Marketing With Purpose Kit: Marketing as a Growth Engine for Franchises

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Michele Brasfield** (0:17)
Welcome to the Marketing With Purpose series of The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Michele, and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. Let's get started. Today, I'm joined by Fred Navas, digital marketing specialist with deep roots in the evolution of paid search and performance advertising. Fred brings years of hands-on experience, leading direct response campaigns for both local and national brands. And over the last three years, he has focused specifically on helping franchise businesses grow through lead generation strategies across Google, social, programmatic, and SEO. With a strong background in digital display, PPC, programmatic, DMP, and Google Analytics, he combines technical expertise with practical execution to drive measurable results. We're going to explore marketing as a growth engine for franchises today, and how data-driven digital strategies can fuel scalable growth across multi-location businesses. I'm excited to dive in. Fred, before we dive in, I'd love to start with why franchise and multi-location marketing has become such a critical topic for you, and what makes marketing such a powerful and yet challenging driver for franchise brands.

**Fred Navas** (2:03)
Thanks, Michele. Happy to be here.
Definitely marketing for franchise has been the forefront for the last three years for me. And digital marketing for franchise is one of the fastest tools to see results. So you set up your direct response campaign. Usually, you want to get more leads. And the goal of your campaign should always be to turn that expense into an investment. So with the right strategy, you can quantify what you're spending and make sure you're getting a return on that. One thing to keep in mind is that your strategy should be scalable because the strategy for a single location owner is going to be different from your CEOs. So those are people that have three or more locations. Those owners require a different strategy. And it's key for us to work with the owner and the franchise source to set up those strategies.

**Michele Brasfield** (3:09)
That's excellent. Yeah. And that whole process builds a lot of trust too with those local communities as well that they're working in.

**Fred Navas** (3:20)
For sure.

**Michele Brasfield** (3:20)
Yeah.

**Fred Navas** (3:21)
Yeah. So that's one of the benefits of the franchise model because you have foots on the ground. So it's a local business with the backing of a national brand. Again, it depends on where in your stage. If you're just starting your franchise, you have a handful of locations. It might look different. But like I said, this is scalable. So if your needs are, I want to get my two locations up and going, we can work with you.
I can have a customized strategy for that. If you have 100 locations, that's completely different. But again, having that local footprint makes it a lot easier for us to work with any number of franchises.

**Michele Brasfield** (4:09)
Yeah, and scale up for sure. Franchises often walk a tight rope between maintaining a unified brand and allowing local owners creative freedom. How do you see successful brands striking that balance without losing identity or local relevance?

**Fred Navas** (4:29)
Great question. Definitely, you have a national brand. Even if you're just starting, you want to make sure you develop your brand when you set up your franchise.
You know, it's a successful business. So the way you run it, you want to make sure that the local or the new franchises have that same philosophy. They follow the recipe. But you also want to create as you grow. So if you go from 10 locations to 20 locations, you want to empower those individual locations to have a leadership group where they can have some impact on their local marketing materials.

**Michele Brasfield** (5:12)
Yeah, that's a great answer because hyperlocals is a component of it too, right? Within the micro communities that they're based in.

**Fred Navas** (5:20)
Exactly. For sure.

**Michele Brasfield** (5:21)
When a franchise brand faces a crisis or sudden market shift, decisions have to ripple across dozens or hundreds of locations. How can leadership maintain empathy and purpose while still acting quickly at scale?

**Fred Navas** (5:38)
Well, the key is recognizing that you have different owners. So again, single owner location, their needs are different. Those CEOs, the owners that have multiple locations, their needs are similar, but they require a different strategy. So from the brand, it's key for them to recognize that the needs are different. If there's a change, we want to make sure we take in account everyone that's going to be affected by this change, and make sure that we're taking everyone into account.