Franchise
To make the most of your franchise’s loyalty program software, create a coordinated promotional campaign that engages customers both online and in-store, ensuring a unified brand experience. Each time a customer makes a purchase at one of your brick-and-mortar locations, they should be prompted to provide their loyalty program information, enabling you to connect their transaction to a marketing campaign they encountered.
Another helpful tip? Ensure that your loyalty program integrates seamlessly with your CRM, POS, and omnichannel systems, which streamlines operations and enhances customer data management.
Local SEO & Listing Management Tool for Franchise Marketing - Bright Local
Why We Chose Bright Local
BrightLocal is an SEO tool that automates local citation management and visibility tracking for individual locations. It caters specifically to multi-location businesses by offering varying levels of reporting depth and scalable citation management tailored for multiple sites. While there are other SEO citation tools available to franchises, BrightLocal stands out for its transparency; many alternatives have hidden, recurring fees, and if you stop paying, your franchise’s citations will disappear.
General Tips for Local SEO & Listing Management Marketing Tools for Your Franchise
While you can semi-automate citation building and listing management, local SEO still demands hands-on involvement. Google My Business (GMB) is arguably the most important citation listing for SEO and deserves careful human oversight.
Ideally, each location page on your website should feature unique content elements to enhance its effectiveness. For optimal local SEO results, consider partnering with a specialist who can provide targeted expertise.
Start Building Your Franchise Marketing Tech Stack With Voxie
Let’s face facts—no matter who your target audience may be, they’re undoubtedly on their phones day and night. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that SMS has an impressive open-rate of 98% while emails are only clicked 45% of the time. When facing fierce competition, your franchise can’t afford to miss out on leveraging this powerful communication channel.
Voxie offers an SMS solution that serves the unique operational needs of franchises while simultaneously placing industry-leading marketing solutions in the hands of users. In turn, multi-location companies can scale campaigns while developing improved customer connections.