First Annual Franchise Marketing Report Provides Invaluable Marketing Intel

2019 marked the debut of the Annual Franchise Marketing Report (AFMR). This new annual report provides franchise consumer marketers with invaluable data and analysis they can use to benchmark their performance against other brands, within both franchising and their industry sector - a resource they can use to improve the effectiveness and ROI of their marketing efforts. Franchising's increasingly competitive landscape has strengthened the need for marketers to better understand how their brand measures up against the competition and is performing in the wider marketplace.

The AFMR is intended to assist franchise consumer marketers in understanding how their team compares with their peers and, more importantly, help them allocate their limited resources to the most effective channels for achieving their system-wide goals. Brands participating in the first AFMR represented more than 13,000 locations, $8.3 billion in annual revenue, and $131 million in annual marketing budgets.

Diane Phibbs, executive vice president and chief content officer at Franchise Update Media, presented highlights from the report this past June at the 2019 Franchise Marketing Leadership Conference. Participants consisted of franchise marketing leaders who completed an in-depth questionnaire online. Responses were aggregated and analyzed to produce a detailed look into the marketing practices, budgets, and strategies of a wide cross-section of franchise brands and sectors.

The data and accompanying commentary and analysis provide the basis of the 2019 AFMR. Leads/Traffic Count In terms of leads and traffic counts, seven in 10 (71 percent) respondents reported that leads or traffic count were up (56 percent) or the same (15 percent) in 2019, while only 22 percent responded they were down. Despite today's economy and tight employment picture, this indicated positive business conditions for the majority of respondents at the local level.