How Collective Intelligence Marketing can help franchisors run effective franchise advertising.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Show. Today I'm delighted to have Joe Schultz joining me from Malmö, just south of Malmö, a little place called Lund in Sweden. Joe, how do you say hello in Swedish?

You can say hey. I think that's the most normal way of— easiest way to say hey hey.

Okay, even an Englishman, uh, like me can, can manage hey hey. So Joe, Sweden is, is famous obviously for the for the furniture stores, but you are working for a company called Adplora.

Yep.

And it sounds like it's got a really interesting solution to businesses and entrepreneurs running sort of multi-site, multi-market marketing. Can you just tell us about Adplora and how you help business owners to get noticed?

Yeah, absolutely. Hey Jim, really, really good to be here. So yes, I work for Adplora, which is originally a German company, but we now have offices in Cologne where we founded, In Paris, in France, Atlanta in the US, and then a bald guy working from Malmö in Sweden. I'm quite new to the company, but I've worked for a number of different startups and quite excited about this opportunity. But what we try to do is we try to help especially multi-location businesses. A lot of our clients are franchise organizations, but also other multi-location businesses to kind of maintain the same voice of the brand. in all the different markets that they work with. So that you make sure that customers in different places, they get the same feel, the same kind of brand guidelines, that you live up to the brand guidelines, but also that you provide a level of freedom to the local business owners to run the lead generation the way they see fit. So they can focus on the kind of business areas where they see greatest potential and make sure that they can adapt to local competition or local culture and all these different things. And the reason I'm so passionate about it is because it allows the small local business owners to run like state-of-the-art marketing campaigns, but still at a very reasonable budget. Because I've seen, having been in this space for a while, I see that a lot of the small business owners, they go to a marketing agency and the marketing agency may very well be very good. And they're trying to do the best thing they can for the local business owner. But in this world where it's kind of complex space, digital marketing, they need to spend an awful lot of time learning the business and setting up the campaigns before they can drive any kind of leads to these local business owners. The way our platform works is that we help the central unit to provide basically templated campaigns to the different local business owners that they can use, and they can self-serve themselves and select what campaigns that they want to use, and then Adapt them as they see fit, and then start generating leads in a much more cost-efficient way than they could if they didn't work with a platform like ours.

Yes, that's really helpful for companies to say franchise and franchisees and franchisors, right, to sort of embrace all the corporate identity and the messaging and keep all the assets up to date, right?

Because that's exactly—

fonts change, colors change, hero images change. Can you give us an example of a customer Joe, that is using AdPlore and how they're using it?

Yeah, so we work with everything from like some really large companies like VW in Germany and some of the German banks, all the way down to some very small franchises with only like a handful of locations. One example is, is a German manufacturer of electrical bikes called e-motion Technologies. For obvious reasons, they've had a really good like growth journey in the last few years, but they were one of these companies who were really struggling with their local marketing in all the different markets where they started and all the different local owners, they tried to find their own way of doing this, which meant that they started competing against each other and that they would, they were kind of like competing against the national branding campaign and they weren't seeing the right results that they wanted to see. And that's where they sourced the markets and found AdPlorer and started working with us. And quite quickly, I think about 90% of their franchisees jumped on board and started working with AdPlorer. And they continue to grow. And it's a typical client for us, but they see great value in it.

Yeah, that's really nice. And I can see then, as you say, you don't get competition between franchises that have a territory, don't they, defined, but the internet isn't creating the same kind of borders as the territory that they've got.

No, and that's why you need to kind of work with the geographic targeting with your digital campaigns and your digital presence to make sure there's no overlap. Because if there is overlap, the only people who kind of gain on that are Google and Facebook. And even if they are our partners, we don't necessarily want to give them more money than what we necessarily need to give them. So obviously our Our aim is to make sure that there is no competition so that every pound spent for a local business owner is spent on kind of maximizing the ROI of their marketing campaign.

So, Joe, the company's called AdPlora. Just take us through, is it a media buying platform or is it a digital asset delivery platform? How is it working from a practical point of view? Yeah.

So, I mean, the history of the business is that in 2008, the current CEO and CTO, they founded the business as a small agency. And they, at that time, started selling digital advertising to small and medium-sized businesses because they were passionate about helping small businesses compete against the big organizations. But they quite quickly encountered scalability problems. And they realized it wasn't that easy to manage hundreds of campaigns. So they started building out kind of a technology that would automate part of the process and really help them to be more efficient. And then partly because Google found the platform and started introducing them to other like-minded agencies, they realized that there was a lot more potential in working with other kind of SMB agencies and helping them with the technology than competing against those agencies selling to the same SMB. So that's how the company morphed into a technology company rather than an agency. And initially then focused on the SMB space. But then when we built out like a self-serve interface, we realized that that was perfect for franchises and other multi-location businesses. And that's why now I think we're growing quicker on the multi-location side than we do on the kind of SMB reseller side. So we basically have like 2 business areas, even if it's helping the local business owner drive marketing with really good ROI is like the endgame for both business areas.

Yeah, because I can see existing platforms like even just AdSense or Google AdWords can manage if you've got one location, but the multi-location sort of franchise network, I can see there's really nothing to serve them. So what would happen is that the parent company, if you like, the franchisor may have, or in the case of Volkswagen, for example, the brand owner, They have their own digital store of assets, do they? And then just explain, how do the local partners with, you know, recall assets and decide which campaigns to run? And then how does it get sort of called back so that there are some analytics of which campaigns are working? Because presumably, as this is all digital, the, the franchise or the brand holder gets some amazing data About which campaigns are working and where.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So what we typically do is either we or one of our partners, because increasingly we work with partners on the multi-location side as well, work with the franchisor to develop these assets or templated campaigns, be it for Google search or Facebook advertising or display advertising or whatever it is. So basically creating these kind of templates And then make those templates available so that each franchisee, if it's a franchise system, each franchisee can log in to their own kind of dashboard and pick and choose between these different templates. And then the franchisee can adapt the templates more or less depending on what the franchisor says that they should be able to do. And they're quite a different scenario there. And then the franchisee can allocate the budget. The franchisor can then choose, like in the case of eMotion, to subsidize the marketing budget so that you share the cost or the franchisee just pays for it themselves. But typically we see that it works really well if you subsidize it because then the franchisee is more keen to kind of log in. And so then they pick and choose between the templates, they activate the campaigns, and then as soon as they do that, we, through the APIs of Google, Facebook, Bing, and so forth, we generate the campaigns and then we manage the campaigns on an ongoing basis. And the franchisee will log in and they can see exactly what what results that we have achieved. We pride ourselves on really like working closely with our clients so that we can integrate into their own systems. So if we integrate to their CRM system, then we can see exactly what kind of revenue that we can directly attribute back to the campaign. And by doing that, we can automatically tweak and so that we move the budget to the campaign elements that generates the best ROI. And so it's For instance, if we see that a certain keyword generates a lot better value on a search campaign than other keywords, then we can steer more of the budget towards that. And the beauty of them working with a franchise system is that we have lots of very similar campaigns that we can work with. So instead of just looking at the post-click performance data that we call it for one location, we can aggregate all the data together. And then we're much quicker at responding to differences in search behavior or different trends like seasonalities and stuff so that we make sure that all the different locations, they benefit from that, which is also good when in new locations. If you have a brand new franchisee, they go online, they haven't done any local marketing before, we can still then utilize all the learnings that we've done from all the other locations to better serve that new location. Collective intelligence marketing. And when the CEO told me about that, that was one of the reasons why I felt like I really wanted to come work for AdPro.

Yeah, that's a great term, collective intelligence marketing. That's a fantastic term. And also for the franchisor, it gives them a lot of confidence, doesn't it, that they're going to get ROI and the kind of support package to generate revenue quickly. What about the clicks to the website? How does that work? Are the local franchise holders having their own Like local web pages, or are the leads going to central and being fed back out? Because local franchisee won't want to spend all that money building a brand and not having the leads.

So that's very different. But I would say in most cases, the local franchisee has some form of local website. It's like a standalone landing page, or if it's a subdomain of the main website. But for obvious reasons, if I am a local consumer looking for a local business to help me with something, then it's good if I land on a site that looks local to me. If I'm looking for a carpenter in Bristol, then it's quite nice if I land on a page where there are images of Bristol and someone's talking about carpentry in Bristol. I can see some reference cases that are local.

And let's just talk about language, João.

Is this Multilingual?

I mean, obviously it's from Germany, you're in Sweden, you've got the US. I'm assuming it can handle all character sets, can it?

So we've had, we have clients in Greece, for instance, we've had to adapt to the Greek alphabet or had to, I mean, it's a privilege to get to work with different alphabets. So we've adapted to the Greek. We have not yet worked with anyone in Arabic. So everything is kind of left to right rather than right to left, but I'm working hard to change that so that we need to adapt to Arabic as well. I mean, to try Find a client who wants to work with us in that part of the world so that we, we need to do that. I don't think it's a big deal for our engineers. They're pretty good. But, but from a business development point of view, I'm working to make sure that we can sign some clients.

So Joe, that sounds a really sensible need to solve this multi-site marketing. You've just come on to Adplora business development. How is the company itself getting noticed? What marketing Is working.

And I think the best marketing for us is really word of mouth. So that's the best way to get the word out there, word of mouth. And we typically see that people work in one organization, they get used to AdPlore, they move to another organization, they bring AdPlore with them. But we also see that a lot of the franchisees, they are kind of like multi-unit, multi-brand franchises, which means that they may get to work with AdPlore through one of the franchisors they work with. And then they introduce us to the franchisor of the other kind of franchise system. So that's, that's also a very good way for us. And that works in kind of the markets where we actually have a presence, but the downside is that obviously that takes a long time to build that, build that up. So in the UK, which is a very new market for us, we have, for instance, joined the British Franchise Association, which is a really good organization. They kind of pull all the franchise systems or a large number of franchise systems together, and they try to support all the different franchise systems. So they've been very welcoming to us, and we look forward to taking part in their annual annual event in November in London. And I think events now, hopefully this whole pandemic is hopefully mostly behind us so that we can start attending events again, because events has always been good, good for us in the space that we're at. We can actually go there and you can meet people and you can talk to people, you can connect with people, you can have a beer with people and talk about the problems they face and come up with solutions to those problems. So I really hope that we can start going back to the event circus again.

Yeah, I'm sure you can. And there'll be more hybrid events, I think. I've seen them now sort of taking place online for a week and in person for 1 or 2 days. But Joe, you and I met because an agency sourced opportunities for you to go on to podcasts. Do you just share with us that strategy? Because the others are, you know, join associations, turn up to shows, but you've also got a more proactive, dedicated strategy. You could just share how that's working.

Yeah. So it was actually an agency who reached out to me and I got a LinkedIn message about they wanted to talk to me, but I get quite a few of those. So, so I didn't actually reply to the first. Then a couple of days afterwards, I got a, I got a follow-up to that on LinkedIn. And I thought that was, that was quite nice because I'm quite used to getting the first kind of LinkedIn message, but to actually get a follow-up that was targeted towards the first follow-up, I thought that was, that was brilliant. And it was done by the CEO of this, this agency. So I thought that was quite good. So I set up a call with him, but I ended up talking to someone else. And it turns out that they were using the CEO's LinkedIn profile to kind of do the outbound activities. And I thought that was quite nice. And they have a whole program that they use for kind of outbound qualifying prospects and then doing the kind of outbounds and trying to generate calls. So that's something that we work with now as well. And I think that is good. You need to do something. Because the world is getting smaller and more and more crowded. So you need to do something to kind of stand out there. So I think being able to be personalized and persistent is kind of like what counts. And I also believe that you previously just talked about salespeople and salespeople managing the whole funnel. But as the world gets more crowded and as sales get more and more specialized, I think it's important that your sales and marketing people, that they can specialize in the areas that they think that they are, or that they are best in. Because I think it's rare to find salespeople who are really good all the way from kind of opening the door and then all the way to kind of making a close and then working with a client afterwards. So myself, I'm not much of a door opener. So that's why it's good to surround yourself with people who are good door openers, whether they be via email or phone or events or And whatever it is.

Yeah, that's a really good, a really good point about sort of breaking up the whole marketing and sales process and bringing in the right people and the right technology for each one of those steps. You had, um, the CEO of a company called Prospectin on, on the show a little while ago and talk about how you can automate these outreaches through LinkedIn. And we use that as well. So Joe, if people want to find out more about you and about AdPlora, how can they do that?

I think the easiest way is to just get to adplora.com and then we have a contact form there, or they just reach out directly to me. It's joe.schultz@adplora.com. I'll have to see if I can write that down somewhere and get that into the podcast somewhere. But otherwise, www.adplora.com, that's kind of where you read up about us and where you can reach out to us and contact us. We'd be more than happy to talk.

Joe, thank you so much for joining me from Lund in Sweden to talk about really collective intelligence marketing and how you can have this sort of multi-level franchise-enabled ad marketing platform. It sounds really, really useful in this day and age. Thank you.

Thanks a lot for having me, Jim. I really enjoyed it.

It's been my pleasure. You've been listening to Joe Schultz of Adplora on The Unnoticed Show. And until we meet again, I wish you the best of health and that if you're going to do marketing, get the right tools in place because they really help you to amplify your message across multiple markets, and AdPlora could just be a tool for you to use to do that.