Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue IV, 2016 | Page 60

Gone Social
having their own page.”
“Franchisees still have the flexibility to
do local things,” says Matheson. However,
she adds, only with guidance and ongoing education from corporate, including
providing them with content, and proving the effectiveness of the national page
using metrics. On Facebook those KPIs
include the total number of fans, fans
reached each week, overall engagement,
and engagement per post.
Corporate also has a lot to teach fran-

chisees about how to most effectively engage their fans online. “It takes a lot of
time and energy and effort to understand
the guest. We do that at the franchisor
level,” she says. For example, franchisees were not following the 80/20 rule
discussed above, and instead were making the conversation too much about
themselves—not the conversation the
guests were having. As a result, she says,
80 percent of online content will come
from the national team, leaving the re-

Driven: The Meineke Rewards Program
BY SUMMER NUNN
The Meineke Rewards program has been very successful for us. Meineke Rewards
truly sets us apart from the competition because it matches every dollar spent with
rewards points. The benefit to customers is the ability to redeem points for normal
services like oil changes, tires, and brakes.
Since its launch one year ago, more than 378,000 customers
have enrolled in the program. Beyond enrollment, we track the
average spend of rewards customers vs. non-rewards customers,
along with the number of redemptions for free services, to gauge
success of the program.

Summer Nunn

The management of the Meineke Rewards program is a collective effort between internal teams and business partners. Meineke’s
internal marketing team oversees the full program and directs
business partners and agencies accordingly. Clutch, a customer
marketing and engagement firm, has been our main partner. They
helped launch the program and assisted in the overall revitalization of our customer retention and marketing efforts.

How did we engage the franchisees on this? Encouraging franchisee buy-in is fairly

simple. In addition to education including webinars, emails, and print materials in
each center, we’re transparent about the benefit of the program and share it in the
language they speak: customer return rate, average spend, overall center profitability. It’s hard to argue with a program that encourages customers to return more,
spend more, and that adds money to your bottom line! With that, we’ve been able
to get buy-in from 30 percent of our centers. Our goal is 50 percent by the end of
the year. Customer demand also dictates franchisee buy-in—the more customers
ask about the program, the more our franchisees are encouraged to participate.

How are we managing/balancing centralized control with local flexibility in our digital
marketing efforts? One of the benefits of being a part of the Driven Brands family

of automotive com panies is access to Driven Brands’ digital marketing team. This
means we’re able to execute national and local initiatives in a nimble way. Because
all advertising efforts are data-driven, if there’s an opportunity to shift efforts for
the betterment of a market, we can do so at any given time. It’s a balancing act
we’ve worked hard to perfect. We’re almost there!

Which social media platforms are we finding most effective for our customers and
target customers? Facebook and Twitter remain our go-to social media engage-

ment tools. Both make it easy to reach and engage with customers while leveraging advertising capabilities that aren’t too intrusive. However, we believe in the
power of a strong digital presence and engage on Instagram and LinkedIn as well.
We want to make it easy for customers to find and engage with us, regardless of
where and how they do it.
Summer Nunn is vice president of marketing for Meineke Car Care Centers.

58

mainder for the franchisees to customize
for their local market.
Matheson says her 80/20 rule offers
the best of both worlds to both franchisees and corporate. “We can do a better
job to engage their audience.”
Built-in advantage
At Moe’s, about 80 percent of its social
media outreach is done through dedicated
in-house resources. Each platform or channel has different messages and purposes,
he says, which requires a different communication strategy. Corporate manages a
lot of the messaging, as well as responses
to customer questions or comments—“no
matter what your question is,” says Magee.
“The beauty of having those resources
in-house is that we can have a consistent
message and brand voice.”
At Moe’s, field marketing teams work
closely with franchisees to establish and
maintain brand consistency across its
websites and social media channels. “It’s
more efficient to have this as a centralized
resource,” says Magee. Search Moe’s and
there is one national website, but it’s local pages when customers are in or near
a store. This also allows rapid changes,
for instance when a hurricane races up
the East Coast, or there’s a community
event nearby. “We want fans and guests
to have that continuity and consistency,”
says Magee.
Moe’s has an additional advantage by
being part of Focus Brands (which itself
is owned by Roark Capital). Focus has
six franchise brands under its umbrella
(Moe’s, Auntie Anne’s, Carvel, Cinnabon,
Schlotzsky’s, and Seattle’s Best Coffee).
Focus has created “centers of excellence”—
pooled resources to support the individual
brands with public relations, social, and
creative—and built a new campus to support these cross-brand initiatives.
At BW&R, a much smaller enterprise,
social media is outsourced to Empower
MediaMarketing, a local agency in Cincinnati that assists in crafting their content. “It takes a lot of time and effort to
develop it ourselves,” says Matheson. Instead, she’s outsourced several functions,
which she monitors and oversees. “I like
using agencies. It’s much more efficient
and effective.” She uses Fishbowl to help
with data analytics and employs Directions
Research, a local company, for additional
consumer research and analysis. Another
advantage to using third parties, she says,
is that each agency works with clients

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