About the author
I spent my senior year of high school in Western New York working at Tim Horton’s, a beloved Canadian coffee and donut chain. I spent my weekend mornings handing orders out the drive thru window, my school day afternoons blending up Ice Capps, and an occasional late-night shift cutting it up with the overnight baker. While I was a teen at the time (working to have my own money to spend at the mall), as a marketing professional now I look back on this time as instructive.
At Envisionit, we support several multi-unit business structures, and my many hours of fast food labor gave me unique perspectives on how we build success for these brands. While the book of clients we support aren’t fast food (some far from it actually, being in the healthcare space), the concept for delivering success is similar, and so are the pitfalls.
Marketing for these businesses is something I often think of as simple in concept, complex in execution. Multi-unit business marketing requires thinking about your business as two components:
- The overarching brand
- The individual locations—in fast food terms, the corporate brand and the franchise locations.
In this post, you will learn:
- How to balance a unified brand with engaging local assets
- How to use a mix of full-funnel tactics to gain and maintain the attention of your audience
- How to identify the must-haves from the nice-to-haves to define your brand and deliver a comprehensive experience for your customers
The dos of multi-unit marketing
DO ensure you create, define, and adhere to a unified, overarching brand
Without a unified brand, our two component framework shatters like a dropped coffee pot. Each location technically comes from the same foundation, but is now fractured and disparate. Some pieces are larger than others, some are different shapes, and it’s very difficult to put them back together.
A unified brand centers your business’s individual locations and their customers, so long as each location adheres to it. It’s imperative to ensure each location speaks the same language, understands the overarching brand ethos and guidelines, and commits to operating in a way that adheres to that ethos. This builds the foundation for your marketing to rest upon.
DO define your uniques and localize your brand to boost engagement
Start by defining your “uniques.” Is it a guaranteed low wait time? Use of cutting edge technology? A competitive price point? Each location must operate on these shared principles. For example, you wouldn’t run a Tim Horton’s location without an Ice Capp on the menu (or for our non-Northeast readers, a McDonald’s without a Big Mac).
The baseline expectation is that each customer should walk into any location and expect the same core level of service. Similarly, your marketing materials should highlight your unified brand, but can be enhanced and tailored to individual locations. Consider adding localized flair to branded assets to drive local engagement and create a feeling of authenticity. Tapping into localized language, slang, jokes or interests can drive up to 6x more engagement on social media. That engagement builds trust with local markets, and that in turn can translate into revenue.
DO equip your business units with the tools to follow your overarching brand
This is where the “simple in concept, complex in execution” part comes in.
A Tim Horton’s unique is that in-house drip coffee is served in a ceramic mug. Now this may not sound like a big deal, but try telling that to your favorite regulars who come in expecting to sit with their coffee and a newspaper every Sunday afternoon. The ceramic mug is a token of comfort and familiarity—one of the things that distinguished Tim’s from the Dunkin’ down the street and kept our regulars coming back.
Part of managing marketing for multi-unit businesses is ensuring that each clinic’s operations are thoroughly briefed on these uniques and equipped to keep up.
What this looks like in practice is ensuring every location has branded signage, the same service lines, and the same capacity to carry out what sets your brand apart. From a marketing perspective, ensure that each location has the same language, creative look and feel, and user experience. If a location is not able to meet these standards, allocate resources to address them.
Similarly, ensure each location is equipped for success with full-funnel marketing tactics.
- Broad awareness tactics that reach a wide audience can help elevate your brand’s visibility and recognition. Think: high-impact channels that capture attention, like television and out-of-home. Leverage these channels to define what makes your brand unique, and what customers can expect when they walk through your doors.
- Data-powered channels such as Connected CTV (or CTV) can refine your audience based on demographic information, interests, and behaviors. This can trim expenses from traditional awareness-oriented campaigns by honing in on the right customers.
- Low and mid-funnel tactics such as social media advertising and paid search can capture your customers when they’re ready to convert, and can be used as testing grounds to identify the messaging that gets prospective customers over the finish line.
Check out how you can maximize appointment scheduling through CTV, OTT, and SEO.
The final stage of a multi-unit business funnel is the customer experience itself—whether on-site or in-store, each location should consistently deliver on the promises made in your marketing. In short, if your location doesn’t have ceramic mugs, order them.
The do-nots of multi-unit marketing
DO NOT force a one-size fits all approach onto every location
Ok, so we have our brand. We have our uniques, we have our rules and standard operating procedures. Things are simple in concept. However, we know that not every location of every business is made equal. Large brands may need to contend with regional or cultural preferences. Even a small brand may need to reckon with locations with increased competition in the area, lower foot traffic, or other nuances. Things are complex in execution.
Understand and be flexible with the knowledge that certain locations will have specific needs, and will need special attention to address them. In practice, tailor your goals and level set your expectations. Understand that competition in a region may raise costs and lift your CPA. Understand that some locations may need to tinker and adjust, and embrace using individual locations as testing grounds for new ideas or localized tactics.
Let’s torture our fast food analogy once more. Some Tim Horton’s locations received more flavors of donuts than others, or limited releases of seasonal items. What works in one location doesn’t always need to be applied everywhere.
It may be that boston creme sells across the entire US, but maple glazed doesn’t. Keep what works, remove what doesn’t. So long as you adhere to your core overarching brand, it’s not only okay, but necessary and encouraged to allow for your Vermont Tim Horton’s to keep maple glazed donuts on the menu, even if we don’t have them in Ohio. Lean on insights from the operators of your individual locations and trust them to understand what their market needs.
DO NOT neglect the customer journey
There’s a lot to manage with multi-unit business marketing, and it’s easy to get caught up in how we as marketers balance our two-faceted strategies for overarching brands and individual locations. In doing so, it can be easy to forget where the customer fits into the equation.
In the B2B space, lead nurturing campaigns can be neglected. Ensure that each location has the ability to identify and nurture leads (via their website, CRM, etc.), and understand that most customers require more than one touchpoint to take them from the top of the funnel to the bottom. Keep in contact with leads through email drip campaigns that leverage your overarching brand’s voice to communicate your core value propositions.
Additionally, consider lead magnet campaigns, which engage prospects with your company in exchange for their contact information. These tactics allow you to share branded content with prospective customers, giving them valuable information to explain your products or services in detail or resources to consider when making a purchase decision, lending your business authority and thought leadership while giving you touchpoints with your prospects that you can target later via email drip campaigns.
In the B2C space, the same theory applies, but remarketing to repeat customers or cart abandoners can be a more effective tactic, as the marketing funnel can look more like a wheel (dare I say, donut) than a triangle. Leverage your learnings from your localized tests to keep customers engaged and curious to come back.
It’s been about 15 years since I greeted a customer with a “Thanks for choosing Tim Horton’s! This is Chelsea, how can I help you?” through a drive thru speaker, but I’m pleasantly surprised at how much branding expertise I took away from my brief stint doing so.
At Envisionit, we combine diverse expertise with strategic precision to craft media and marketing solutions that spotlight what makes your brand unique—and ensure it reaches the right audience at the right time.
Ready to take your multi-unit business to the next level? Let’s talk.
