Franchise! How Small, Local Business becomes Big Business

Location 3, is a digital marketing agency that "delivers enterprise-level strategy with local market activation. In its 20th year in business, the Google-Analytics Certified agency works primarily with franchisors to understand their business objectives and facilitate enterprise strategy alignment and with individual franchisees, to promote hyper-local-level marketing activation. Services include business listing management, SEO, data and analytics, and driving new revenue through paid search, paid social, local programmatic buys – and anything else that makes sense for boosting local level revenue.

How big is the franchise market? Alex notes that over 50% of all US retail locations are part of a franchise organization. Only about 30% of the approximately 750,000 franchise locations in this country are in fast food/casual dining. Almost anything, Alex explains, can use the franchise model. Location 3 focuses less on fast food and more on services or franchise systems with measurably higher customer lifetime values.

In this interview, Alex explains how Digital marketing at the local level is interesting, but also complicated. Unlike direct mail, where someone can walk into a store with a traceable coupon, programmatic vendors (e.g., Google and Facebook) can claim, based on their technology, that someone saw or engaged with your ad or website on their platform, and ended up in your location. When promotions are on multiple platforms, how does one tell which one actually drove the store visit? And how should the proportion of spend be tweaked to maximize revenue growth? To facilitate optimal decisions, Location 3 provides franchisees with full turnkey campaigns across a broad variety of platforms, tracks return on ad spend, and shares that information with it clients with full transparency.

Location 3 developed a franchisee-facing software platform, LOCALACT, which serves as a hub of local digital data. Franchisees can use this tool to see their local page analytics, how their local Google My Business is performing, and where their traffic is coming from; respond to reviews; and buy additional media.

Alex can be reached on his company's website at: https://location3.com/, on YouTube, or at 820 16th St. Suite 300, Denver, CO 80202.

You can always check out our website. We're very active. We have a pretty active YouTube account. We put up some video content. We go to pretty much every franchise tradeshow that's out there, so if you're in the franchise space and we haven't met you, I'm sure we will soon. Very active in that community, the tradeshow community. If you're ever in Denver, we're right on 16th Street Mall right downtown.