EFFECTIVE LOCAL MARKETING MADE EASY FOR FRANCHISEES

Anytime’s brand portal enables their clubs to create the marketing material they need, while ensuring it is always ‘on brand’.

The inside story on how one of the world’s leading franchises ensures its local area marketing stays effective and on-brand

One of the biggest challenges in franchising is that, while marketing teams can put together great national campaigns, you are very much in the hands of your franchisees when it comes to running local promotions.

That’s even more true in these days of local social media and community pages. They’re a great way of making the tills ring, but franchisees often lack the time, expertise or proper brand material to do a really good job of reaching their best prospective customers – the people who live and work locally.

As Andrew Mitchell, CEO of Storyteq (formerly Brand Machine) says, ‘The combination of big brand and local ownership that makes franchising so effective when it comes to customer service can create real difficulties when it comes to promotion. But social media automation and local marketing portals can make it easy.

‘Take video, for example. Master templates can be connected to a data source to create localised media in batches so you can create a localised video for a hundred franchisees at the push of a button. That makes it easy for franchise marketing teams to create, distribute and even post customised content to a franchisee’s local media without having to wait for the franchisee to do it themselves.’

Case study: Anytime Fitness

When Vanessa Parker joined Anytime Fitness New Zealand as marketing manager in 2019, she met the same challenges common to many franchises: a small, busy head office, with increasing demands from franchisees for marketing support and plenty of local ‘DIY’ marketing.

To give Anytime Fitness the brand health kick it needed, Vanessa decided to set up a Storyteq Brand Portal for her franchisees. Andrew asked her to share the process and results with us.

Vanessa, to introduce us to Anytime Fitness, can you tell us what are the key pillars of the brand?

We have over 5,000 franchised clubs in 50 countries, and each one is open 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. In 2021, we launched a new slogan that highlights our core values:

Real people. Real success. It reflects our commitment to assisting the individual fitness journeys our members are on in a down-to-earth, nonintimidating environment. In New Zealand, we have 59 clubs.

How well was this brand position being expressed across the club network when you joined?

Very inconsistently. We were all over the place with clubs interpreting various brand elements, such as images or videos, in different ways. We couldn’t blame the clubs. They are not marketers or designers, and because our head office team didn’t have the design resource or budget to meet all their bespoke marketing support requests, clubs were just doing the best they could.

What attracted you to a Storyteq Brand Portal as the right solution for Anytime Fitness?

We needed a self-service solution that would allow our many local teams to create and localise their own on-brand content, but in a way that meant our design standards and quality of output wouldn’t be diminished. I could see right away the Storyteq template software was super-flexible and would allow clubs to adapt content as they needed. But the kicker was how easy and intuitive it was to use, which I knew would be key to it being adopted by clubs. I was also amazed to see video and digital banner templating was possible.

What are the key features and content you have included in your portal?

We wanted to launch the portal with a lot of content and templates. We included social tiles, event collateral, in-club posters and flyers, staff profiles, time-table templates, monthly promotional material and more; all ready to localise and personalise at the click of a button.

The playbooks for specific events and promotions have been really popular and make it easy for clubs to access what they need. The ability to build customised landing pages has been very helpful for presenting brand guidelines, playbooks and instructional videos. We have also added the ability to order printing via the system.

One of the best things we’ve done

A year in, how would you rate the success of the platform so far?

Like most franchises, the investment in technology comes from a centralised marketing fund that clubs contribute to, so it is imperative that we can show strong value from everything we do. With the high volumes of asset downloads and template adaptations going through each month, implementing our Brand Portal has been one of the best things we’ve done. It has now become integral to how our business runs, and the franchisees love it.

How easy, or how hard, was the implementation process?

The biggest task was creating the master templates and first batches of content. The Storyteq team made everything easy, and we went from the first demo through to going live in just over three months. Our launch date coincided with a rebranding release, so the date couldn’t be moved. However, the project management and commitment from the Storyteq team was so superb that I was always confident we would be ready.

What would you say are the keys to success for any marketer implementing a Storyteq Brand Portal?

Understanding exactly what marketing material local teams need before starting is key. You won’t know this without talking to them and understanding what content they utilise now, and what they would like to use but don’t because it is too difficult, costly or time-consuming to create. The other key factor is that the software must be easy and intuitive to use, or the portal will fail.

What is the next marketing tech initiative for Anytime Fitness?

We are keen to add video templates to the portal – as we all know, video is super-important these days for the digital channels. We also plan on implementing Storyteq’s Brand Amplifier local social media automation tools. The ability to cascade organic content and ads across social media accounts and have the content automatically localised will help us take our digital marketing to the next level in a scalable and efficient way.

Localised content up to 500 percent more effective

Andrew Mitchell, who has a long background in advertising and marketing, believes that the majority of franchise brands are underutilising digital marketing in a local context, but says that Anytime Fitness is a good example of how Storyteq’s Brand Amplifier tool is opening the door to a digital local marketing future.

‘Brand Amplifier’s organic module enables content to be cascaded down to each local franchisee social account, with the content automatically localised. The marketing team can monitor all local pages in one dashboard.’

The paid module allows digital marketing at scale, with national campaigns split into multiple local campaigns automatically. This local approach frequently outperforms a generic national approach by up to 500 percent, Andrew says. ‘People are always much more likely to engage with a local ad.

‘The module also allows franchisees to select from a library of preconfigured social and Google Adwords campaigns and fund them with their own budget. Franchisees simply choose a daily budget and press ‘play’ to activate their own local campaigns.

‘It means brands that were hesitant to create local pages in the past can have confidence that they can monitor all page activity and reviews in a single dashboard. It helps franchisors and franchisees to make the most of the franchise model, rather than be restricted by it.’

Starting the journey to marketing transformation

In addition to Anytime Fitness, Storyteq is an international supplier to such well-known franchise brands as KFC, Costa Coffee, Pizza Hut, Pret A Manger. In New Zealand, local clients already include Unichem, Four Square, Caci, Active+, Robert Harris and MTF Finance.

‘Brands that do true local digital marketing stand to gain a significant edge on their competitors. We’re seeing some very large retail brands channel more and more of their consumer ad spend through the app simply because the local nature of the ads significantly out-performs generic campaigns.’

Andrew says, ‘We love meeting with franchise brands large and small, regardless of the outcome, so if you want to learn more about what Storyteq can do to help your franchise, contact me and let’s talk effective marketing.’

Advertiser Info

Storyteq

www.storyteq.com

Contact Andrew Mitchell

P ++64 21 801 115

andrew.mitchell@storyteq.com

Andrew Mitchell, CEO of Storyteq: ‘The majority of franchise brands are under-utilising digital marketing in a local context’

Anytime’s Vanessa Parker says the key to the success of their brand portal is how easy the template software is to use by clubs