Brand + Performance = Exponential Results
Two factors typically drive the marketing success of a franchise brand: lead generation and brand awareness. However, in the age of digital marketing, many established franchisors have been isolating their performance marketing from their brand marketing. This is a big mistake — one that dilutes the impact of marketing investments, and often puts them competitively behind.
For your franchise brand to thrive, brand and performance must work together. Or you may miss opportunities for real-time optimization and full campaign accountability, leaving you with less-than-optimal results.
Here is how you can avoid this mistake.
Brand vs. Performance
Performance marketing is about reaching the right people at the right time and achieving a sales conversion. Brand marketing is about generating awareness of your value proposition and encouraging consideration.
Most awareness marketing campaigns feature top-of-the-funnel strategies. The idea is to make consumers familiar with the brand whether they have an immediate need/want for the product or not. This is a costly bet, since prospects might not be ready to buy, and are more likely to tune out your marketing.
With brand and performance blended however, marketing is focused at the bottom of the funnel, where consumers are already looking for solutions and most likely to consider your brand.
Make Sure your Brand Strategy Is Clearly Established
You’ll need to start with a relevant brand strategy. Your brand + performance strategy is built on your brand’s position, audience, and value proposition. These need to be defined and/or built before choosing strategies for consideration and conversion.
Check for Leaks in the Funnel
Every marketing funnel needs to be solid. An effective strategy quickly turns ineffective when leads fall through holes in your marketing funnel. Holes are anything that causes prospects to abandon their journey with you. They can range from a lack of sales training for your franchisees, a complicated process on your website, or a confusing call to action. You’ll need to address any conversion leaks as quickly as possible to get the most out of your marketing funnel and your marketing investment.
Your Top Priority Is the Bottom
When you have limited marketing funds, awareness dollars should be concentrated on consideration and conversion at the bottom of the funnel, where the prospective customers are actively searching for your services. The Awareness and Consideration stages of the customer journey have been radically compressed. Prospects today can become aware of a need and identify a solution within seconds thanks to search, mobile search, or voice assistants. If you show up as an enticing solution in those moments, they’ll be likely to remember your message and brand.
Rinse, Optimize, Repeat
Brand + Performance marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Instead, it’s designed to be tweaked in real time and informed by the latest campaign data. If your brand message isn’t resonating, you’ll have to tweak it in a way that will. If performance marketing is not generating the expected results, pivot to what’s working. It’s crucial to establish a conversion monitoring process that feeds your performance marketing results into brand strategy so your campaign can always actively improve and excel.
Case Study
REGROUP worked with a home-services franchisor to establish a brand + performance test for a group of their franchisees.
This brand was the top-rated brand in customer satisfaction within their category, but no one knew about it. REGROUP refreshed their brand by defining their value proposition: exceptional service and a happy customer base.
With the brand position clearly defined we developed a performance marketing campaign designed for real-time conversion optimization. Additionally, our team met with each individual franchisee to review the campaign and its performance. This led to consultations on sales training and conversion practices.
The results compared to previous performance were:
Conclusion
In 2024, make a commitment to combine your franchise’s brand strategy with performance campaigns for exponential results. As an expert in the franchise industry, REGROUP does, and has been using this strategy effectively on behalf of its clients for more than two decades.
REGROUP is a full-service brand + performance marketing agency with franchise industry experience spanning restaurant, home services, and more. Our integrated team of strategists, creatives, and seasoned in-house media experts work together to ensure every initiative capitalizes on our clients’ combined brand and performance marketing potential.
Are you ready to REGROUP?
Andre Mello – CFE – is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at REGROUP. He has over 20 years of marketing experience having served over 10 of them in the franchise industry. Connect with Andre on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melloand/ or directly at andre.mello@regroup.us.
REGROUP is a woman-owned, independent full-service marketing agency in Ann Arbor. We have been the agency of record for DTE Energy for over 10 years and we also support non-profit, financial services and franchise industry clients. Are you ready to REGROUP?
