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Franchise advertising can be fraught with difficulties that many other kinds of businesses cannot imagine. Often, the brand has to come first - but the needs of local franchisees are just as critical. The most effective way to handle co-op marketing is by finding common ground. Only then can you create co-op campaigns that meet the needs of both parties.

Striving for a successful co-op marketing partnership? These six strategies can help:

1. Make It Part of Your Larger Marketing Plan: Often co-op marketing is seen as a completely separate entity, and that creates problems for many brands and franchisees. Instead of looking at it apart from your current marketing strategy, view it in alignment. In fact, it needs to be part of your overall plan, so you can integrate your message and track your key performance indicators (KPIs) accordingly.
2. Create Better Branding Guidelines: If you're going to work together to create a solid campaign, you want to be sure that branding guidelines are clear. If you're a franchisee, inquire about any requirements for fonts, spacing, and logo usage upfront, before developing your creative. You want to make it as easy as possible to obtain co-op marketing approval, and the brand wants to ensure your promotions are consistently portraying an established identity.
3. Make It Worthwhile: If you're a brand who wants buy-in from your franchisees, you're going to need incentives to make it work. Whether it's a hot offer, a discount, or another perk that grabs attention, you need to make sure it's worth your franchisees' time to promote. After all, they're the ones who are going to be driving those sales, and that's a huge benefit for you, so create something spicy to help them set sales on fire.
4. Digital Marketing Really Is Better: Print marketing was typically home for co-ops, but that's just not true anymore. Digital is beating print and almost every other sector fairly routinely. Customers are looking online for brands and franchises alike, so spend those co-op dollars on digital marketing in lieu of (or in addition to) traditional marketing.
5. Create Accountability: Often co-op campaigns struggle because there's no real accountability. The franchise doesn't exactly bear all of the responsibility and neither does the brand. You need to create joint ownership in the process. This helps hold to task everyone involved, otherwise real results may never come.
6. Keep Going: Successful co-op marketing is not a single event. It's a long-term arrangement for delivering mutually beneficial marketing time and again. In other words, if one co-op campaign works, don't abandon it. Instead, figure out how to keep going and create more.

Interested in learning how to take your franchise advertising to the next level? Contact THAT Agency for details, and be sure to check out our free co-op marketing tracking template: