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Franchise marketers risk failure if they design for HQ, instead of their franchisees. Leaders like Larisa Walega (Ziebart) and Julia Moody (British Swim School) identify the core issue: Headquarters overestimates how “easy” they’ve made local execution. This piece reframes the franchise marketer’s role as teaching non-marketers to execute, requiring better campaigns, templates, and communication systems. The best franchise marketers are ultimately educators.

 

Your Franchisees Aren’t Marketers. The Best Franchise Systems Plan for That.

Most franchise headquarters build marketing programs for marketers. There’s just one problem: the people executing those programs at the local level aren’t marketers. They’re operators, entrepreneurs, and small business owners whose priority is running their location, not spending hours on email segmentation.

The franchises winning at local marketing have figured this out. They’ve completely reframed what the HQ marketing team’s job actually is.

The blind spot: HQ overestimates “easy”

Larisa Walega, Senior Vice President & Chief Growth Officer at Ziebart (400+ locations, 37 countries), learned this lesson over 15 years in franchise marketing. Her current approach centers on removing every possible barrier between headquarters and execution. Ziebart provides franchisees with content calendars and pre-built playbooks designed so owners can, in Walega’s words, just cut and paste.

But even cut-and-paste requires context. That’s why Ziebart sends a biweekly “Marketing Minute” newsletter, deploys field marketing specialists to help franchisees identify the right local tactics, and maintains a resource center stocked with creative assets their in-house team produces.

Julia Moody, Director of Marketing at British Swim School (200+ location franchise across North America), describes a similar philosophy. Her team’s job, as she sees it, is filling the top of the funnel nationally while giving franchisees the simplest possible tools to generate leads locally. That means facilitating grassroots efforts—pediatrician partnerships, water safety presentations, daycare events—that no corporate team could successfully run from a distance.

The common thread is powerful: both leaders treat their franchisees as the primary audience for their marketing, not just as distributors of it.

Small teams, big dreams, broken design

Research from ActiveCampaign’s ACHQ Franchise Marketing Report—a survey of 250+ franchise marketers —puts numbers to this gap. 

  • 35% of franchise systems report a lack of franchisee engagement with headquarters marketing initiatives. 
  • 45% say coordinating across locations is their biggest challenge.
  • 38% are expected to deliver results with teams of just two to five people.

The disconnect isn’t motivation; it’s design. When headquarters creates campaigns that require marketing knowledge to execute (like managing segmentation, send-time optimization, or personalization setup), most franchisees stall. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t have the know-how or the time to become an expert. And a small HQ team can’t hand-hold hundreds of locations through every send.

The franchise systems that win make marketing automatic

The winning franchise systems share one specific infrastructure philosophy: make execution as close to automatic as possible. 

  • Pre-built campaign templates with dynamic fields that auto-populate local details—store addresses, phone numbers, manager names—so each location gets a personalized version without 1:1 manual personalization. 
  • Time zone-aware sending, which eliminates the need for HQ to coordinate schedules across the country. 
  • Pushdown automation that deploys proven campaigns across the entire network, so a franchisee’s “marketing” is pressing one button, not starting from scratch.

The data confirms this is the right approach: Franchise marketers who describe their personalization as “very effective” are twice as likely to use automation, according to the ACHQ report. While 98% of franchise marketers agree that personalization across locations is important, only those with the right infrastructure can actually deliver it at scale.

The reframe that changes everything

The best franchise marketers aren’t campaign creators. They’re educators and system builders. Their job is to translate complex marketing expertise into tools that non-marketers can use without a second thought—and to keep communication frequent enough that franchisees never feel stranded.

As Ziebart and British Swim School demonstrate, that mindset isn’t where most franchise marketers start, but it is where the successful ones end up.

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