Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2013 | Page 30

Grow Market Lead

CMO
roundtable:
“In your development efforts,
how does your marketing team
balance automation with a
personal touch?”
Heather Anderson
Director of Marketing
The Little Gym International

Our franchise development process is
more high-touch than
high-tech. While automation is an integral
part of our marketing
strategy, building personal relationships is our top priority.
Since its inception in 1976, The
Little Gym has been a family-oriented
business. As the company has grown,
we’ve remained true to our roots and
have cultivated the same atmosphere
in our corporate office and with our
franchise owners. It’s important to us
that we establish a personal relationship
with prospective franchise owners from
the very start. Every inquiry, whether
it comes through phone, email, or our
website, gets a phone call response. This
initial call allows us to answer questions
and determine if the candidate is a good
fit. If we both agree that we’d like to
continue discussions, a more detailed
call is scheduled and the process remains
extremely personal.
Our automated process is designed
to target lost franchise prospects and
nurture them to re-engage with us. If
we are unable to make contact by phone,
the inquiry is placed into a drip email
campaign prompting them to contact
us again. A series of eight emails is sent
over the course of a year. In addition to
email, remarketing has proven to be a
valuable way to stay in front of prospects who have visited our website but
have not taken the next step to request
more information.
Looking to the future, we’re exploring

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Franchiseupdate Iss u e III, 2 0 1 3

opportunities to incorporate behaviorbased rules and triggers into our email
marketing efforts. Automated tools play
a key role in improving operational
efficiencies, but we recognize that the
messaging should still be personalized
and segmented when possible. This is a
project that’s currently under way on the
consumer side and will next be applied
to our franchise development efforts.
Since many of our franchise owners
started as members of our locations,
we’re also planning to use social platforms as a personal way to introduce
candidates to our franchise concept.
For The Little Gym, automation
does not replace a personal connection.
It enhances it. Developing relationships
from day one has proven to be effective for awarding new franchises, and
more importantly, for ensuring their
long-term growth and success.

Gillian Maffeo
Director of Marketing
Jake’s Franchising

Our marketing department is involved
with assisting the sales
team in creating material for prospects.
We assist in developmental efforts and in
identifying and recruiting new franchisees through several mediums.
When we rebranded in March, we
made sure that all of the sales and developmental materials matched our
entire branding. We partnered with
Greenbaum Marketing to help with
the developmental and sales marketing
plans. Our first plan of attack on the
development side was fixing all of the

drip email campaigns. We tailor every
email drip campaign to be customized
for each prospect. We also created a
new look and feel to the campaign to
keep it fresh and up to date with our
marketing materials.
We also changed all of our sales and
development brochures. We attend
a lot of conferences (like the MultiUnit Franchising Conference) and we
needed marketing material that was
eye-catching, something to make future
prospects stop and want to learn more
about our brand and why they should
invest in a Wayback Burgers. We also
made additions to our brochures, for
example, items that pertain to certain
regions across the country, franchisee
testimonials, menu variety, etc.
We changed our trade show booths
as well and created a recruitment e-sales
brochure similar to the brochure for
trade shows. This year for recruiting
at the IFE, we will be advertising our
Triple Triple Burger and promoting
that Wayback is a “Big Opportunity.”
Our ad campaign for the IFE is a little
“risky,” but we are hoping it succeeds
in attracting not only males, but females as well.
The marketing department also
created “prospect questioner forms,”
which gather informat [ۈX