This post, Off on the right foot, can be read on our new blog by clicking this link.

I am proud to announce that Quiznos has selected the Balihoo platform to drive all marketing at a local level. The

marketing department at Quiznos has been looking for an integrated solution to drive demand at the local level and when they found Balihoo it was a perfect fit. The Balihoo platform will provide the 4000+ franchise owners of Quiznos with a simple to use, yet powerful marketing platform to both create and execute campaigns across 14 different media types from Television to Pay Per Click, In-Store to E-mail.

Quiznos is a very forward thinking franchise and has recognized the fact that high quality local marketing is critical to the success of their organization and their franchisees. We are thrilled that they have identified Balihoo as their solution to implementing national quality marketing at the local level.

Bringing Quiznos on to the platform continues our long string of growth, which we have been able to sustain even during these difficult economic times. You can read more about the win here

Joel Libava, aka “The Franchise King“, posts a valuable blog post on the OPEN FORUM at American Express:  Franchise Execs, Are You Planning For An Upturn?

Lots of good tips for franchise organizations looking to capitalize on an economic turnaround, of course my favorite is:

“You may want to get your franchisee’s local marketing activities more automated. I found some folks who specialize in this through Twitter. Check out Balihoo.com “

As a company dedicated to providing franchise organizations and national brands with the most effective and efficient local marketing automation solutions, we are unsurprisingly frequently asked questions about joining the franchise industry. We are often asked whether it is wise to join a franchise during the recession. The Idaho Stateman just published an exerpt from an article written by our CEO, Pete Gombert in which he addresses this question.

Read Pete’s full article here:

Starting up: If You Want to Own a Franchise, Here’s What You Should Know

Franchising tends to increase during a recession as many aspiring entrepreneurs, driven by layoffs or job changes, finally decide to make their leap. Before leaping, astute future franchisees invariably seek to understand the benefits and challenges they’ll face – fortunately, the benefits are well-documented and accurate, but the most fundamental challenge is too often misunderstood.

Many aspiring franchisees assume that their biggest challenge will be executing within the franchise system, but they quickly find that while running the system is important, the ultimate challenge is translating national strategy to address variables in a local market. Jason Bowman, owner of several Sport Clips franchises in Boise, puts it best: “Franchising is much more than just executing against a system, there are a ton of local challenges and constant adjustments franchisees make depending on the situation.”

Here are just a few of the local challenges franchisees face:

Location. Location can be “everything” and the most important early decision a franchisee makes is often selecting a location. Understanding such things as geography, community planning initiatives, and real estate trends are critical to success.

Competition. Competition varies greatly by region and consists of other franchises, national retailers, mom and pop shops, larger well-established local brands, or alternatives to your product or service.

Employment. Franchisees need to recruit and retain employees that can help build and advance the franchise’s reputation. Dwight Mogford, owner of the Mr. Handyman franchise in Boise, aptly explains, “The face and reputation of Mr. Handyman is largely determined by the people we hire. Though the franchisor can offer guidance, it is up to the franchisee to choose the right people to execute their vision.”

Marketing. Building a brand locally and generating local demand are two key responsibilities of a franchisee. Tactics for reaching an audience can vary greatly by region, often down to the neighborhood level, and understanding the creative elements that work best in combination with the shifting world of advertising media and public relations – such as online, newspapers, and social media like Twitter and Facebook – are all daunting challenges the franchisee must address.

Those are greatly disparate challenges – how can you best address all of them? The key is to look for franchisors that not only have a strong brand and proven system, but also provide solutions that help the franchisee solve local issues. This is where good franchisors separate themselves from the pack and aspiring franchisees should research diligently to determine whether the franchisor offers the following:

Information – franchisors can help share data, best practices, and lessons learned via technology and by connecting franchisees through networking, regular events, and training.

Expertise – many franchisors make experts readily available to franchisees, often for free or at subsidized rates. For example, some franchisors provide real estate consultants for store openings and some provide dedicated marketing professionals in each market.

Execution – franchisors can help eliminate time-consuming, non-core tasks to enable franchisees to best focus on managing their business. Examples of this include recruiting screening tools and marketing fulfillment services or technologies.

It’s important to keep in mind that no matter how good these solutions are, the franchisee’s ultimate responsibility is to drive local strategy by making decisions across a spectrum of business challenges. This leads to perhaps the most important observation I’ve made in working with franchisees throughout the country – franchise success is most highly correlated to the people that run them, and not necessarily to the national brand or system.

The common traits shared by successful franchisees include demonstrated skill at solving a wide variety of challenges and an incredible passion for building a local brand. At the same time, successful franchisees acknowledge they can’t solve all problems themselves, and thus they are readily willing to rely upon the franchise for support. If you think you are this type of person, franchising may be for you – just remember to look for franchisors that set themselves apart with the tools and services they provide.

I think it’s safe to assume that most tourists who visit The Leaning Tower take that same silly picture, you know the one I’m talking about and if you don’t, here’s a few examples to help you along.

A new campaign by McDonald’s UK is playing on this very idea. It’s pretty clever. When else would the Golden Arches go home with thousands of tourists in their vacation photo album to be viewed by friends and family over and over again?

As media professionals, we are constantly trying to combat the fact that consumers are taking control of their media consumption, but the fast food giant is finding ways to embrace the shift in culture and encourage interaction with their brand. As a marketer that struggles with this every day, I think the execution is brilliant.

McDonald’s Piccadilly Circus

Holy crap!  When I picked up my Saturday Edition of the Wall Street Journal this weekend something just didn’t feel right.  So, I squeezed it – kinda’ like a pack of Charmin - and shook it – kinda’ like a wrapped Christmas present - and to my surprise noticed a scintilla of red peeking out of the top right corner of the paper.  What was this?  I have been reading the Journal since I was a kid - not because I was an aspiring businessman, per se, but my father was a union newspaperman and every weekday morning he’d bring home all the New York area union-affiliated newspapers and I would wake up in all my glory to read them: The New York Times, The Daily News, The Wall St Journal, The Star ledger (NJ), even The Racing Form, which made me know way too much about handicapping as a little kid.  I’ve continued to read the Journal consistently for years, so the small difference in the paper’s pliability was readily apparent to me, and I can verifiably say this is the first time I saw a foreign document hidden inside the bounds of The Journal.

What was hiding inside was an FSI, otherwise known as “Free Standing Insert”, which we laymen call a circular.  You probably know them well because they appear in just about every Sunday paper and over the years have become more commonplace in daily papers and via the mail.  This particular FSI was a colorful, four-pager for Regus office centers.

Despite my shock at seeing the FSI in the Journal, I think it could signal some changes that are occurring in the newspaper marketplace.  I have no “inside” knowledge of this, so just taking some guesses, but if there was a purposeful decision by the Journal to open up to FSI advertising, I think that’s a good sign for newspapers in general.  This prompted a bunch of questions in my mind.  We all hear how bad newspapers have been doing, so has the WSJ changed or expanded its advertising model?  Are advertisers driving this change because FSI’s are more effective than standard run-of-press (ROP) ads within the paper, and thus will advertisers have more options/flexibility with FSI’s?  If newspapers offer more flexibility and capabilities for FSI advertisers, could they help boost their revenue?

I’m particularly interested in these questions because FSI’s are a component of our business at Balihoo.  Through our local marketing solution, we offer users the ability to customize and place an advertisement in every medium. FSI is a big part of this, especially since so many of our users utilize FSI as part of an integrated campaign.  Essentially, they customize their ad (oftentimes in many places on the sheet(s)), then with the click of a button the FSI is sent to a best-in-class printer, drop-shipped to the paper of their choosing, and run in the paper at the right time to coincide with their campaign.  I often hear “FSI is more effective than ROP,” so again, I’m wondering if advertisers essentially drove the WSJ to open up this form of advertising within their hallowed paper.

What does this all mean to advertisers? Maybe it’s a leading indicator that newspaper advertising will evolve - we at Balihoo certainly believe FSI advertising works today and should be a part of an integrated campaign for many of our customers.   But we firmly believe newspapers need to do more to help their advertisers.  Offering more comprehensive “solutions” to advertisers around FSI could be one path.

FSI’s already offer many benefits over ROP advertising: users can vary messaging in FSI’s to test different offers, more easily geo-target their ads, and given the size the advertiser can ensure their identity isn’t lost in a small news ad while having more “room to play” with things like multiple coupon offers and such.  But to do some of these things requires quite a bit of leg work on the advertisers’ behalf and newspapers could essentially change their model to help alleviate some of this legwork.

Some ideas I have on how newspapers could improve their offering: first, they can make geo-targeting and testing easier and seamless for the advertiser by offering more consultation to their advertisers and partnering with FSI printers to offer turnkey packages.  Second, they could open up more of their research to their advertisers – again, this could come from a consultant at the newspaper who works closely with the advertisers to ensure they are reaching their audience in the most effective way.  Finally, they could do more to help their customers advertise in an integrated fashion by offering “packages” that combine FSI and other complementary media so they all revolve around the same campaign theme – for example, text ads and direct mail that speak to the same offer as the FSI.

If newspapers are going to “save themselves” they need to be truly solutions oriented.  Just my thoughts!

Some Friday afternoon fiddling with Animoto brought about this video as a thank-you to our latest customer additions: 

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that mobile advertising is growing, but far off last year’s predicted pace.  Spending on mobile advertising is expected to be about $200 Million this year, far off the expected $1 Billion, but still up significantly from $120 Million in 2008.

Like several other media we’ve mentioned in past blogs, the cost of mobile advertising is down with the economy.  Think about it - some of these mobile advertisers are hurting ($200 Million doesn’t allow too many companies to stay in business, many of whom expected huge growth this year).  The situation warrants you to think, “How can I use mobile advertising to my advantage?”

First off, there are many different ways to advertising via mobile - these include text ads, either via standard SMS or via bluetooth, display (banner) ads, mobile gaming, or video - for more info see this wikipedia post.  There are a lot of ways you could deploy mobile advertising, but we at Balihoo are strong advocates of a “test and control” approach to advertising, especially in newer media, and we think a great way to try mobile is through a limited test. So, here is ONE approach you as a local store owner could use:

Mobile is best for a younger demographic (18-25 or maybe up to 35) - using it for older demographics could work, but may not be worth the risk.  Additionally, mobile is better for driving demand than it is for branding, so think about “testing” a demand generation campaign toward a younger audience, perhaps versus another medium that has worked for you in the past, like direct mail or pay-per-click.  Allocate the same budget to both mediums and use consistent messaging or offers (e.g. same coupon amount) to ensure you don’t unduly influence the test.  Launch your campaign during the same timeframes, again, to limit external influences on your test.

The hardest part will be determining how much to spend - you need to make sure you spend enough to ensure the sample size is large enough to yield believable results.  This can be tricky - there are sample size calculators (http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html) but if this is confusing, I’d strongly recommend you hire an ad agency.  The final step will be measuring the result - a good approach would using a coupon, which will allow you to monitor the lead source whether you have a good point-of-sale system (to capture the coupon) or not.

One of the cool things about mobile advertising is many companies now offer the ability to “geo-target” - that is, send a text message when a mobile user is within a certain locale.  For example, one time I was visiting San Francisco (I live in Idaho) and got a text message with a coupon for a certain coffee shop in San fran.  I thought it was pretty cool and proceeding to buy my coffee there!  If you are a location-oriented business (like one that depends on foot traffic in a city or mall), this might be a good approach for you.

OK, so you want to do it, but are asking, “How do I buy mobile advertising?”  There are several ways.  You can buy direct from a cell phone carrier (Verizon, Sprint, etc), through a mobile ad network, or through an ad or media agency.  Each has its advantages and disadvantages - going direct could give you more control and visibility, but likely provide less reach and could be costlier, going through an ad network could be cheaper and give you greater reach, but will provide less control over who sees your ads, while using an agency could also be more expensive, but should come with lots of advice and experience.  Remember, just because the latter two are more expensive per message, doesn’t mean they won’t be more effective, which could result in better return on your investment.

Another way we’ve bought mobile is actually through other media owners – for example, some radio stations have lists of listeners who have opted-in to receive text ads – this could be a great way to reach a very targeted demographic who will be responsive to mobile ads.  It may take a little more legwork to find such lists, but the results could be well worth the effort.

Using a “test and control” approach is a great way to get started in any new medium - it limits your risk in trying new things for your business.  Think of the money as a “tuition” - an investment in learning and hopefully improving relative to your competition.

Kudos to Pet Butler who announced their 2008 financials today and demonstrated 20% revenue growth and a 29% increase in the number of franchisees.  From the CEO: 

“The Pet Butler family has definitely been blessed and protected during these tough economic times.” says Founder and CEO, Matt “Red” Boswell.  “I attribute our growth to 3 factors: great people within our organization, a strong pet industry and busier-than-ever pet owners who just don’t have the time to ‘mess’ with the mess.”

Some interesting 2008 accomplishments you just can’t overlook:

All kidding aside, it’s a great accomplishment and truly amazing growth figures given the economic situation of 2008.  Congrats Pet Butler! 

Here at Balihoo we talk about how franchisors can create and implement a “Breakthrough Local Store Marketing Strategy”.  Is your LSM Strategy Breakthrough?  If you can’t answer a resounding YES to the below questions, it’s time to review the strategies and tools you have in place to enable local demand generation efforts:

6 Questions to discover if your LSM Strategy is Breakthrough:

1. Are all local store marketing effort implemented by my franchisees 100% in concert with our national brand?
2. Are my marketing and advertising materials currently being distributed to all franchisees in the most effective, cost-efficient manner possible?
3. Are we leveraging our national buying power to get the best pricing for local marketing efforts across all mediums?
4. Do my franchisees all have a clear and actionable local marketing strategy that leverages best-practices across the entire network?
5. Do I make marketing EASY for my franchisees so they can focus more on running their business?
6. Do I have clear visibility into all local marketing efforts including creative, spend and results? 

 Can’t answer yes to all the above?  We can help - complete local store marketing solution for franchisors.