Local Digital Marketing: Creating an exceptional customer journey

After 2½ years of disruption and the accelerated adoption of automation that ensued, franchise brands are adjusting operations with a renewed (and in some cases, a new) appreciation for local digital marketing that goes far beyond followers and likes.

“Right now, it’s all about the customer experience every time they interact with the brand,” says Donna Josephson, CMO of Shipley Do-Nuts. “Social media has grown and is always changing, so brands must keep up to interact with their existing customers and attract new ones. No matter what, building relationships and trust with our consumers is the root of any marketing campaign.”

This means meeting the changing needs of customers when, where, and how they expect it. Consumers don’t distinguish between digital and brick-and-mortar as much as in the past. This also makes the franchisor-franchisee partnership more crucial than ever for delivering the brand promise, from the first touchpoint to the last mile of each encounter.

Local marketing strategies

When franchisors use local multi-channel marketing programs to empower their frontline owners to support a consistently branded and executed customer journey, it drives results for both, according to local marketing tech firm BrandMuscle’s “The State of Local Marketing Report 2021–2022.”

“An exceptional customer journey requires an exceptional local experience,” notes the report, which was compiled by analyzing responses from more than 2,400 local partners and 13 large national brands. Succeeding at this requires support in the form of funds, assets, and tools to make marketing decisions easy and accessible so partners can drive awareness and traffic to their locations.

Finding authentic ways to flex a customer-centric local marketing muscle at every stage of the customer journey is keeping marketing pros like Brooke Mallick, Big Blue Swim School’s CMO, on her toes and open-minded to continually test and learn. It’s a busy time for the brand, which continues to open new locations across the country every month and projects 240 pools sold by the end of 2022.

“Our local marketing playbook has come a long way from where we were pre-pandemic, led by how social media has changed in that time,” says Mallick. Before joining Big Blue in 2019, she spent more than 6 years with PepsiCo, doing marketing for brand giants Gatorade and Quaker Oats.

Big Blue uses a centralized, data-driven approach to drive both creative and tactics for each local pool, such as organic social media postings and tools to manage review responses, all designed to ensure brand consistency.

“I’m laser-focused with my team on how our brand comes to life on social media and local marketing,” says Mallick. “Each touchpoint is an opportunity to build awareness in a new community. Since social platforms are where we’re frequently discovered, showing up the right way on social media is a critical part of building that consistent brand message.”

By using real-time data from Big Blue’s proprietary CRM system, Mallick’s analytically inclined marketing team can “quickly pressure test what is working and what isn’t in each individual market and build more local customization as needed,” she says.

“We make sure that everyone has a seat at the table along the customer journey to do what they do best. This means central marketing drives planning and execution on the vast majority of the marketing programs, while we look to our franchise partners as the experts on their community and the ones responsible for grassroots marketing and a great customer experience in their location to drive conversion.”

• Disciplines like conversion rate optimization and digital psychology and persuasion will be invaluable.
• Customers identify with people, not companies.
• We’re working to continue to develop our brands’ human personas/avatars and portray them.
• Spreading that across every interaction on every channel is key and we feel it requires a centralized approach.

Franchise marketing examples

Shipley Do-Nuts, with more than 330 restaurants across 10 states, is undergoing a martech transformation to support its rapid growth, which includes plans to more than double in size over the next 5 years.

Guiding the way is franchise marketing veteran Donna Josephson, who joined Shipley as CMO in 2021, bringing a wealth of experience that included CMO roles at Corner Bakery, Fazoli’s, and McAlister’s Deli.

After more than 85 years of serving up gourmet donuts made fresh daily, Shipley is now busy mapping out a marketing future that allows the company to be nimble and to quickly react to change. Among recent firsts for the company, Shipley hired its first branding agency of record, rolled out its first systemwide digital marketing campaign, “Do-Happy,” and is updating its systems in a host of ways, including the addition of the brand’s first unified systemwide POS.

With everything tied back to sales and profitability, Josephson says each program must have a positive impact on guests, operators, and franchisees. “We test and learn what works best for us,” says Josephson. “We’ve learned that sharing user-generated content is what Shipley Do-Nuts is all about because it celebrates the ‘Do-Happy’ we bring to the community.”

• We are constantly evaluating our promotions and our business to see what is and isn’t moving the needle.
• In owned media (websites, email, social), we regularly track and A/B test different variables to ensure that the message, timing, media, and creative are resonating.
• From a paid media standpoint, one of the benefits of consolidated media buying is that we have the benefit of seeing everyone’s data, setting consistent KPIs, and measuring the same way across the system.

A satisfied customer is the best marketing tool, says Correa, whose team encourages all local stores to become part of the community they serve, highlight their store history and local guests on social media, and contribute charitably to their markets.

• As part of the Unleashed Brands family, all brands have accessibility to tools and resources they may not have as a single brand or a single location: things like consolidated media buying, which drives more value for every dollar spent; an internal creative studio, which helps them get creative quickly; and consumer research and analytics that can help them identify the right consumer, market to them effectively, and be efficient in their operation.

Winning brands, notes SOCi’s 2022 Localized Marketing Benchmark Report , “exhibit well-balanced marketing efforts that pay close attention to search marketing, reputation management, and social media engagement.”

At the heart of the pandemic, in-home care provider BrightStar Care turned to SOCi’s multi-location marketing platform to engage with current and prospective customers. The franchise increased its social media posts by 757% and improved review response time by 48% in 2020—despite a 20% increase in review volume.

• Along with email marketing, BrightStar advocates for its franchise partners to take advantage of search engine optimization and constantly manage online listing platforms, such as Google My Business and Yelp.
• When our franchisees identify and implement successful SEO strategies, this improves local brand awareness and drives website conversions overall.

Customers are not the only part of the journey capturing Celmer’s attention these days. BrightStar has made an unprecedented move to pour “countless dollars into recruitment, employee branding, and elevating our candidate journey,” she says.