Over a year after COVID-19 first hit, restaurants, retailers, and other businesses are finally beginning to embrace a post-pandemic world. If you’re a franchise business, it’s a good time to start thinking about expanding – and maintaining a strong brand is crucial to your business’ success, especially as you scale. If one franchise fails to meet brand guidelines, the entire company’s reputation could be at risk.
A marketing asset management platform like Ontrack automates many of your marketing processes, improving communication between the corporate marketing team and the franchises. It also streamlines the management of all your marketing assets, which ensures a consistent customer experience while empowering individual franchises to grow.
For a more in-depth look on how to grow your business, here are four key ways a brand asset management platform can help franchises scale more efficiently.
1. Keeping assets consistent and up to date
Consistency can be especially difficult to enforce in a franchise model. If a franchise location doesn’t have access to the right branded materials, it may decide to make its own. This can create a confusing or disruptive experience for customers, potentially hurting your company’s brand integrity.
Brand asset management tools prevent this issue by helping corporate teams manage and maintain brand standards on the franchise level. Ontrack keeps all your up-to-date branded assets in one place, serving as a single access point where marketing professionals can go find the current version of any asset. Ontrack’s templating capabilities also make it possible to create and set standardized assets that can’t be changed without permission, helping to enforce that essential brand consistency.
2. More franchise bandwidth to spend on growth
If your franchise locations are wasting time searching for the right digital asset or duplicating materials that already exist, they’re losing time they could spend focusing on what’s important: the customer. In addition to putting a content library at franchisees’ fingertips, Ontrack also allows franchise locations to produce, edit, and order corporate-approved materials directly through the asset management system. Users will also be able quickly search for materials that can be reused, saving time on repetitive tasks.
When franchisees have instant access to high-quality, approved branding, they’re better positioned to focus instead on attracting and retaining customers – improving brand loyalty and increasing sales.
3. Streamlined expense tracking
As your franchise network scales geographically, it’s important to have a centralized platform to track and manage marketing expenses. Not only can you track asset use across your franchise network, Ontrack allows you to monitor marketing costs. This helps corporate marketing teams save on internal resources by reducing the number of requests for one-time branded assets, resulting in better cash flow.
What’s more, with a marketing asset platform, individual franchise owners can readily access branded marketing materials at a moment’s notice, eliminating the need to hire their own marketing teams.
4. Adapting to local markets
Every local market is unique, with different customer preferences. This means each franchise location will face its own marketing challenges, including which assets to distribute and when to share them. Ontrack’s templating capabilities make it possible to create and set semi-customizable assets that can be easily adjusted to your franchise’s local market. The platform’s multi-level permissions feature also allows you to customize access for all users, helping franchises meet their local marketing needs while eliminating the headaches of having to get every change request approved.
Corporate marketing teams also need to be able to collect and analyze key insights to determine if their marketing campaigns are successful. Ontrack also lets franchises quickly learn which marketing assets are being used the most by franchisees nationwide, enabling more accurate forecasting.
Ready to scale your franchise business more effectively?
Reach out to Ontrack at [email protected] to learn how you can maintain brand consistency, improve analytics, and grow your franchise business.
