Today at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, real life national brands stressed the importance of social media and local reviews in any location-based ad strategy. This is an always-welcome perspective, given that the BIA/Kelsey stage is usually filled with media companies (sellers) rather than buyers.

Mark Hardison, VP Marketing, El Pollo Loco
Elnora Cunningham, Director, Local Search, Uhaul International

As always in the multi-location franchise world, an important distinction is how much campaign fulfillment happens at the centralized corporate level versus the de-centralized franchisee level. Both Uhaul and El Pollo Loco lean towards the former.

“We encourage franchisees to take a role in community through clubs or sponsoring baseball teams,” said Hardison, “but we supplement that through posting activity on Facebook to communities near the restaurant. We localized that but from the central base.”

Uhaul is similar in providing direction to franchisees, while handling the heavy lifting and quality control from the corporate level: “Everything is centralized in the dealer network,” said Cunningham. ” We don’t give them the tools, we take that burden off them.”

Where Uhaul has spent the most energy is developing social marketing around the experience of moving. Cunningham reminded us that moving can be an emotionally fueled time that is tied to certain life moments — a ripe opportunity for brand association.

“Something in your life is changing when you get a Uhaul,” she said. “It could be a mother aging, someone changing jobs, or having a baby. Whatever their life situation is, we’re trying to give them a way to have a customer experience. It’s successful because it focuses on the journey.”

Specifically, this includes developing blogs to chronicle the experience, and sometimes posting on customers’ behalf. It also includes collecting and curating pictures that then populate social channels, as well as more analog media (i.e. the side of Uhaul vans).

Lastly, user reviews have a huge impact on both moving/storage and quick serve restaurants. Uhaul has five million cumulative reviews, and they’re very impactful says Cunningham. Meanwhile, El Pollo Loco’s business is swayed heavily by Facebook and Yelp, especially when negative.

“The first goal is to respond quickly,” said Hardison. “We want to move the conversation offline as quickly as possible. We need better ways to manage those reviews and search out bad reviews.”

The post At BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL: Franchises Go Loco appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

This is a paraphrased report, quotes indicate what was actually said.

Over half of U.S. businesses spend over $1,000 without any predefined customer acquisition goals. Platform providers, agencies and advertisers can be part of the solution, according to AdMall CEO C. Lee Smith who spoke today at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL.

Franchises, according to BIA/Kelsey, spend 27 percent more than other SMBs. It’s better to reach people who count than to count how many people you reach. This kind of targeting is possible with digital marketing. So, define your audience to get started in ad improvements.

Franchise marketers should consider using Purchase Intent as a defining criteria for audiences. Not everyone is going to buy — one may not read a boating magazine because the want to buy a boat. For example, in furniture, audiences often are looking for inspiration, which doesn’t have to be the cheapest furniture. Thirty-seven percent of furniture buyers have Pinterest accounts. Two-thirds have a particular store in mind before they start surfing — so branding is critical.

61 percent of shoppers showroom when shopping at furniture stores, looking for a better price.

Another type of buying intent: Heavy Frequency Purchasers spend 5x more on fast-food. Their digital use revolves around convenient sharing with friends and finding new things to try. Frequent fast-food eaters are 3.5x more likely to use FourSquare, 88 percent more likely to take action on a promotional email, and 37 percent will try new things they discover through social. They are enrolled in 23 percent more loyalty programs as the typical American.

Purchase Intent: Personal Goals — or “aspirational.” Example: People ready to move. They click to call 74 percent more often and 50 percent to look for repair services online. They are 82 percent more likely to have used HomeAdvisor.

Other critical purchase intent: B2B planned purchases and dissatisfied customers (cable customers top this list).

How would you redefine your audience based on purchase intent, then drill in and learn everything about them? Do a few things well, be the go-to source on your chosen topics/targets. Aim for where your target audience is, don’t reach everywhere.

You don’t need big data, you need big insight. Connect your brand to the customer’s hears and minds, it’s not all about reach.

Don’t let your franchisees’ fights with local competitors interfere with your national brand goals. Tell franchisees why they need to aim above the fray they think they are fighting.

“New doesn’t always mean better.” Use existing media where it works.

Now to Q&A:

Rick Ducey of BIA/Kelsey: You described fast-food users as active, but are they brand loyal?

Smith: It could be a bit of both. If they are in many loyalty programs, they will choose, but they will choose based on communication from those brands.

Ducey: On the moving marketing, there is clustering data to exploit in selling related services.

Smith: When you reserve a U-Haul truck, you could also pay for a repairman to fix a hole in the house you are leaving, so it’s a great opportunity to grow the customer relationships.

The post At BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL: The Smart Numbers on Franchises appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

To kick-off BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, the analyst team sits down to review 2015 – 2019 local advertising across 12 different channels and 94 industries, summarizing key issues for marketers over the next half decade.

Michael Boland, Chief Analyst and Vice President of Content, BIA/Kelsey
Peter Krasilovsky, Vice President, BIA/Kelsey
Steve Marshall, Research Director, BIA/Kelsey
Stacey Sedbrook, Vice President of Strategic Sales Consulting

Steve Marshall opens with our Local Commerce Monitor results on franchisees. They send $87K-plus, the highest level of marketing spend among the SMBs BIA/Kelsey tracks. They are highly engaged in digital — 42.9 percent of 2015 spending will be on digital; again, far ahead of the average SMB.

Franchises also spend at least 10 hours a week on social networks. About 85 percent maintain customer lists (compared to only about half of SMBs have customer lists in digital form). Seventy-one percent of franchises will have a loyalty program this year. This is a vindication of loyalty programs. Hand in hand with these loyalty programs, franchises are driving huge investments in discounting — 50.7 percent of revenue will be due to discount sales tied to loyalty programs.

This is the wave — loyalty and discounting — that will sweep the local space. There will be a much deeper, more committed relationship between the franchises and customers.

Franchises tend to favor buying through on-premise sales reps (feet on the street), even though many have national agency relationships. The franchises buy most through agencies and are extremely satisfied. Sixty-three percent are extremely satisfied with their agency relationships, though they prefer making individual purchases with assistance (expertise) from the agency. “They like a partner for these activities versus doing it themselves.”

Co-op advertising represents about $50 billion in U.S. spend annually and franchisees are the most prevalent users of co-op (more than 50 percent of all co-op monies flow through franchises). As a result, they want more analytics and analysis for their planning and assessment of campaigns.

Next up, Mike Boland discusses technology, particularly mobile.

Mobile ad revenues will grow from $13.25 billion in 2014 to $41.63 percent in 2019. In mobile, brands are the majority early adopters. YP, Yelp and other directories participate, but more than half is brand spending.

There are many flavors of ad targeting in mobile. It is no longer a matter of simply being geo-targeted, but must include contextually relevant information on the mobile devices. Using local area codes perform better than 800# listings, because they are perceived as actually local.

Bringing local inventory to bear on these opportunities, bringing POS inventory online as Google is doing, will be critical to market growth.

The static display ad is dying as live targeting takes on the role of providing context to mobile users.

Location-based programmatic ads are making headway. Weather, for example, can be used to address a customer with a topical offer. For example, a gym can send a coupon to a runner when it is raining: “Come in and run out of the rain.” These ads are starting to perform well.

Competitive conquesting works in retail, but struggles in restaurants. “There are so many different shades to these new opportunities, and it requires a lot of testing,” Boland said. Think of location as an audience profiling tool — where are consumers going and what does it say about the consumer that brands can use to create resonant messaging for consumers.

Contextual location targeting, such as a consumer at Wrigley Field, is a rich starting point for engagement. Drawing in other activities around that location and demographics.

“Everything I just mentioned can only happen when the location is accurate,” Boland concluded. “But the dirty little secret is that many location tags are wrong.” That’s a critical area for the market development and we have a session about this later this week.

Now Stacey Sedbrook: Are companies really learning use national and local brand targeting. Brand is centric, the location is subservient to the brand. And it is all over the board (for the same reasons that Gregg Stewart identified earlier). Talent development is going to be essential.

Stacey suggests it is important to “super-serve” the brand behind franchises, so we still need to be near the national brands, such as locating near Detroit for auto. The relationships matter more, and sales will continue to thrive.

Programmatic ads do not replace the human relationships that media companies have built with brands. Steve Marshall adds that he sees a tremendous need for integrators who do consultative selling with brands. Stacey: Make the local franchise group happy. So, send out a “hunter” to bring in brand deals, but hand fulfillment and account management to the local staff. Relationships matter.

Programmatic feels like “a buying method” to talk about targeting demographic, location with the “humble display ad.” Mike Boland: “This is bringing the tenants of search to the local display ads.”

That’s the session.

The post At BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL: Location Services Will Kill Traditional Display Advertising appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL show is now fully in place, with 56 speakers set to define the cutting edge in national brands and local marketing. The show takes place March 25-27 at The Dallas Westin. Just added to the program: Internet visionary Mitch Golub, who leaves Cars.com today after successfully developing it into a $1.8 Billion enterprise that has, along with AutoTrader.com, helped define all the best practices of working with the world’s most aggressive national and local marketers (the car manufacturers and car dealers.)

Also added: key brands defining the best in vertical marketing. Dental One Partners, VCA (Animal Hospitals) and Service Experts Heating and Air Conditioning have now been added to a lineup that also includes leaders from Brooks Brothers, UniGroup (United Van Lines), Rooms to Go, All My Sons Moving & Storage, El Pollo Loco, U-Haul International, Nestle TollHouse Cafe, and The Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Announced earlier: keynotes from Google’s Brendon Kraham; Facebook’s Jon Czaja; Bizhive?s Dave Walker, Kenshoo’s Aaron Goldman, Geary LSF’s Karen Traversi Kovaleski and The Weather Co’s Ryan Davis. There are also key sessions with thought leaders such as YP’s Melissa Burghardt, The Washington Post Co’s Ethan Selzer; The Dallas Morning News’ Grant Moise; Meredith Corp’s Pam Taylor; and TvB’s Steve Lanzano.

The program also marks the debut of key new BIA/Kelsey data on franchise marketing from our Local Commerce Monitor survey. And last but not least, we’ll be doing Dallas right, with two Best of Dallas receptions; a “Before the Bell” Dallas Innovator Breakfast at the Addison Treehouse sponsored by Speakeasy; Two social breakouts, including National DEMOs and Drinks and Women Leading in Local; and an After Hours Country Casino sponsored by Local Site Submit and Moon Valley Software.

Check out the full, 2 1/2 day agenda. You may register here.

Cars.com visionary Mitch Golub is set for BIA/Kelsey National

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The BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL show is now fully in place, with 56 speakers set to define the cutting edge in national brands and local marketing. The show takes place March 25-27 at The Dallas Westin. Just added to the program: Internet visionary Mitch Golub, who leaves Cars.com today after successfully developing it into a $1.8 Billion enterprise that has, along with AutoTrader.com, helped define all the best practices of working with the world’s most aggressive national and local marketers (the car manufacturers and car dealers.)

Also added: key brands defining the best in vertical marketing. Dental One Partners, VCA (Animal Hospitals) and Service Experts Heating and Air Conditioning have now been added to a lineup that also includes leaders from Brooks Brothers, UniGroup (United Van Lines), Rooms to Go, All My Sons Moving & Storage, El Pollo Loco, U-Haul International, Nestle TollHouse Cafe, and The Susan G. Komen Foundation.

Announced earlier: keynotes from Google’s Brendon Kraham; Facebook’s Jon Czaja; Bizhive’s Dave Walker, Kenshoo’s Aaron Goldman, Geary LSF’s Karen Traversi Kovaleski and The Weather Co’s Ryan Davis. There are also key sessions with thought leaders such as YP’s Melissa Burghardt, The Washington Post Co’s Ethan Selzer; The Dallas Morning News’ Grant Moise; Meredith Corp’s Pam Taylor; and TvB’s Steve Lanzano.

The program also marks the debut of key new BIA/Kelsey data on franchise marketing from our Local Commerce Monitor survey. And last but not least, we’ll be doing Dallas right, with two Best of Dallas receptions; a “Before the Bell” Dallas Innovator Breakfast at the Addison Treehouse sponsored by Speakeasy; Two social breakouts, including National DEMOs and Drinks and Women Leading in Local; and an After Hours Country Casino sponsored by Local Site Submit and Moon Valley Software.

Check out the full, 2 1/2 day agenda. You may register here.

Cars.com visionary Mitch Golub is set for BIA/Kelsey National

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We continue to gear up for our National Conference, taking place next month in Dallas. It will be here before we know it. As we put together the program, many themes are emerging.

One theme is the importance of national brand advertisers in the local media picture. The connotation with “local” is always SMB; but national advertisers are driving lots of the ad spending. In fact, national companies make up 36 percent of the $140 billion spent on location targeted advertising in the U.S.

And thought they’re national in scope, many large brands — especially multi-location and franchised businesses — compete for consumers and mindshare at the local level, where conversions actually happen.  This has driven their early adoption of emerging areas like location based mobile advertising.

We discuss a few of these themes in the video below, and preview the location based mobile ad session. We hope this piques your interest and we’ll have more previews to come. Email me for a discount code if that helps your ability to join us in Dallas (mbolandATbiakelsey.com). Hope to see you there.

The post Video Preview: BIA/Kelsey's National Conference, the Mobile Angle appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

We continue to gear up for our National Conference, taking place next month in Dallas. It will be here before we know it. As we put together the program, many themes are emerging.

One theme is the importance of national brand advertisers in the local media picture. The connotation with “local” is always SMB; but national advertisers are driving lots of the ad spending. In fact, national companies make up 36 percent of the $140 billion spent on location targeted advertising in the U.S.

And thought they’re national in scope, many large brands — especially multi-location and franchised businesses — compete for consumers and mindshare at the local level, where conversions actually happen.  This has driven their early adoption of emerging areas like location based mobile advertising.

We discuss a few of these themes in the video below, and preview the location based mobile ad session. We hope this piques your interest and we’ll have more previews to come. Email me for a discount code if that helps your ability to join us in Dallas (mbolandATbiakelsey.com). Hope to see you there.

The post Video Preview: BIA/Kelsey’s National Conference, the Mobile Angle appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Franchises use more targeted marketing and advertising, are more engaged with their customers, and are also more disciplined across the full range of activities required in reaching and serving customers. They use more marketing tools and platforms, loyalty programs, mobile marketing, social media, cloud platforms, etc.

In particular, franchises are well ahead of other SMBs in their use of personalized, targeted digital media and platforms including Pinterest, mobile coupons and deals, text messages, Twitter ads, etc. Looking at the media usage findings from LCM is like looking into a new media laboratory (look out, MIT!).

Franchises estimate that about one-half of all their sales in the next 12 months will be through discount programs. This arrestingly-high reading is actually consistent with other behaviors of franchises — such as their near-saturation use of loyalty programs (and the personalized, targeted media mentioned above). Franchises are building close and deep relationships with their customers, and they’re accomplishing this by using a host of digital media and platforms.

The bottom line: Franchises might be viewed as a vanguard — showing us where the rest of the SMB world is heading.

Clients of the BIA/Kelsey Advisory Services can find the full report here.

The post Franchises as a Vanguard of the SMB World appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

It’s here! We have just announced the agenda for BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL. which takes place March 25-27 in Dallas.

The NATIONAL theme is especially important this year. Local technology and services have reached a level where they have fostered major relationships with national brands and retailers. At IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last year, we noted a poll by Operative that showed that local sales has now become the seventh most important revenue driver for CMOs. Our own BIA/Kelsey research shows that national players will spend more than $68 billion on local marketing by 2018.

We know this: Brands want to be part of this. Retailers want to be part of this. Franchisees want to be part of this. And so does local’s growing community of digital channel players and vendors.

All of them will be front and center at the third edition of BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, which we are co-chairing with 3rd Act Marketing’s Gregg Stewart (ex 15 Miles, TMP and Wahlstrom).

The agenda is now posted, with an initial slate of keynoters that includes Facebook’s Jon Czaja, whose portfolio includes the national franchise opportunity, where he leverages his experience at core national local leaders such as General Mills, eBay and Walmart; “Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google” author Aaron Goldman, Kenshoo‘s CMO, who shares his irreverent and critical take on search. social and mobile; and Geary LSF President and CEO Karen Kovaleski, who is spearheading national local strategies for such key brands as Bumble Bee, WD-40, Brooks Brothers and Ashley Furniture.

The brands themselves will be well represented at the show. The initial slate of brands at the event include key local targeting leaders from Brooks Brothers, El Pollo Loco, All My Sons Moving and Storage, ServiceMaster/American Home Shield and Rooms to Go.

Other speakers come from media leaders who are providing local solutions to national players, including Dallas Morning News SVP Grant Moise and Washington Post VP Ethan Selzer.

We’ll also hear from a number of top platform providers and agencies, including BizHive Chairman Dave Walker, ReachLocal VP Travis Arthur, Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel, Simpli.fi CEO Frost Prioleau, SpeakEasy CEO Mike Orren, LocalBizNow CEO Todd Webber and Soci CEO Afif Khoury.

Anchoring the whole show is the second edition of our GoLocal Awards, honoring the best efforts from national brands and rretailers(and their agencies) in local. We’re just getting started. Watch this space for frequent updates.

The post Mark Your Calendars: BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, March 25-27, Dallas appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Many in the advertising world can relate to the infamous quote by John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Advertisers are trying to combat this issue every day but now it appears that Sparkfly may have some answers to this age old struggle.

Sparkfly was founded by Catherine Tabor in 2001 in Atlanta, Georgia. She started in the online promotions business where she ran solutions with online coupon codes. “It was here that I recognized merchant’s desire to put a promotion out into the world digitally but then track the performance of that promotion in real time if possible through their physical point of sales system,” says Tabor. “So I embarked on developing a platform that would do that.”

She then explained that “the Sparkfly solution interfaces directly with a merchant’s point of sale system, and this enables the real time redemption of a SKU level promotion at the physical point of sale.”

So how does this platform work? It starts with a consumer on a mobile Web page; the user then clicks on an ad which takes them to a landing page powered by Sparkfly. The consumer is then provided with an on-demand code that times out in 20 minutes. The consumer can either scan the bar code that is provided or have the employee at the designated retail location enter the code at the register. As soon as that is done, the code goes to the system and is verified in real time providing immediate analytics, which enables brands to instantly recognize effective campaigns.

The Sparkfly platform can be integrated with over 20 different POS systems, which is a major benefit for companies with large franchise networks.

“We recently launched a program with a major restaurant chain and the interesting part about that program is that as a franchise network they actually run four different point of sales systems,” Tabor says. “Because our platform can very easily interface with any point of sales system we were able to interface with all of the systems they had and pull of those systems together so they could run one loyalty program as an organization.”

As noted in my recent blog post Franchisees See Mobile as the Future for Reaching Local Customers, mobile is on the rise in the national to local world and Sparkfly appears be consistent with that theme in their ability to bring national campaigns down to consumer’s personal mobile devices.

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