As an agency, managing franchise accounts feels synonymous with managing inefficient task workflows. This is primarily due to the inefficiencies of traditional management methods that demand manual execution and drain resources. Streamlined processes are essential to uphold brand consistency while meeting local market needs.
But what if you could free your team from the stress of manual, repetitive tasks and give them back time and energy to focus on strategic growth and creativity? Automation can help.
We’re going to explore how automation helps agencies with two key struggles when running ads on behalf of a franchise customer: campaign management and localized targeting.
Improved campaign management for better results and faster workflows
Automation plays a crucial role by enhancing efficiency and responsiveness, enabling agencies to maintain consistent brand messaging and swiftly adapt to local opportunities. This technological edge strengthens customer relationships and boosts operational effectiveness in franchise management.
Here are some ways that automation improves franchise campaign management for agencies:
Automate unified, on-brand frameworks for scalability
Your agency already has a playbook for how to manage specific franchise clients. But what does this playbook look like? Most agency playbooks are stagnant docs or PDFs that teams manually work through step by step to build out new channels, accounts, or locations. This is a waste of valuable time and your team’s talents.
Fluency empowers agencies to take these static playbook docs and create dynamic advertising frameworks known as Blueprints. These Blueprints centralize data, assets, campaign requirements, and strategies for franchise programs.
With Blueprints, teams can automate the execution and management of localized advertising across multiple platforms and channels. This ensures that every campaign aligns with the broader brand strategy while maintaining a unique, local identity.
For instance, Five Mile Marketing saw a 30% increase in lead and impression performance within the first month of using Fluency for a major customer with a 200-location franchise system. The operational efficiencies gained from automation, combined with actionable insights from real-time reporting, drove this significant improvement.
Manage last-minute ad changes in bulk, with ease
For most ad agencies, unexpected copy or creative changes are just another part of the job. Agencies handling franchise accounts know that last-minute requests are inevitable.
However, there’s a big difference between changing a few ads and changing copy across an entire multi-location campaign. The scope of a last-miunte change can make a big difference in the workload and stress of your team.
But what if there wasn’t a workload (and stress) discrepancy between changing one ad or changing 100 ads? Automation equips agencies with the tools they need to to swiftly manage changes across entire franchise portfolios, eliminating while keeping campaigns accurate and responsive to local opportunities.
“The ability to make changes across an entire portfolio, whether that's multiple accounts or various assets within one account, especially in bulk actions like location targeting, is a huge improvement from our previous processes,” said Brittany West, Sr. Director of Marketing Services at CyberMark.
For example, agencies can find and replace keywords across an individual account, a group of accounts, or an entire portfolio. You can also take a more nuanced approach and choose if you want to make keyword changes to all keywords or just keywords within a specific campaign or ad group. Bulk changes can also be made to ad copy, too, saving teams a significant amount of time that can go right back into strategizing.
Swap out multi-location promotional copy in minutes
Scheduled edits, like changing out ad copy when promotions, inventory, or sales change, can also be managed more effectively with automation. Whether it’s a weekend event or a one-day promotion, automation tools like Broadcast allow agencies to update ad copy across multiple channels or locations in seconds.
Agencies can even plan ahead for upcoming events or promotions by pre-scheduling Broadcasts. This also guarantees that promotional campaigns launch on-time across every channel and location. Once a promotion ends, ad copy automatically resets to the original version so long-term franchise strategies remain intact and consistent.
Adapting quickly to franchisee needs agencies can maintain strong customer relationships and demonstrate their ability to respond to last-minute opportunities without compromising broader campaign goals.
Scalable customization for local markets
When agencies manage localized marketing efforts on behalf of a franchise, there’s a lot at stake. Agencies must prove that they understand (and can act upon) the local nuances of specific geographics. To target multiple local audiences effectively, though, agencies often need to put in a lot of time and effort into customizing copy, images, and campaigns around colloquial elements.
And if you can’t craft your ad efforts to the local market? The unique appeal of a local franchise business is often diluted in pursuit of broad targeting due to resource constraints. This loss of localization diminishes the relevance of marketing messages for local audiences and undermines the strengths and community ties that local businesses rely on for success.
Automation tools like Fluency solve this problem by enabling agencies to scale localization efforts efficiently, delivering tailored campaigns that cater to the unique needs of each franchise location.
With scalable customization tools, agencies can:
Manage unique local elements at scale
Managing unique inventory, promotions, and local events across franchise locations can turn into a keystroke nightmare. Most agencies running franchise ads manually add, remove, and change localized elements. Working in this way makes it difficult to keep campaigns and creative up to date.
With automation, agencies can seamlessly integrate localized details across all locations by integrating data directly from the source. This eliminates the need for manual work and triple-checking what your customer sent over in an Excel doc before launching a campaign.
Ads remain relevant and locally customized, automatically updating whenever data feeds change. This ensures that each franchise location can quickly adjust to local events—such as seasonal sales or competitor pricing changes—in real time, maximizing both relevance and effectiveness.
Automatically apply franchise strategies when local data is missing
When agencies don’t receive specific information from a franchise customer, automation ensures that the franchise’s strategy continues to run in compliance with brand guidelines. Setting and automating default content guarantees no franchise location is left out if localized data is missing.
For example, you can set up a default 15-mile radius for geo-targeting that is automatically applied if specific location data isn’t provided. Building automaton like this into your strategy ensures that all campaigns remain accurate, effective, and aligned with the overall franchise strategy—even if specific local data isn’t used.
Uphold brand messaging and compliance across locations
When you’re running campaigns on behalf of a franchise, it can be hard to ensure every message and ad you’re running is on-brand. Managing ads for franchises within a regulated industry, like a pharmacy chain or regional healthcare company, comes with additional challenges. You must make sure every ad adheres to federal, state, and/or board regulations required within that particular industry.
Fluency’s system empowers agencies to effortlessly uphold brand guidelines and compliance requirements, significantly reducing the risk of costly errors while maintaining a consistent brand message across all locations. By automating brand compliance, agencies ensures that ads are deployed efficiently, with pre-set rules in place to keep everything aligned with both brand standards and legal guidelines.
You can also build in automated safeguards that double-check ads with particular images, copy, or promotions. For instance, when advertising a specific drug, AI can ensure that every ad featuring the drug also includes the appropriate benefits and risk copy. Any ads without the benefits/risk copy can be flagged for human review or edits before turning live.
Used in this way, automation streamlines the compliance process, providing peace of mind that every campaign remains on-brand and compliant—regardless of the scale or complexity of the advertising program.
Don’t let manual processes hold you back
Managing multi-location franchise customers requires precision, flexibility, and efficiency. Each of those necessities is hard to deliver if you’re still stuck using manual workflows and disjointed processes to deliver multi-location results.
Looking for a place to start? Audit your current processes and workflows for automation opportunities. Think about some of the mundane, time-consuming tasks on your plate: moving data between spreadsheets, daily budget and bid adjustments, or building updated reports. These types of tasks are ideal for automation to take over from your team.
By centralizing workflows and offloading manual tasks to automation, agencies can deliver better performance, reduce workloads, and focus on driving strategic growth for their franchise customers.
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