For years, franchise marketing has largely been built around two ideas: build the brand nationally and capture demand locally.
The national organization creates awareness. It establishes the brand, develops the creative, and builds enough familiarity that consumers recognize the name. Then, when someone is ready to act, local marketing captures that demand through Google, paid search, Performance Max, maps, social platforms, directories, or other lower-funnel channels. It is a logical model but I also think it leaves a very important part of the customer journey almost completely unattended.
There is a layer between broad brand awareness and demand capture where consumers are recognizing needs, developing preferences, researching possibilities, encountering competitors, and gradually deciding which companies belong in their consideration set. We call this the Intent & Influence Layer. For franchise organizations, this may be where some of the biggest untapped opportunities exist.
Demand Gets More Similar as You Get Closer to the Transaction
Something interesting happens as consumers get closer to taking action: their behavior begins to converge. Someone ready to file their taxes may search for a tax preparer nearby, compare reviews, look at pricing, or search for help with a particular tax situation. Someone ready to join a gym may search for gyms nearby, compare memberships, read reviews, look at class schedules, or check hours and amenities. Someone who needs a home repair may search for a provider, check availability, compare ratings, and make a call. The industries are completely different, but the behavior at the bottom of the journey is remarkably similar.
Find. Compare. Validate. Act.
That is precisely the environment where Google’s increasingly automated advertising systems are powerful. Performance Max and Google’s broader advertising ecosystem are designed to identify and capture people exhibiting behaviors associated with an eventual action.
At that point, the platform doesn’t necessarily need to understand everything that made a consumer different weeks or months earlier. It needs to recognize that the consumer is ready now. That is the Demand Capture Layer.
But move backward in the customer journey and something very different happens. People start looking in ways that are much more reflective of local environments, concerns, economics and even culture.
Influence Is Local
Consider tax preparation.
The final action may be nearly identical across the country: someone searches for tax help and schedules an appointment. But what happened before that search can vary enormously.
One market may have a large population of gig workers. Another may have more retirees. Another may have a concentration of military families, small-business owners, recent homebuyers, or people with complicated investment income.
Even economic conditions can change what matters. In one community, messaging around maximizing refunds may resonate. In another, consumers may be thinking about small-business filings, extensions, tax planning, or navigating a major financial change.
The final demand looks similar. The conditions that created it do not.
Health and fitness provides another example.
Someone at the bottom of the journey may simply search “gym near me.” But the person who eventually conducts that search could have arrived there through very different behavioral paths.
In one market, outdoor recreation may dominate people’s lifestyles. In another, extreme summer heat or winter weather may push activity indoors. A community with a younger population may behave differently from one with a large retiree population. One location may compete primarily against traditional gyms, while another competes against boutique fitness studios, Pilates, CrossFit, community recreation centers, or at-home fitness.
The search looks the same while the journey into the search is markedly different.
A Franchise Isn't One Market with Hundreds of Locations
This may be the more useful way to think about franchise marketing. A franchise with 200 locations isn’t necessarily one national market with 200 places to purchase something. It is potentially 200 local markets connected by one brand.
Those markets can have different competitors, demographics, economic conditions, cultural influences, media behaviors, seasonal patterns, and triggers that cause people to move from passive interest toward active consideration. Most franchise marketing frequently flattens those differences.
The national campaign defines the audience and message. Geography determines where the advertising runs. Local marketing becomes a smaller version of the national strategy. It is important to realize that shrinking the geography isn’t the same thing as localizing the strategy.
True localization means asking a different question:
What is happening in this market that could cause someone to become a customer?
That’s an Intent & Influence question.
The Differences Are Greatest Before Demand Fully Forms
This is the part I find particularly interesting. The farther we move backward from the transaction, the more market differences matter. A consumer ready to buy a product, schedule an appointment, join a gym, file their taxes, book a service, or visit a location has entered a relatively narrow behavioral state. They are expressing demand.
But six weeks earlier? They may look completely different.
The future tax customer could be reading about self-employment deductions, researching an IRS notice, starting a business, selling investments, preparing for retirement, or simply consuming content about the upcoming tax season.
The future fitness customer could be researching weight training, looking at nutrition content, preparing for a race, trying to improve mobility, following wellness creators, researching a new exercise program, or visiting competitors.
The future home services customer might be researching energy efficiency, noticing an unusual utility bill, looking at home improvement content, visiting a competitor’s website, or responding to a change in weather.
The eventual transactions may be predictable. The behaviors that precede them are far more diverse. That is exactly why the Intent & Influence Layer shouldn’t simply be a national audience distributed across local markets.
Brand Awareness Isn’t the Same as Influence
National brand building still matters enormously for franchises. It creates familiarity, credibility, consistency, and trust. Here is what we often miss: awareness and influence are different marketing jobs.
Brand awareness asks:
Do you know who we are?
Influence asks:
When your circumstances begin to change, are we present while you’re deciding what to do about it?
That second question requires a much deeper understanding of the consumer.
And because circumstances vary from market to market, influence is inherently more local. A national campaign can tell millions of people that a fitness franchise exists. A localized influence strategy can recognize the kinds of behaviors suggesting that people in a particular market are becoming more receptive to joining one. A national tax campaign can create brand recognition.
A localized influence strategy can recognize the behaviors and life circumstances that suggest different groups of consumers are beginning to think about taxes. That’s a fundamentally different use of advertising.
The Opportunity Is Before the Search
By the time someone types “tax preparation near me,” “gym near me,” “urgent care near me,” “oil change near me,” or “AC repair near me,” much of the behavioral complexity has disappeared. That consumer has declared what they want. That declaration is enormously valuable, which is why demand-capture platforms are so powerful. It is also why competition becomes so intense there. Everyone wants the person who has already raised their hand.
The Intent & Influence Layer asks a different question:
Can we recognize the person before the hand goes up?
It is not because they happen to fit a demographic profile. It is because their behavior suggests that something is changing. That is a very different marketing problem.
Don’t Compete with the Demand Capture Engine
Within our work at MarketStorm we don’t try to recreate what Google is becoming exceptionally good at doing. Neither should any other sophisticated marketer in this space, we should seek to complement it. Let demand-capture platforms compete for the final expression of intent.
Yes, this can make attribution more difficult, but the point of our work is not getting credit; it is driving revenue. To drive revenue, we have to be strategic enough to step away from seeking that last click. The larger strategic opportunity may be to own more of what happens before the consumer enters that environment.
That creates a very different franchise marketing architecture:
National Brand → Local Intent & Influence → Demand Capture
The national organization creates brand equity and provides consistency. The local Intent & Influence Layer recognizes the behavioral signals, market conditions, competitors, and consumer differences that make each location unique. Then Google and other lower-funnel platforms capture demand when the consumer is ready to act.
These aren’t competing systems. They are different systems, each doing different jobs.
Local at Scale
Historically, sophisticated localization has been difficult for large franchise organizations. Running hundreds of truly individualized marketing strategies could require hundreds of campaigns, hundreds of audience decisions, different competitive sets, different optimization strategies, and an enormous amount of management. This is why the industry compromised - because it was easier. We created sophisticated national strategies and distributed them locally. That worked until advances in technology created the opportunity to truly focus locally.
It is increasingly possible to bring national-level data science, audience intelligence, behavioral targeting, optimization, and measurement down to the individual franchise market—even when the individual location does not have a national-sized advertising budget.
That creates something franchise organizations haven’t always had local intelligence at national scale.
And I think that becomes increasingly important as demand capture becomes more automated. If every competitor eventually has access to similar bidding automation, similar AI optimization, and similar tools for capturing consumers who are already searching, competitive advantage has to move somewhere else.
It moves to earlier in the journey. Competitive advantage moves from capturing demand into understanding why demand is developing. It moves into recognizing the signals that precede demand. And it moves into influencing consumers before they arrive at the search box. By the time two consumers search for the same thing, they may look significantly similar to a demand-capture algorithm unless there has been an influence strategy employed before that search.
The people they were before they made that search may look nothing alike. This is where the opportunity lies. The most strategic thinkers understand those differences aren’t noise that needs to be eliminated in the name of national scale. This is where leaning into the Influence Layer delivers the payoff. Understanding the differences at first intent and knowing how to apply the right kind of influence to bear is how to move from random intent to actual demand.
We find understanding and utilizing those differences is where the competitive advantage lives.
By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm