Franchising Spotlight: Local Area Marketing with sister company Orange Canvas
Joe Papadatos, Managing Director
One of the many challenges for franchisors is leading the marketing efforts of their franchisees. Franchisors want to help grow their franchisees’ businesses, but local area marketing can pose many challenges that non-franchised businesses just don’t encounter.
After all, franchisors need to ensure that a group of individual business owners adhere to a marketing plan that is bigger and broader than any individual franchisee who is a part of it.
Marketing can become a strain on the marketing manager in the franchisor’s head office when every enthusiastic franchisee has their own ideas that they believe will be most effective for their local area. But if the marketing manager tries to support all of these varying, individual marketing activities, it often becomes detrimental to the overall marketing plan for the brand.
“Australia’s 1,300 franchised businesses include more than 98,000 individual franchised outlets and employ nearly 600,000 people.”
Indeed, it can even be harmful when multiple people can control the voice and patterns of a brand, as can be the case in franchised businesses. It can tarnish the consistency of the brand and be detrimental to the strength of the overall brand in the market.
The significance of franchising in Australia
It’s important to acknowledge the significant contribution that franchised businesses make to the Australian economy. Compared to similar Western countries, Australia has a higher-than-average percentage of franchised businesses.
The Franchise Council of Australia notes that there are more than 1,300 franchise networks in Australia. Collectively, Australia’s 1,300 franchised businesses include more than 98,000 individual franchised outlets and employ nearly 600,000 people.
Launching a local area marketing support system for franchised businesses
The only way to grow a franchised brand and gain momentum is to precisely replicate the business model and marketing strategy across all territories, regardless of location or size. This is a challenge that all franchisors and their head office marketing manager need to overcome.
The difficulties of achieving brand consistency in local area marketing led Icon to launch its sister brand, Orange Canvas, in 2016. Orange Canvas offers bespoke, strategically designed solutions that support franchised businesses with modernised and strategic local area marketing systems that promote brand and marketing consistency.
“We have built a simple solution that allows franchisors to set their brand free safely.”
Our centralised online marketing hub ensures that both the brand and franchisees are receiving the marketing support they need. Orange Canvas offers a unique blend of marketing solutions that collectively deliver a simple
local area marketing brand management solution.
What we’ve learned from working with franchised businesses
Here are five key things we’ve learnt from working with franchised businesses through Australia over the last five years.
Be consistent
The key to successful local area marketing is making sure your messaging is consistent and memorable. Brand and marketing consistency helps build awareness, allowing customers to easily and immediately recognise your brand.
Provide clear guidelines & instructions
To control the consistency, franchisors need to set strong guidelines for the use of their logo, brand, and other marketing materials, and provide clear instructions for its use. This can be done via a digital system, saving time and providing checks and balances.
Help them tell your story and theirs
There are plenty of opportunities for franchisees to market their individual business, and in turn your overall franchise brand. This could include business milestones like anniversaries, sales promotion activity such as an annual clearance sale, or seasonal events such as the start of spring.
Make it scalable
The local area marketing strategy should include a baseline program provided by the franchisor that is compulsory for each franchise holder. This can be controlled by an efficient online system and then scaled up as required.
Measure & report results
The results of your marketing activities must be measured. Digital systems allow for much stronger reporting on marketing activities than what was available in the pre-internet era. As a franchisor, you should look for a system that can provide regular reports on your entire network’s marketing initiatives and their effectiveness.
Partnering with franchisors and their marketing managers
Orange Canvas products and services were specifically designed to make life easier for marketing managers at the franchisor’s head office. Our systems help franchise marketing managers to better support the franchisor and their franchisees by plugging directly into their marketing plan, alleviating the time and cost of local area marketing activities.
Today, Orange Canvas is a leading supporter of Australian franchised businesses. We have built a simple solution that allows franchisors to set their brand free safely to their network. We take care of sourcing, production, logistics, warehousing, and distribution of marketing tools to your network.
Visit orangecanvas.com.au to find out more about how Orange Canvas works with franchised businesses.
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