Winning Franchise Owner Buy-In for Digital Marketing Investments

Winning Franchise Owner Buy-In for Digital Marketing Investments

In this episode of the Vera Shafiq podcast, host Vera Shafiq delves into innovative strategies for garnering franchise owner enthusiasm and commitment towards digital marketing. She emphasizes using AI-powered storytelling, interactive dashboards, and gamification to demonstrate the value of digital investments. Vera discusses the importance of personalized marketing plans created via AI tools, connecting real-time data through dynamic dashboards, and injecting fun with gamified challenges. These methods aim to overcome skepticism, providing transparency and compelling evidence of ROI, ultimately fostering a collaborative, innovative culture among franchise owners.

00:00 Welcome to the Podcast

00:30 The Challenge of Franchise Owner Buy-In

02:12 AI-Powered Storytelling

07:54 Interactive Dashboards for Transparency

11:31 Gamification: Making Marketing Fun

14:01 Final Thoughts and Actionable Steps

15:23 Closing Remarks

Transcript

Vera: 0:16

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Vera Shafiq, your guide into the wild, wonderful world of franchise marketing innovation. Today, we're flipping the script on winning franchise owner buy in for digital investments. So I know this is a topic that's pretty top of mind for franchise marketing professionals, especially CMOs. And that is how to get franchise owners excited and engaged about investing their hard earned cash into digital marketing initiatives. And instead of the usual charts and case studies today, I want to explore some tech driven tactics. Using AI powered storytelling, interactive dashboards, and even gamification to demonstrate how digital investments drive qualified leads and growth. So imagine if you could bring a personal side to your franchisee's digital investments. To life before their very eyes and showing and telling them how their marketing investments are moving the needle for their business. I think this would really get them enthused and excited to participate. So, you know, getting past that skepticism and doubt that we often hear from franchise owners regarding the effectiveness of local marketing is a big challenge. And a nut that we really want to be able to crack. A lot of times we will see that franchise owners do not want to invest in digital marketing because they can't see the value behind it or they're skeptical or they don't understand marketing period. So it's up to us to be able to give them the tools and the visuals and the story. to show them what they're getting themselves into. So I think today, what I'd love to do is go into detail on how you can implement these types of strategies step by step. So let's dive right in. So let's start with AI powered storytelling. This is about tailoring a unique story for each franchise location. And with the help of AI tools, this task that used to be mammoth, really daunting is now totally doable, right? So we can use AI to help us to craft a unique customized marketing plan, essentially for every single franchise owner. That dives deep into their specific local nuances. And I think there are a few steps that we can take to get there. So step number one, gathering your historical data is going to be key. Now this needs to be done, right? Regardless, but back before AI. This would have been a major time consuming task for us to do, and probably not a feasible one really in terms of return on our investment in terms of time. But now that we have AI, I think the first step is we can gather our historical CRM data. We can gather everything that we have on local market insights, competitor data at the local level. So who are the pesky local competition? The social media sentiment that comes from the local social media ad platforms and your digital campaigns, all of this data is likely sitting somewhere in your systems. So it's sitting in your CRM, it's sitting in your ad platforms, on your research folders, on SharePoint or shared drive, somewhere in your internal enterprise systems or maybe in your reviews platforms. So right now, I think the time has come to locate the data and then feed it into your enterprise level AI platform. So the location of all this data might seem like a daunting task. But trust me, I think the time and effort you put into this is going to reap rewards for years to come. So I highly recommend investing in this effort. So once you've located the data points that I just mentioned, what we want to do is feed them into your enterprise AI platform. So that could be IBM Watson, Google cloud AI, Microsoft Azure AI, any enterprise AI platform that you're using as a brand. That's capable of processing and finding patterns in your data. And the reason I say use an enterprise level system rather than a chat GPT is because a lot of this data that you're going to be feeding in is proprietary, and it's going to be pretty sensitive. And you probably want to stay away from uploading that type of data to a, you know, public cloud platform such as chat GPT. So you've got your data points, you've uploaded them to AI. Okay. The next thing that you want to do is develop templates that the AI can use to create personalized narratives or stories for each local franchisee. So, a sample template for each individual franchise location could include slides for number one, who their target audience is and what their money zip codes are. Two, how much brand and category demand there is in their local market. Three, who the top local competitors are for what weather and event related opportunities are present in their local market and when they occur, and then five, what their local reviews and social media sentiment tells us. Right. So that could be a sample template. And then the final section of the template would be the unique customized marketing plan for that particular franchisees location based on the findings in the previous sections. So once we've put that template together, we can then have AI create a customized marketing plan for every single franchisee. based on the data that we've fed it at the local level. And this personalized strategy would really highlight the ways in which the franchisee can win market share from its local competitors. And I think this would be really exciting to show and present to franchisees. The best way to do this is to use some kind of dynamic presentation software, such as a Prezi or a Power BI that allows us to visualize the data and really display these AI generated stories in a visually engaging way. And my pro tip here is I love using gamma. ai for fast tracking the slide deck creation process. So if you haven't tried gamma. ai yet, I really, really recommend it. In the presentation deck, make sure to include interactive elements so that franchise owners can see how. Changes in local data might alter their specific narrative in real time. Right? So really kind of going into, Hey, this is your local market. These are the competitors. These are the mom and pop stores that you're competing against these are the events that are happening in your local area. And here are the days and times that they're happening that are really influencing. Business, so by harnessing AI to craft personalized data driven stories, you can make your pitch not just informative, but compelling and uniquely tailored to each owner's market. All right, next up, let's talk about interactive dashboards and live attribution tools that will offer undeniable transparency. Here's how to set this up. Choose the right platform. So evaluate and select a dashboard platform such as Looker Studio or Tableau or Power BI or any specialized marketing dashboards, such as Datorama, Domo, Funnel. There are a lot of choices out there and I think. First of all, you need to pick the correct platform for your needs. Make sure that the platform that you select can integrate with your digital marketing channels, such as Google, Meta, Bing, any other programmatic channels that you use, as well as your CRM system for real time updates. So that's the key. Now, once you've selected your platform, you need to set up a real time data feed so that you can connect your ad accounts, your website analytics, and your CRM database. To the life data in your dashboard. The best way to do this is to use APIs and automation tools. I think the most success that I've seen doing this is using something like a Zapier or a make. So these are two platforms that will allow us, you could pick one or the other, but I would definitely say one or the other would be ideal for this scenario. Zapier or make to ensure that the data is being updated continuously. into your dashboards so that every click impression conversion is being captured in real time and being tied into your CRM data. So we can see how everything is linked to actual real time sales or bookings or appointments or whatever your major KPIs are. You want to make sure that those dashboards are built for clarity and so that they clearly illustrate the flow from digital spend Right. So that hard earned cash that your franchisees are spending all the way through to qualified leads. So we need to be able to use visualizations like funnel charts, time series, graphs, heat maps, whatever the platform has the better, right? To visualize how the hard earned cash is making its way through the pipeline and landing qualified leads. into the franchise owner's business. You'll want to make sure that you include KPIs, such as cost per lead, conversion rates multi touch attribution metrics, if possible, that really show which channels are driving the best results. And then finally, you'll want to make sure that you incorporate filters and drill down options. So the franchise owners can explore the data specific to their location. Now, I know that a lot of franchise owners are not savvy with using these types of dashboards. So I think when we give it to a franchise owner for their consumption, we really want it already drilled down. Showing their specific data layers and making sure that what they're seeing is very, very specific to their marketing initiatives and their marketing investment. And then I think key to this is to schedule periodic live sessions where you walk the franchise owners through the dashboard, explaining how each metric ties back to their investment. So this level of real time interactive transparency, not only builds trust, but it empowers franchise owners with insights that they can explore on their own. And I think that's really key to success in, you know, getting that buy in. Next up let's inject some fun with gamification. So transforming the process into a collaborative challenge that drives innovation and engagement. So here's a practical roadmap to that. Number one, you could design a digital marketing innovation challenge. Set up a quarterly challenge where franchise owners can propose and execute innovative digital strategies tailored to their local markets. And then define clear objectives such as increasing lead quality by a certain percentage or offer a framework for participation. The next thing you can do is develop a scoring system. So create a points based system where initiatives earn points. Based on predefined metrics, like lead quality improvements, engagement increases, or creative campaign elements. And you can use things like digital badges or leaderboards to publicly recognize top performers. There are tools out there that can help you create a custom web portal so that you can track scores and progress across all of your franchise owners. And then I think providing resources and mentorship. So organizing monthly webinars or roundtables where successful strategies are shared and inviting digital marketing experts to offer mini sessions. on topics like creative production or AI utilization. You might want to also consider setting up a buddy system where experienced franchise owners are mentoring those who are new to digital initiatives. And then finally, rewarding and recognizing. So offer tangible rewards This could be a marketing budget bonus or a featured story on the company intranet. Something that's going to really get people excited about participating and excelling in the program. You can highlight case studies from the challenge in your broader marketing strategy meetings and turn individual wins into collective learning moments. So this is all under the umbrella of gamification. And I think this not only incentivizes participation. But also fosters the spirit of friendly competition. And so, you know, the traditional pitch of, get into your digital marketing, make sure that you're spending money, becomes more of a collaborative, fun, engaging, community driven experience. And I think this can really help the cause. So let's wrap up with some final thoughts and actionable steps to get started. First of all, let's just remind ourselves what we talked about. Implement AI powered storytelling. Integrate your CRM and local data with an AI platform, develop templates, and then use dynamic presentation tools to generate personal narratives that resonate with individual franchise owners. Secondly, launch interactive real time dashboards. So if you don't already have it, choose a robust dashboard tool, set up live data feeds from your marketing channels and CRM and design interactive visuals that transparently showcase the ROI of digital investments. Finally, roll out a gamified innovation challenge. So design a quarterly challenge with clear goals, a scoring system and rewards. Provide resources and mentorship to encourage collaborative innovation among franchise owners. And there you have it. I think following those three steps Could transform a standard pitch into an immersive data driven and engaging experience that can win the buy in and also build a collaborative culture of innovation within your franchise owner's system. Well, thanks for joining me today. If you are ready to put these tactics into practice, I encourage you to experiment, share your successes and continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible. I'm Vera Shafiq and this has been the Vera Shafiq podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, share it with fellow innovators and leave a review. I'd love to hear your thoughts and any creative strategies you're trying in your markets. Until next time, stay innovative, embrace the data and let's make a difference with our marketing.