How To Translate Key Marketing Data into ROI for Your Brand, Part 1

Franchise marketing in our ever-evolving, data-driven digital world overflows with opportunities — and loads of challenges.

With a wealth of channels available for customer engagement and unprecedented access to analytics, it’s easy to get bogged down in data. In addition, measuring marketing in a vacuum risks wasting time and money chasing the wrong performance metrics. Make decisions based on old data or too few touchpoints, and you’ll be out of touch.

“Marketing ROI is far from an exact science,” says Ashley Schuetz, vice president of marketing at Massage Heights. “It needs to be looked at holistically because it is so challenging to attribute one specific marketing vehicle to an overall conversion.”

Franchise brands must know their core customer and the value of that customer to decide on marketing and measurement tactics and strategies — and then be ready to adjust and measure again and again. The right data can help brands select key performance indicators (KPIs) that correlate with the company’s strategic goals. These can include increasing sales or conversions, raising brand awareness, or boosting website traffic, for example. Once that is decided, the next task is to craft strategies to target the right customer with the right message at the right time — and find ways to measure and analyze the results.

Customer lifetime value

The deluge of data available to make smarter decisions can lull franchisors into focusing on performance-driven metrics in isolation or only over the short term. Too often, brands can obsess over single transactions and overlook the lifetime value of their relationship with the customer, says Craig Ceccanti, co-founder and CEO of Pinot’s Palette.

“Working in franchising, I find one of the biggest things missing, which is a travesty, is customer lifetime value,” he says. “You can’t even start to judge whether a pay-per-click campaign or any digital marketing is successful or not unless you know the lifetime value of the customer.”

Customer lifetime value reveals how much money a customer is expected to spend over the course of their relationship with a brand. Customer lifetime value is also valuable for the insights it can provide on customer acquisition costs and on strategies for boosting loyalty, bringing back lost customers, and maximizing the return on that initial investment over time.

Use your technology

“With the information we receive through our POS,” says Schuetz, “we can track and drill down to the value of that member (or nonmember) to see their habits and try to sell and upsell them in a way to give them what they want or need, based on why they have been coming in previously.” Massage Heights’ membership-based brand uses a proprietary centralized platform that integrates with the brand’s POS system to extract and analyze customer data.

Finding a centralized platform that is easy to understand and that provides dynamic reporting for both individual franchise locations and the entire brand is vital. Online dashboards can provide details down to the ZIP Code on leads and content engagement that can help guide local marketing that delivers to the bottom line.

Brands that excel in localized social marketing experience three times the revenue growth of their peers, according to the 2019 Localized Social Marketing Benchmark Report, a research project from the Local Search Association and SOCi, a platform for social and reputation management for multi-location brands.

Read the full story at Franchising.com

NEXT TIME: Continuous improvement; how vendors can help; testing 1, 2, 3; and measure and recalibrate.

Learn more about Franchising at Franchising.com