As a national or regional franchisor you've no doubt spent significant dollars establishing and building your brand in the eyes of your target customer. You've crafted your image, massaged your messages and fine-tuned your offerings to build a solid market foundation for your local affiliates. However, with most true demand-generation activities happening at the local level, the question remains: are you effectively enabling your local affiliates to increase demand in their daily businesses?

If you're like most franchisors, you package your finely-tuned creative assets on a regular basis and ship them off to your local affiliates with the hopes that they'll use them in an effective and brand-friendly manner. True local demand generation - driving customer leads to the store - is left solely in the hands of the local stores with the hope that they'll be successful.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if you could offer your local affiliates a full end-to-end marketing system that provided simple customization of corporate-approved creative and proven, easy-to-implement marketing activities across all mediums? Even better, what if you could leverage your national buying power to drive down marketing costs at the local level, making more dollars available to get paying customers in the doors? North America's largest floor covering retailer has found just such a solution.

Carpet One Floor & Home, with over 1,000 independently owned and operated locations, recently launched a web-based software application that addresses these common needs. By centralizing the management and execution of local marketing activities for its national brand, Carpet One is implementing distributed demand-generation efforts effectively and consistently while lowering its overall marketing costs.

Using a branded web-based software application developed by Balihoo, Carpet One members are enjoying lower marketing costs, finer brand consistency and improved effectiveness of their local marketing efforts. By consolidating advertising spending across the network of local dealers and aggregating their buying power, Carpet One members are maximizing their marketing budgets at the local level to drive local demand generation.

Ultimately, by being provided with simple creative customization and proven, easy-to implement marketing activities across all mediums, Carpet One members are experiencing significantly improved local marketing effectiveness. Their locally customized ads are now in concert with their national image, thus pleasing both the franchise organization and the franchisee.

"I have been pleasantly surprised at what Balihoo can do," said Wayne Wengerd, owner of Bear Carpet One Floor & Home in Sugarcreek, Ohio. "It's very thorough and well thought out. Balihoo makes it easy to create, manage and execute our advertising campaigns across the complicated media landscape of print, online, radio and television. It's a win-win for us: we are able to identify the best media mix - at the best price - to target potential customers."

Frank Chiera , VP of Marketing, Carpet One Floor & Home says "Balihoo ensures that local Carpet One marketing is efficient, effective and always in concert with our national brand."

Applications such as Balihoo Marketer Edition deliver true value to the distributed marketing model for franchisors to support their affiliates. By enabling efficient and effective demand generation at the local level, franchisors and their franchisees are experiencing heightened brand consistency, lower marketing costs and overall improved local marketing. Ask yourself If your franchise's national and local marketing efforts are in concert - if not, why not? Perhaps, considering a user-friendly application like Balihoo's Marketer Edition might be just what your franchise needs to solidify your marketing efforts.

Get in touch with Balihoo to discuss how to enable your local affiliates to increase demand at the local level.