Managing budgets across franchise locations presents unique challenges for agencies, especially when dealing with complex, multichannel portfolios. Whether you’re managing five franchise locations or 500, your challenges are the same. You’re managing different budgets, goals, and strategies internally, even though your client sees (and expects) these components to be managed seamlessly under their umbrella brand.
For agencies managing franchise customers, the perils of budgeting—ranging from costly human errors to time-consuming processes—are all too familiar. Budget allocations must be precise and responsive to local market demands while ensuring accurate pacing and meeting key performance indicators (KPIs). But manual budgeting workflows are highly prone to human effort, increasing the risk for your agency.
Automation minimizes errors in budgeting by streamlining and centralizing core tasks, which compound when managing multiple franchise locations under a single umbrella brand. These tools are more accurate than manual budgeting processes. Plus, they save teams hours of budgeting work every week (and at month's end).
If you want to reduce the daily burden of franchise budget management and take a more streamlined approach, here are four ways that automation can make your franchise budgeting work more strategic, error-free, and efficient.
Manage portfolio-wide franchise budgets from a single platform
When channel budgets live in different locations, you can’t get a holistic view of a franchise client’s overall budget performance. For instance, determining when (and how) to reallocate budgets across channels to maximize ROI for a franchise customer requires reconciling dynamic per-channel numbers with static numbers in a spreadsheet. It’s impossible to get the equation right for every location every month.
Automation enables you to view, analyze, and move budgets for multiple franchise locations within a single dashboard. This gives you and your team complete budget visibility and control at all times. With advanced budgeting capabilities, such as automatic reallocation based on custom thresholds or criteria, automation can perform real-time adjustments that align with your strategic direction and goals for specific franchise locations.
For example, one of our enterprise marketing agency clients uses automation to manage budgeting workflows for more than 100 market locations across the United States. In total, the agency manages over 400 different budgets for the franchise! Budgeting automation tools enable them to execute over 2,000 budget adjustments every day!
As a result, the agency can achieve ideal pacing for over 100 franchise locations every month, while still spending less time on budgeting tasks than before.
Utilizing a single source of budget truth also enables you to make real-time adjustments that can be crucial in fast-paced industries. Consider a fast-food restaurant franchise that wants to launch a limited-time offer in key geographies. With automated budgeting tools, your team can swiftly reallocate funds to maximize reach and engagement for certain locations during the promotion, ensuring optimal performance without a ton of manual grunt work and stress.
Eliminate overspend and underspend
Overspend is always top of mind for agencies. If your team accidentally overspends, issuing credits at the start of every month can diminish customer trust and your bottom line.
At the same time, underspending leaves money on the table that could be in your pocket. Let’s say you charge a percent of a customer’s spend. If you miss that monthly spend number by 10%, that means you’re billing 10% less than expected. At scale, that can be really costly to your business. Underspending can also impact your revenue predictions, making it difficult to adequately forecast money coming in and out.
In short, whether you’re over or under budget, you may be having uncomfortable conversations with franchise customers about missed pacing targets. In both scenarios, you’re also feeling financial strain.
Automation can immediately eliminate both underspend and overspend issues. For example, if underspend is detected over the course of the month, automation can implement your pre-set strategic actions to ensure that spending targets are met for each location in the entire franchise portfolio.
On the flip side, if a budget is exhausted, it triggers automation rules that automatically pause campaigns (whether it’s at the campaign, account, or company level). This prevents overspend and keeps every account within strict budget limits.
In short, automation enables you to be more strategic because you can maximize budgets without jeopardizing overspend. You can rest assured that every dollar is accounted for and spent efficiently, even as changes arise during the month or performance doesn’t meet expectations. This means agencies can meet the unique needs of every franchise location while maximizing the impact of ad spend.
Generate budget proposals for new franchise locations instantly
Good news: your customer is launching a new franchise location and are looking for your team to scale their advertising efforts to this new market. But now that your team has to provide budget and strategy recommendations, do you have the data, insights, and capacity to do the necessary research for a full proposal?
Better news: with technology, you can have the data, insights, and capacity to provide proposals instantaneously. Rather than spending hours researching local competitors, geography, and other data, automation can deliver ideal spending and media mixes tailored to any location’s specific needs in seconds.
Streamlining the process of generating budget recommendations for new franchisees or locations means your team can spend less time pulling together the right data. It also means you have more time to pitch (or implement) your strategic expertise and recommendations. This saves your team time while also empowering them to deliver a data-driven, strategic media plan from day one.
Tailor budget pacing to individual franchise location goals
On the surface, budget pacing seems very straightforward. You want to spend a specific amount of money every month: not a dollar under, not a dollar under.
But oh, the reality is so much more complicated.
Generally speaking, one reason it's difficult to maintain pacing is that most channels don't have a way to input or manage monthly budgets. True, you can set daily budgets, but most customers think in terms of monthly or quarterly budgets.
As a result, you’re tasked with doing complex math every single day to reconcile what has already been spent with what you still need to spend before the end of the month. Now, multiply that complexity across multiple channels. You can see why pacing complexities compound quickly, making it nearly impossible to hit monthly budget goals using manual workflows.
Automation simplifies budget management for franchise campaigns by enabling you to instantly enact specific pacing strategies tailored to each location’s unique needs. Depending on franchise goals, monthly budget amounts, and local market demands, you can implement multiple pacing options that align your strategic approach with the needs of different locations.
Here are some examples of different pacing options:
- Strong start: Prioritize spending more at the beginning of the month to capitalize on early opportunities.
- Strong finish: Spend more toward the end of the month to push last-minute promotions or achieve performance goals.
- Weekdays: Allocate the majority of your budget to weekdays, if this is when a franchise location sees more traffic.
- Weekends: Focus more ad spend on weekends to meet specific market demands.
- Front-loaded business week: Direct spending to the beginning of the business week, which is ideal for locations with strong early-week sales patterns.
- Segmented: Break up your full monthly budget into dedicated allocations for specific time periods, ensuring consistent pacing during the month.
- Metric-based: Adjust pacing based on user engagement, allowing agencies to select a key metric or performance goal to drive budget allocation.
Implementing automated pacing strategies can deliver significant time savings for your agency. One of our clients reduced their weekly budget time from 15 hours per week to 1.5 hours per week: a 90% decrease in time spent on budgeting tasks!
As a result, the team doubled the amount of time spent on optimizing campaign performance and responding to client requests. Plus, they could spend a full day every week toward making internal process and team improvements: something they had zero time to do before using automation. Redirecting 20% of their workweek to strategic planning and process improvements has resulted in better performance, more engaged teams, and improved customer service.
The budget management revolution is here
Automated budgeting tools are revolutionizing the way agencies manage franchise accounts, offering a strategic edge in a competitive market. By streamlining operations and minimizing errors, these budgeting tools free you from the tedious, error-prone manual processes that have long plagued budget management.
As a result, you can focus more on strategic decision-making and less on time-consuming, error-prone administrative tasks. You can deliver precise, real-time budget adjustments that meet the unique needs of each franchise location, ensuring optimal spend and maximum impact. Ultimately, embracing automated budgeting tools not only strengthens your agency’s service capacity but also builds stronger, more satisfying relationships with franchise clients, positioning your team as a vital partner in your customers’ success.
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