[Top Agency Series] Digital Marketing Tips for Franchise Businesses With Alex Porter

Alex Porter is the CEO of Location3, a Denver-based digital marketing agency. Location3 was founded in 1999 to provide clients with global direct response marketing services by leveraging search engine marketing and display media advertising. During his 15-year tenure with Location3, Alex has also served as Vice President, President, and Chief Strategy Officer. His insights as an influential thought leader have been featured in publications such as BizReport, MediaPost, and Adotas.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [02:53] Alex Porter talks about Location3’s services
• [04:30] Why Location3 focuses on the franchise market 
• [09:36] Location3’s process of helping franchises achieve results through digital marketing 
• [12:08] How Alex got into the agency world and the evolution of his roles at Location3 
• [15:03] Alex talks about the LOCALACT platform they built 
• [23:02] Location3 growth strategies 
• [24:02] Who are the ideal clients for Location3?

In this episode…

Do you wish to drive tons of sales across all your franchise locations? The secret is in your marketing. So, what digital marketing tricks can you apply to scale your profits?

According to Alex Porter, many franchise businesses have limited digital marketing presence that hinder their success. He recommends hiring digital marketing agencies who understand the nuances of marketing franchise businesses to help create digital marketing strategies to drive revenue growth.

In this inspiring episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz welcomes Alex Porter, CEO of Location3, to discuss how they offer digital marketing solutions to franchise businesses. Alex talks about Location3, its process of helping franchises achieve results through digital marketing, and its LOCALACT platform.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Alex Porter on LinkedIn
• Location3
• LOCALACT

Special Mention(s):

• Todd Taskey on LinkedIn

Podcast(s) Mentioned:

• Second Bite Podcast

• “How Managing Industry Complexity Creates Niche Expertise and Valuable Agency [Going it Alone Series]” on Second Bite Podcast

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Expanding Your Brand Impact Through Social With Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing” on Inspired Insider
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on Inspired Insider

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I’ve Alex Porter of Location3.com. And, Alex, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out. And I always love to hear the different niches people are in, and especially in the agency world, with Location3, they go by every franchises story, and they help tell it and we’ll go into the details on that. But I had Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing, he focuses on food and beverage companies. I have Todd Taskey, who actually helps match agencies with private equities. He does M&A stuff, but only with agencies matching with private equity. So I love to hear the different niches people are in. And so we’ll dig deeper into that check out more episodes on the podcast. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast, we are an easy button for a company to launch and run their podcast we do strategy, accountability and full execution production. For a podcast we call ourselves like the magic elves that work in the background and make everything happen. For me, and Alex, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way to do that than the profile of people in companies I most admire and profile and share with the world what they’re working on. So you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com and learn more. And I’m excited to introduce Alex Porter. He’s CEO of Location3, they’re preferred digital partner of multi-location brands and franchise systems. They’ve been delivering enterprise strategy with local activation all the way back to 1999. And they have over 80 team members over $60 million in annual media Billings. They support over 50,000 franchisees and business locations. And like I was saying their message is every franchisee has a story and they help tell it. So Alex, thanks for joining me.

Alex Porter  2:37 

Thanks for having me. I appreciate being on. I’ve actually been on Todd’s podcast, Second Bite Podcast.

Jeremy Weisz  2:44 

Love the Second Bite Podcast. We help Todd and Todd’s awesome. Talk about Location3 and what you do.

Alex Porter  2:53 

Yeah, so Location3. Like you mentioned, we’ve been around since the early days of the internet and have gone through various iterations over those years. But about five years ago, we really decided to focus on the franchise space. And we operate in two different entities. The Location3 side is your traditional digital agency really focused on data and analytics and national media programs and closed-loop reporting and things of that nature. Working with CMOS of big franchise brands. And then on the franchisee side, we’ve built our own platform called Local Act, that is a solution for franchisees to understand their local digital marketing as well as by local digital media. So the individual franchisee of your local tutoring company can go into the Local Act, they see where their traffic is coming from. They understand if they’re getting reviews, if they’re getting phone calls, and then they can understand how their local marketing is working. So they’re in search for tutor near me. How many people clicked on that? What was the cost? Did it convert, did people show up at their location? And then they have the ability to kind of work with our support team to understand those metrics, and ultimately drive customers. For us, at the end of the day is we want to drive customers and revenue for our franchisees systems.

Jeremy Weisz  4:24 

Talk about the focus you said at one point you focused on franchises. What caused that?

Alex Porter  4:30 

Yeah, so it was a moment in time where one of our biggest clients went out of business somewhat unexpectedly and we were left really looking internally at existential crisis of who are we, what do we do? What do we do well? This is also at a time where the seemingly we’re 1000s of digital agencies all kind of saying the same thing. We’re really good at performance or we’re ROI focused and all these things, kind of a sea of sameness. And so we looked at our existing clients that had been with us a long time, and we enjoyed working with and they were all in the franchise space. And looking at that market, we realized pretty quickly that there weren’t very many agencies or any really, that were focusing on the franchise space, because it’s hard. It’s hard when you’re working with a franchise system and essentially every single franchisee is their own CMO. And that marketing at that franchisee level is so impactful to them as an individual, right? It helps them pay for college pay for summer camp, whatever the case might be. So there’s a very invested interest in this. So when we work with a franchise system, and they have 500, franchisees, every single one of them wants to be a VIP and deserves to be a VIP. But we thought that there is a lot of opportunity and it’s proved that we were corrected in that assumption.

Jeremy Weisz  4:33 

I love to hear learn more about what you do, and people don’t understand what you do. Can you talk about Wild Birds?

Alex Porter  5:03 

Yes. So Wild Birds, they’re all my favorite clients, but one of my favorite partners, favorite children, right. Wild Birds Unlimited, they have retail locations where they sell bird feeders and bird seeds and things like that. And when we started working with them, gosh, probably five-plus years ago, they had a very limited digital marketing plan or presence. And the team over there has the mindset of let’s test and learn. Let’s try things out. Let’s use data to support our hypotheses. And so we’ve gone from almost no digital to their locations are running paid search. They’re running Meta, they’re running YouTube, they’re running retargeting. And then at that enterprise level, we’ve tested out connected TV buy ads and other digital marketing opportunities that are more measurable, and really can kind of see the connection between a connected TV buy in a region with retail revenue rising. And not to mention the pandemic who would have thought that a pandemic would increase bird watching, but it sure did. And so they’re great.

Jeremy Weisz  7:41 

Good for social distancing.

Alex Porter  7:43 

And frankly very entertaining. I’m still trying to get an Oriole bird to my Oriole bird feeder, I’m from Baltimore originally and I have not been successful because the squirrels keep getting the oranges but I’m not giving up hope on that but I think why it works well is a mindset of innovation. And it’s a mindset that we’re truly partnering with them to A; understand their business but B; to drive that revenue and the proof ultimately is in that same store revenue growth and hey, let’s try this new tactic. We’re going to do it best practices we’re going to partner with our partners to make sure that we’re spending each dollar as efficiently as possible and the payoff is in their success. And that’s why the franchise space is so rewarding for us as a company and for our teammates here at Location3 is we hear about it all the time we get on a phone call with a franchisee who said, I’ve never had so many customers this is unbelievable how do I do more and of course there’s some that are frustrated and maybe need some education on how YouTube videos work and why that’s not going to directly correlate to a sale online and things like that, but for the most part it’s a very rewarding and very instantaneous feedback that we get from working in this business.

Jeremy Weisz  9:09 

Alex, how do you navigate, you said there’s challenges with any niche and with franchises, how do you navigate the corporate versus the individual franchisee? Does it typically happen where you’re talking to corporate and they want to disperse you because listen, I mean ultimately it’s gonna benefit them if you’re driving tons of sales to their locations? They want this to happen across all their locations are typically as they happen you’re working with one and then word spreads from there.

Alex Porter  9:36 

Yeah, currently we start at the franchisor level. So at the enterprise level because they are kind of the guardians or their stewards for their franchisees. It’s their responsibility to make sure that they’re assisting your franchisee in their marketing efforts. But for the most part, the franchisee does have some flexibility to kind of whatever they want. In some regards, they’re typically paying a percentage of revenue back to corporate, for an ad fund, and then that ad fund can go to fund a lot of different things. So our process is to get to know the franchise system get to know how that relationship works from a funding perspective. Our goal would be for the franchisor, to say, hey, we’re going to work with Local Act, they’re a preferred vendor, you’re going to get some preferred pricing by working with them because of our relationship, you’re gonna get some additional support. And then the best thing for us to do is to go to their annual conference most franchise systems have one time a year they bring all their franchisees to one place, there’s sessions on operations and finance and marketing, and we get to be there in person. And shake hands and walk people through the data. And we typically see adoption skyrocket after something like that, whether that’s, hey, we just rolled out YouTube in the platform, you should be on YouTube. And here’s why. Or, if it’s a brand new system we were just starting working with, we’re gonna see a lot of signups there. And then throughout the year, we’re continuously engaging them with education opportunities to put on webinars send out information to them. And it’s really a very much an ongoing process because the digital marketing world changes so frequently, right, like, okay, cookies are going away. What does that mean? How do we explain to a franchisee how the marketing technology landscape is changing in a way that makes them feel comfortable with their digital marketing results. It’s overly complex.