The Franchise Council of Australia honoured franchising's best and brightest at the MYOB FCA Excellence in Franchising Awards at The Star on the Gold Coast this week and PACK & SEND achieved yet another impressive milestone in 2019, being announced as the winner of the franchising ‘Excellence in Marketing Award’.
Innovative and effective brand marketing is a critical support function offered by Franchisors to Franchisees, which has resulted in the Excellence in Marketing Award being one of the sectors most highly coveted accolades.
Judged by an independent panel of experts, PACK & SEND won the award ahead of four other finalists - being the national brands of Subway Restaurants, Quest Apartment Hotels, Poolwerx and Chatime.
PACK & SEND CEO and Founder Michael Paul said that a key indicator of a strong franchise business model was the quality marketing support that it offered and the results it delivered.
“Our ‘digital first’ marketing approach at PACK & SEND delivered a message of how we can save customers time, trouble and money with their shipping needs and resulted in impressive record sales growth for the franchise network in 2018/19. This has continued in the first quarter of the 2019/20 year, with the franchise network posting a 12% ‘same-store’ sales growth” Paul said.
PACK & SEND is well known within its industry for its strong digital marketing performance at a national level (through robust Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social media campaigns), however, it was the execution of a very successful local area digital marketing campaign that helped it win the excellence award in marketing.
“We really wanted to switch our local area marketing from non-digital to primarily a digital focused marketing strategy. We knew we had to invest our marketing where people spend most of their time, which is on their mobile phones, and that marketing on digital channels was more trackable and generally produced a higher return. That resulted in an “always on” local digital marketing campaign for each franchisee using social media platforms” Paul said.
PACK & SEND utilised its in-house marketing team to centrally administer over 100 social media pages, creating content, and digital marketing assets. This enabled a universal message whilst also retaining the ability to have a local flavor through copy and stylistic tweaks. By using the geo-targeting and geo-fencing capabilities of social media platforms PACK & SEND was also able to ensure the advertising was targeted to a franchisees marketing territory.
Paul said that that the results of the local digital campaigns were trackable and provided a very significant increase in brand awareness and customer leads to the PACK & SEND brand, which contributed to $5M in additional sales revenue to the franchise network. “The results demonstrated that a digitally focused local area campaign when combined with national advertising can drive very good results at the territory level”.
“Apart from the increased sales the campaign delivered, another very important benefit of centrally managing the local digital campaigns was that it gave back valuable time to franchisees to focus on sales and customer relationship building” said Paul.
“This award is a celebration of the strength of franchising as a business model, the team effort our franchisees displayed in the campaigns execution and the dedication of our marketing team in providing quality franchisee marketing support” Paul said.