Balancing Brand Consistency and Local Market Empowerment in Franchising

Intro: Coming to you live from the Business RadioX studio. It’s Franchise Marketing Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Franchise Marketing Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have the CEO with Reshift Media, Steve Buors. Welcome.

Steve Buors: Hey. Thanks, Lee. Happy to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. For folks who aren’t familiar, can you tell us a little bit about Reshift? How you serving folks?

Steve Buors: Absolutely. So we specialize in working with franchise systems. We’re a digital marketing firm, been around about 14 years. We do everything from build websites to apps, social media, search, advertising, and everything in between. And I’m happy to say along the way, we’ve picked up a couple of awards. We were named the world’s best franchise marketing firm by the Global Franchise Awards a few years in a row, and we’ve topped entrepreneurs category for franchise suppliers a few times.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How’d you get interested in the franchising world?

Steve Buors: Well it’s funny, so I actually worked on the media side for a number of years. I was an executive in a newspaper publishing company, if you can believe that. I was the head of digital, though. So I was the guy launching all the websites back in the day pre-internet for website or for newspapers back then, and really enjoyed it. But as I kept working on it, I could very much see that there was a whole opportunity in the agency side of the business. So myself and my business partner, Kirk decided to open an agency. Our first client happened to be a franchise system, and we saw right away that, oh my goodness, like there was so much opportunity to help franchise organizations with digital marketing because the honest answer is the tools available then, and even even still now really aren’t built for franchise companies. So we said, look, we can we can do a better job of this. And next thing you know, the rest is history.

Lee Kantor: So when you started kind of working with franchisors and started learning of their pains and needs, what kind of struck you as meaningful enough that you said, you know what, we’re going all in here. Let’s not kind of be an everything shop. We are going to be the go to franchisor shop.

Steve Buors: I really enjoyed the franchising business model, if I can be honest, because there’s something so elegant about the fact that you have a great business, a great idea, a great brand, repeatable processes, and you have all these people who want to own their own business but don’t necessarily, you know, want to be in business all by themselves who are entrepreneurs in their own right. And you work together. And so you’re able to now scale a business in a way you never could as an individual company. I thought that was amazing. And as we dug into it, we saw more and more that that business model, while it has many, many, many benefits when it came to digital marketing was really complicated. And so we were like, well, we know this is a good business model. We know that it works around the world. We have clients now in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, etc. and we said we could add some real value here. And I’m happy to say, you know, 14 years later, I think we’re doing a pretty good job of that.

Lee Kantor: Now, are your clients, um, kind of established franchise brands or are they emerging franchise brands? Are they in the B2C, B2B? Um, what do you have a niche?

Steve Buors: Uh, all, all types of franchises. So we have quite a number of well-known, well-established franchise organizations we work with. I love working with new emerging brands because I love seeing the new concepts coming out. Like there is a franchise for almost every industry. It’s your average layperson has no idea how powerful franchising is in our economy. So I really enjoy working with new franchise systems. I enjoy sharing the knowledge I’ve learned, helping them avoid some pitfalls, and we work across a whole bunch of different categories. Obviously, you know, QSR is a big one, but we work in all kinds of different industries. We have dumpster rental franchises, batting cage franchises, lawn care franchises, you, you name it, we’re in it.

Lee Kantor: Now, since you do work with emerging brands and we have a lot of listeners here are, um, part are in that world. Can you share some of the challenges and emerging brand faces? Because there are a lot of times they’re at the stage where they obviously have just figured out how to replicate themselves, but now their business is in a transition of, now, I’m not trying to get another local client for my shop. I’m trying to sell somebody on the idea they should buy this, you know, in another state. So that’s a different business. Do you have anything in your like when they work with you? Are you helping them make that transition a little smoother?

Steve Buors: Absolutely. We’re helping actually in two aspects there. We’re helping on the franchise development side. We have a whole franchise development arm where we’re helping franchise organizations find new franchisees. But once they start to open those new locations, we’re also on the B2C side where we’re helping with getting new customers. And I can tell you the number one thing that tends to surprise franchise organizations as they start to scale. Once you get over 20, 30, 40 locations, um, they find that they hit this point where their marketing stops working or it becomes too complex or too hard to manage. And that’s because scaling digital marketing is actually really hard. It’s not like a TV or radio or direct mail or print where, you know, I use my, my ad fund and I can run a TV commercial across all my markets or a radio commercial. I have consistency, I have scale, I have cost efficiency, that’s all great. But on digital marketing, Local wins. Right? Consumers are searching locally. They’re engaging locally. They’re reading local reviews. They’re following local social media accounts, and they’re making decisions more and more based on what’s happening in their own communities. And so from a scalability perspective, it gets really hard to replicate a local model, but still be scalable. And so what ends up happening is a lot of emerging franchise systems. They hit a point where they’ve been doing it through sheer force of effort. They just they keep hiring more people or you got that one marketing person. Everyone has them in their marketing department who’s working like 18 hours a day. And they’re holding everything together with sheer force of will. And it eventually gets to a point where it breaks. And what we try and do with emerging systems is we help them put the right foundations in place, the right systems in place, so that way they can in fact scale their digital marketing properly.

Lee Kantor: So how do you help them kind of manage the content that’s coming out of local shops that is their own original content, while still protecting the brand as a whole and making sure that the content that’s coming out is kind of congruent with the messaging they’d like to see, because that seems like herding cats.

Steve Buors: You’ve just asked the billion dollar question because that is we work on that every single day. Is that friction between the head office who wants consistency and the local franchisee who wants flexibility? And candidly, both both are right. The head office, they’re trying to protect the brand. Like the brand is literally what you own as a franchisor. And so it’s really important that you’re not letting anything happen that damages that brand. It’s critically important as a franchisee, you know, if I own a location and I want to grow my business, I want the flexibility to do that. I’m an entrepreneur in my own right, and I’m paying money to be able to run my own business. And so that friction is sometimes unhealthy. But I think it can be healthy because what you want to do is put in a process and it’s a mix of trust technology and actual like, you know, sort of business rules and just the way you do business in terms of having that collaboration and communication. And we tend to solve a lot of it by having shared technology platforms where the head office can create campaigns or create social posts. The local person can see it, customize it within certain guardrails, and deploy it quickly and easily through a combination of technology. And, as I said, business rules. And so what you get is the best of both worlds, where you’re using technologies and enabler to facilitate collaboration and communication, which then allows you to have a better product where the head office still sets the strategy. Head office still makes sure that creatives on point, you know, we’re all rowing in the same direction here, folks, to make sure that we’re all trying to achieve similar objectives. But that local person within, you know, certain guardrails has flexibility to maybe change the offer or change the wording or add something local about their community. So they’re still getting that additional benefit.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, it’s a tricky, uh, relationship to navigate because on one hand, the franchisor is selling the franchisee this, hey, be your own boss. And then in their mind, they think they have maybe more autonomy than they think than they really have.

Steve Buors: Well, it’s true, and we’ve dedicated more than a decade to that exact friction point. Because in the crux of it, once you can solve that, you’ve solved digital marketing for franchise organizations. Once you’ve been able to establish, um, an approach that gives the franchise owner flexibility to be able to do those local things, you know, be able to create a local post or a local search campaign or to update their local Google business profile. But the head office still gets visibility into analytics, making sure that the creatives on point, making sure we’re not using an old logo from three years ago or something. Um, once you can establish that process and get the right technology in place, you kind of get your cadence where everybody’s working through the same approach. It’s actually quite magical because that is how franchising is supposed to work, and that’s how you can scale it. I find when franchisors either try and centralize too hard, where it’s like, I’m going to do everything and no, you can’t post locally and no, you can’t have local campaigns. Um, your franchise owners actually get quite upset because they feel like they don’t have the flexibility to be successful. And I’ve also seen the other edge of the equation where the franchisor is like, you know what, I’m not going to worry about this marketing thing at all. That’s your problem. Local guy. I’m going to go over here and sell more franchises. And that doesn’t work either, because now the franchisee is, you know, they’re off on their own. They don’t know exactly what to do. They’re not a professional marketer. And to your point, Lee, they start going in 50 different directions. And next thing you know, you have no control over your brand or your messaging in market.

Lee Kantor: Right? And it becomes evident to the person who runs into a brand in one place and then goes somewhere else and hears a different story somewhere else.

Steve Buors: Yep. Different, different offers, different creative, different brand messaging. And you, you don’t want that as a franchisor that dilutes what you’re trying to do, changes your competitive differentiators in market. So you need to set up a system where the franchisor always should be in charge of the brand and the creative and the overall strategy for the direction we’re going. And the franchisee has flexibility from within their market. So customizing creative, customizing messaging, but not going off those brand standards, right?

Lee Kantor: And if you create the system, right, and it’s communicated effectively and there’s buy in at the beginning, no one’s going to care. It’s when they change the rules where I guess the friction really shows itself.

Steve Buors: I couldn’t agree more. Like I’ve walked into franchise systems that have, you know, 500, 800 locations. And then we’re trying to implement a process either way, frankly, like either it’s been too centralized and we’re trying to actually get franchisees engaged by then. They’re already disinterested and it’s really hard to get them on board or where franchisees have just been doing whatever they want. And now you’re trying to add a little bit of brand rigor. It’s really hard. So that’s one of the things I really like with emerging systems is you can put that in place from, from day one, right? By the time you hit ten locations, start putting those processes in place, figure out what your technology stack is going to be, figure out who your partners are going to be, you know, standardize how you’re disseminating and using creative and what your nomenclature and tone as a brand is. Those are really important things that often get overlooked because you’re so busy growing that you’re looking for that next space for your next location, or you’re trying to hire that new friend, dev person or whatever it is. It’s really important that you get those elements right because it’ll save you so much heartache when you hit 30, 40, 50, 300 locations.

Lee Kantor: And I think it’s a missed opportunity also by not kind of leaning into what the person you already sold the franchise to, what they who they know, why they should share the story to their friends that might bubble up a new franchisee for your system, but also to give by giving the franchisee the agency to, to be themselves and be visible locally within the brand structure, then they’re getting what they need in the sense of pride and status of being a business owner, and not to this kind of person that’s running this other thing. It really connects them with the brand. It connects them with the community. And ultimately, from a franchise standpoint, it has the opportunity to connect them with their next franchisee because this person is going to be bragging and be visible, and they can open the door to another business sale for them if they do it right.

Steve Buors: I love everything you just said, Lee, because that engagement of your of your franchise partners, of your franchise owners is it’s so powerful. And that’s, that’s what makes franchising so different from an owned retail network or an owned network of any kind. Because, you know, if you’ve got a store manager, yeah, they’re in their 9 to 5 and they’re doing their thing and sure, they’ll run your store and it’ll be fine. But if you get a franchise owner who owns that business, they wake up thinking about that business, they go to sleep thinking about that business. They’re talking it up in their community. They’re always thinking about, how can I do more? How can I grow this? And it’s that that creativity and that energy, that’s what you want to tap into. And you certainly don’t want to take that away to your point, Lee. Right. Like let them get engaged again within certain parameters. And you got to make sure that you don’t let your brand go crazy. But if you can basically say, yeah, run as hard as you can, but let’s run in this direction instead of this other direction. Now you got something.

Lee Kantor: And you have systems that make it easy for them to do that. They don’t want to do all the kind of work it takes to develop like a, to be a local influencer. But if you can give them all the stuff where that’s just drop and plug and play, they’re going to happily do it because it makes it, it’s going to improve their how they see themselves and how they’re seen in the community. I think that’s a missed opportunity for a lot of franchise brands. They don’t understand how important that is to a franchisee. I mean, that’s a part of why they did this, is they want to be seen as an entrepreneur and a business owner, not someone who’s just basically running this thing on autopilot.

Steve Buors: I couldn’t agree more. And that was one of our big ahas too, is we got deeper and deeper into franchising is like your franchise owners are busy. They, they are running operations, they’re hiring people. They’re worrying about, you know, to put the sign out the front or worrying about customer service. Marketing is one tiny slice of their day. It’s an important slice, but it’s one slice, so making it easy, approachable, understandable, but still allowing them ownership right where it’s not like, hey Bob. Yeah, I’m running your ads for you and your market. You know, I hope they work. Your franchisee doesn’t feel any ownership over that. And, you know, their first inkling is to say, well, it’s not working because I’m not getting enough customers versus if it’s, hey, I’ve created these three campaigns with these different offers. And, you know, I want you to take a quick look at them and I’ll help you make sure they get deployed in your market. Now they’ve got ownership, now they’re making decisions, but you’re still making it easy for them. Now you got buy in and they’re still going to be successful because they’re they’re not spending all their time on marketing.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And that’s where the synergy really is important. And the communication channel and the clarity of messaging, all of that stuff is critical. If you do that right, I think you to your point is you’re really leveraging what a franchise can be. And it doesn’t create kind of this adversarial relationship of you don’t know what’s happening in my market. You know, my market’s different. It’s not like that here in corporate. It’s easy for you to do things like that. But here, you know, I’m the boots on the ground. I’m the one who’s seeing things.

Steve Buors: I completely agree. And you know, the real inflection point again, coming from media myself, um, you know, old school franchise marketing was quite centralized because you could, you had, you know, if you had newspaper, radio and TV covered, you’re doing pretty good from a marketing perspective these days. There’s, you know, there’s Facebook, Instagram, right?

Lee Kantor: It’s too fragmented. There’s too many channels. Nobody watches the same. We don’t all watch the same things or listen to the same things 100%.

Steve Buors: And it’s local now, right? It’s not just about, you know, being on YouTube. It’s about how are you relevant locally and how are you connecting on those local platforms with local communities? It’s a totally different game now, and I think a lot of franchise systems and franchise marketers still think very centralized, which I think is one of the things holding franchising back a little bit.

Lee Kantor: So how do you kind of open their mind to how things, how you think things should be and when they’ve been doing things with this? You know, I’m the smart one on top of the mountain and just do what I say.

Steve Buors: It’s not always easy. I’m not going to lie. We have more success with some franchise brands than others. Some are very adamant that the centralized model works for them. Um, and we try and, you know, sort of within their framework, try and get a little more, um, I’d say, uh, local flexibility to a degree. I would say for most franchise systems that we work with, once you can show them how it can work, They’re happy to to go with it because they’re feeling frustrated, too. It’s not just the franchisees. The franchisor feels it because it’s hard. It’s hard to scale a network when you’re trying to run everything through head office, and your franchisees are contacting you saying, hey, I need to put a Facebook campaign in my market. Oh, I need to do the social post in my market. I need this, I need this, I need this. Your marketing team is suddenly run off their feet and they’re running everything on Google Sheets. And it’s, it’s a mess and nobody’s happy. So I do find when we can walk in and say, look, guys, I like what you’re trying to do here. Here’s a better way and here’s how technology’s an enabler. You know, here’s how you can put a better process and everyone wins. And that’s really the thing we always hit hard is we’re not looking to make the head office life better or the franchisees life better. We’re looking to make everyone’s life better. And once you can get the right people on board, and once you can show them that it can work. It actually takes off pretty quickly.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. I think that, um, the impact is real if you can frame it right. And they buy in. I mean, I think that’s the future here. And especially if we haven’t even started talking about AI and where that’s going to be and what you have to do to really kind of stay on top of that, but you have to, um, leverage local if you want to be successful. I mean, there’s no, I don’t think it’s possible to succeed without having a good local strategy and system.

Steve Buors: In the future. No. Right now. No. And to your point, AI, it’s only going to get more local from here. It’s going to get so, so hyper focused on the information that’s relevant to you as an individual where you live, you know what your background is like. We’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of how, um, marketing is going to change over the next few years.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And this is the worst AI is going to be so. Yeah.

Steve Buors: Buckle up. You’re right. Yeah. It’s only getting better, right?

Lee Kantor: I mean, you could I mean, you can see in a month how much it improves. Like, I mean, you can’t even imagine what a year is going to be.

Steve Buors: I totally agree. And I think what we’re going to start seeing is a shift from kind of platform driven marketing. Like right now, when I have conversations with, with marketers, they’re still saying things like, well, what’s my, what’s my meta strategy or my TikTok strategy or my email marketing strategy or my SEO strategy. At the end of the day, you know, you only have so many people around your locations, right? So as opposed to being platform centric, I think we’re going to move to more of a people centric, uh, system driven sort of approach where we’re using, um, more advanced tools to be able to manage our campaigns regardless of platform. So I won’t worry so much about meta versus Google versus TikTok. I’m more going to worry about who is it I’m trying to reach and how am I using tools and technology to best reach them and measure the results? I think that’s going to be a fundamental shift in the next few years, because AI is such, such an enabler to allow us to think and act that way.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. I mean, I think you have to have a direct path to your customer, and you can’t rely on any third party system like a platform. They’re just holding you hostage and they’re just continually squeezing you. And that’s just not sustainable over time. I mean, it has to the pendulum has to swing the other way where the brands say, you know what, I like you said, if I’m in, you know, Des Moines, Iowa, I just need to know 2000 people. Let me get their names and addresses and emails and phone numbers. That’s going to be cheaper in the long run than, you know, relying on the changing, uh, algorithm at, at at meta or Instagram or TikTok.

Steve Buors: Yeah. For sure. Like the winners in the future from a, from a franchise marketing perspective are going to understand their customers better than their competitors. And you can still use Meta and Google and TikTok as avenues to reach people. But too many marketers use their data as a crutch, meaning they use Meta and Google’s data as a means to reach people. But to your point, that’s not the company’s information as Google’s information. And as soon as Google makes a change or, you know, privacy changes or whatever comes next, um, you’re out of luck. And so having that, the systems and the information and, you know, the ability to simply think of these different platforms, Google, meta, TikTok, etc. as distribution as opposed to necessarily needing them from a targeting perspective. That changes your whole game.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And you have to you can’t rely on them. They’re not trusted partners. They don’t they don’t care about you. You’re you know, there’s the old saying that said, if you’re not paying for something, then you’re, you’re the product. Like, yeah, how many people do you have? I’m sure you have these huge brands that have thousands or millions of followers. And then any given post is shown to, you know, half a one percentage of them. Like it’s not a people think that, oh, I got all these followers on this platform and oh, I posted so everybody saw it. It’s like nobody saw it. Like the only way you people can see it is if you pay them to, you know, put it in front of more of the people who already raised their hand to say they want your content, which is insane to me.

Steve Buors: It is funny, like, you know, going, going back to the inception of Facebook. And yes, I am in fact that old that I was in marketing when Facebook came out. Um, yeah, once upon a time you put a post out, you had an opportunity to reach 100% of your followers as a brand. Um, the glory days. Now you’re absolutely right. It’s a fraction of a fraction. And so you put out a post like only a small fraction of the people who follow you even have a chance of seeing it. Never mind. Did they actually see it? If you’re not boosting it or running an ad or paying to play, you’re absolutely not getting any visibility. You’re absolutely right. So it’s understanding that and understanding that building equity on someone else’s platform, while you may get some short term benefit long term, you got to think about how am I building my systems? How am I building my franchisees as brands? How am I building my organization up? So that way I can, I can have a competitive advantage because if you’re leveraging what Meta and Google and TikTok provide you and that’s it. Well, then you don’t have a competitive advantage because anybody can do that, right? They just need to know how. So building your own systems and your own knowledge and your own data, that’s, that’s a winning formula.

Lee Kantor: And that’s then you have control. I mean, they can change the rules. They change the rules constantly. This is the part I don’t think that the average, um, even the people in marketing and big companies understand that that’s, that is not a sustainable strategy for any length of time. And every platform runs the same playbook. They make it easy. They make it easy for you to dump your content on there. They make sure everybody sees it. And then just over time, they throttle it more and more and more. And your your posts are being seen by less and less people and fewer and fewer. The people that matter to you are seeing anything you’re doing unless you write a check to any of these platforms. That’s the playbook for any social media platform.

Steve Buors: It’s true. And, you know, I don’t know if you want to go down this rabbit hole today or not, but if you look at what Google is doing with AI overviews, that same approach is now happening with search, where your average website is seeing somewhere between 30 and 60% decrease, because people don’t need to click through to a website anymore. Because Google’s AI overviews provides the answer to the question without having to click. Well, but where do Google get the answer? Well, they got it from your website. Okay.

Lee Kantor: So and then their AI changed the words a little. So, you know, they just used you as a jumping off point. Thank you for that. I mean.

Steve Buors: That’s.

Lee Kantor: That’s how it is. Now I know it’s the same playbook. This has been done since the beginning of this. They all do it the same exact way. It’s done this way. So you have to control the people that matter most to you. You better have a direct path to them. You better figure it out, or else you are going to be always beholden to these other platforms.

Steve Buors: Yeah. And I would say there’s there’s that piece of it for sure. Right. Being able to directly converse with your existing and potential customers is, is amazing. And also making sure that, you know, you’re not going with the latest and greatest sort of trendy thing. Like if you’ve been producing good content for an extended period of time on your website and you haven’t been keyword chasing or, you know, keyword stuffing or any of those, those types of terms, if you’ve been producing good, legitimate content, you’re probably doing okay in AI search. Now, are people clicking through? No. But are you doing better than your competitors? When someone searches something like, you know, where can I get great pizza with spicy tomato sauce and, uh, wood fired, uh, experience? When someone does a really detailed search like that, you’re probably doing better than your competitors. And so there is value in just sticking with communication fundamentals. Um, and then when a big change happens like this, like AI search, it’s not as detrimental to your business. I’m seeing a lot of businesses that have seen really substantial traffic declines who are not doing particularly well in AI search just because they were going after keywords in a, you know, very specific fashion, which isn’t really going to translate into an AI based environment.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. It’s a, uh, it’s the Wild West again, which it is every few years. And that’s just kind of business. Uh, especially.

Steve Buors: A big one though AI search is.

Lee Kantor: No. And believe me, I know, and, and because people come up to us at Business RadioX and they’re like, oh, you know, first we’re audio. So then they’re like, well, video is going to eat audio. And I’m like, well, AI summaries are going to eat video and audio. So.

Steve Buors: It’s true. It’s true. Actually, a lot of ways. Yeah. Audio is audio. Seeing a big resurgence. But that’s a whole nother topic. But it’s true. Ai overuse is. We’ll see where they go. Google just announced some big changes that freaked everybody out. And they had to walk it back just a little bit. But it’s it’s coming sooner rather than later.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. Now you better figure it out or else you’re going to be left behind. And that’s why you need kind of experts like Reshift to kind of watch your back, because this is the stuff you guys are thinking about 24 over seven. I mean, people are running a franchise. They don’t have time to really understand the minutia of this. But this, you know, the ground is not stable. It is it is moving. So you better have a, a partner there that can help you get through this, uh, because it’s not going to be for the faint of heart.

Steve Buors: I agree, so we, um, we’ve been working very hard on AI search strategy specific to franchise systems. And, um, it is complicated. Your, your average marketer, even if you try and keep up as much as you can, you just can’t. It’s changing too fast. I have a whole SEO team. This is all they do. Like, their job is to keep on top of what’s happening in AI search and think about how does this apply to franchise marketing? Because it’s moving so fast. To your point, you’re absolutely right.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the best way to get a hold of somebody at redshift?

Steve Buors: You can go to our website, redshift media.com. I’m also happy to talk with anyone. You can get me very easy at steve@media.com. Happy to chat anytime.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, Steve, thank you so much for sharing your story today, doing such important work. And we appreciate you.

Steve Buors: Thanks, Lee. Appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Franchise Marketing Radio.