The Top Marketing Mistakes Most Franchisees Make
To most franchisees, marketing feels like it is the one part of the business they “should” be able to figure out on their own. After all, you have the brand name, you’ve got customers in your area, and you know how to explain your services. But in most franchise systems, marketing is the difference between barely surviving and becoming a top-quartile performer. Yet the majority of franchisees fall into the same traps, predictable, avoidable, and often expensive. In reality, most franchise marketing failures are not caused by lack of effort, but by the absence of structured, system-driven marketing approaches across franchises.
At CraigAds, we’ve spent years helping franchise brands and their owners make their way through the messy middle between local marketing and scalable systems. Below are the most common mistakes we see, along with their causes and corrections.
DIY Marketing
That said, many franchisees start out running their own marketing, usually thinking they can “figure it out” or save money. But digital marketing isn’t a simple set of tasks anymore; it’s a system. It involves brand consistency, strategic targeting, analytics, conversion tracking, and continuous optimization. DIY marketing often isolates franchisees from proven franchise-wide marketing systems designed to scale performance and protect brand consistency.
DIY marketing typically equates to inconsistent branding, scattered campaigns, and reactive decisions. Franchise owners waste a lot of time on marketing that actually never compounds. That’s why CraigAds emphasizes the Branding → Engagement → Action structure: franchisees need clear brand standards, professional creative, and repeatable campaign frameworks designed to generate measurable results.
Not Tracking Leads
You can’t improve what you can’t measure, but a surprising number of franchisees have no idea which marketing channels actually drive leads-or how many of those leads ultimately turn into revenue. Without proper tracking, franchisees are unable to accurately evaluate marketing ROI or make informed investment decisions.
Without call tracking, form attribution, or CRM visibility, budget decisions become guesses. And guesses are expensive. Lead tracking not only reveals what works but also exposes operational issues like slow follow-up, missed calls, or poor conversion rates. Franchisees who track data outperform those who don’t, every time.
Bad GBP (Google Business Profile)
First impressions often begin with a Google Business Profile for local service businesses. But many franchisees don’t take the time and attention needed to keep them updated-blurry photos, missing hours, old phone numbers, or half-filled service descriptions abound. Neglected Google Business Profiles weaken both local marketing performance and overall brand credibility across franchise systems.
A weak GBP leads to fewer map rankings, less local search visibility, and fewer calls, even if your ads are working.
Optimizing your profile with fresh photos, complete service listings, consistent NAP data, and weekly posts is foundational. It’s part branding, part SEO, and part customer trust, and it takes discipline.
No Reviews
Consumers trust reviews more than brand slogans, yet few franchise owners ask for them as a matter of course. That’s especially damaging, since Google gives heavy weight to the volume, recency, and velocity of reviews in local search results. Consistent review generation reduces franchisees’ reliance on paid marketing by increasing organic visibility and conversion trust. After all, a franchisee who has 30 five-star reviews will always do better than one who has three unverified reviews, even if they run identical ad campaigns. Reviews are no longer a nicety; they’re a competitive advantage. The brands that build them systematically rise faster, spend less on leads, and convert more customers on the spot.
No Retargeting
The majority of people never convert on the first visit to your website. They browse, then compare options, get distracted, or just need more time. Without retargeting, every prospective customer who leaves your site is gone forever. Retargeting plays a critical role in improving overall marketing ROI for franchisees by capturing missed opportunities across channels.
Retargeting, whether through display ads, video, or social, is key to CraigAds’ Engagement solutions. It keeps your franchise top-of-mind and dramatically increases conversion rates for paid search and social campaigns.
Missing Monthly Meetings
Marketing systems only work if you stay in rhythm. When franchisees stop having their monthly calls with corporate or their marketing partner, they lose sight of performance, miss optimization opportunities, and fall behind their competitors.
Regular monthly meetings create accountability and alignment between franchisees and the broader franchise marketing strategy. Those are the meetings where campaigns evolve, budgets shift, and growth opportunities get identified. A 30-minute check-in each month can easily add thousands of dollars in incremental revenue.
Inconsistent Ad Budgets
One month the budget’s strong, the next it’s cut in half, then raised again: this kills performance. The digital marketing platforms optimize for long-term signals and learning cycles. If franchisees constantly change budgets, then the campaigns never stabilize.
Consistent marketing investment allows algorithms to optimize properly and supports stable performance across franchise systems. A predictable monthly marketing budget allows algorithms to optimize and drive down cost-per-lead, while supporting healthier long-term growth.
Ignoring Competitors
Competitors are not static; they change their offerings, increase their budgets, add more technicians, and push into new ZIP codes. Most franchisees don’t track their competitive landscape and will not adjust their strategy to compensate for changes around them.
Ongoing competitor monitoring is an essential component of an effective franchise marketing strategy, not a one-time exercise. Not paying attention to competitors results in lost ground, higher click costs, or falling behind in local search rankings. Understanding the playing field is just one component of a sound Action-oriented strategy.
How to Fix Everything
Fortunately, each of the mistakes above is solvable with the right framework. Start by aligning with your franchisor on brand standards and approved marketing systems. Leverage centralized resources instead of improvising. Second, implement tracking immediately: call tracking, CRM, attribution, and dashboards. Clean up your Google Business Profile, commit to weekly review generation, add retargeting to your campaigns, maintain consistent monthly meetings with your marketing support team, and set a steady, predictable budget that allows for long-term optimization. When franchisees adopt marketing systems instead of isolated tactics, long-term performance becomes more predictable and scalable.
At CraigAds, we help franchise brands and their owners build these systems from the ground up, from branding and creative assets to engagement campaigns and high-intent lead generation. When franchisees stop guessing and start operating through structured marketing systems, performance becomes predictable, scalable, and significantly more profitable.