Varied and off-brand marketing collateral is bad for business: it dilutes and undermines the brand and confuses customers.
If you’re struggling to maintain brand control and consistency across all your franchise locations, here are three tips to help ensure franchisees create marketing materials that build your brand, not undermine it.
- Set expectations and provide guidelines – From the outset, be clear about expectations for marketing collateral. Franchisees deserve some freedom to let their personality show in their local market, but be clear about when that’s appropriate. For example, if franchisees want to create collateral for a local promotion, develop a review process so you can ensure whatever they create is brand-compliant. Also, give them specific guidelines on things like colors, tone and messaging to promote consistency both online and in-store.
- Provide corporate-approved materials – Giving franchisees corporate-approved images, videos and graphics deters them from creating their own materials that may be off-brand. Develop high-quality assets that franchisees can easily reproduce or use, like images for their website and social media sites.
- Use white label marketing platforms – White label platforms are websites created for franchisees using the franchisor’s branding. Franchisors create and upload corporate-approved templates that individual franchisees can log on and use to market their business. For example, using direct mail white label sites, franchisees can select pre-approved mailer templates to advertise in their local market. This eliminates the chance of off-brand messaging or materials.