Sponsored content by ActiveCampaign.

At ActiveCampaign, we speak to dozens of franchise marketers each month and have noticed a theme: strategy is critically important, but the first order of operations is getting control of your time.

The most effective franchise marketers have thoughtful time management habits that help them do their best work. Here’s how they do it:

Habit #1: Moving from decentralized to hub and spoke

When you have a decentralized approach, any change to deliverables or campaigns is made manually. The more franchisees you add, the longer any strategy adjustments take to implement. Which is why the more you grow, the more chaotic your day feels.

In fact, difficulty coordinating across locations was the most cited challenge (44.8%) from our recent research report.

Your first step to get control of your time is to move to a “hub and spoke” approach, one where franchisees use the same tools, the same communication platforms, and run on the same marketing calendar.

“We realized we had no visibility into what our franchisees were doing with their email marketing,” explained Brittany Graff, Head of Marketing at Painting with a Twist. “Some were using different systems, some weren’t sending emails at all. We really needed a hub where we could have visibility into what was going on across all locations and provide branded resources to help them succeed.”

But be aware of being too draconian with your standardization effort. We’ve found that “The Consolidation Mirage” is real and can impair your ability to execute.

Habit #2: Creating clear brand guidelines with room for localization

If you create strict brand assets and guidelines, you’ll limit the creativity and agency of your franchisees. If your guidelines are too loose, your franchisees will be unable to build on each other’s success, and customers will get a disjointed experience.

“If content could be created for the franchisee that localizes it, without a lot of work from the franchisor. That would be the fix,” says Kristi Mailloux, Managing Partner of Three20 Capital.

Establish the constraints that allow your individual franchises to be creative, and then listen for feedback. Chances are, it will take some revisions to strike this balance.

“When we started providing completed templates and saved modules, we saw a 65% increase in the number of emails being sent across the system and a 25% increase in revenue attributed to email marketing. It was a huge win for our system,” says Graff.

When you offer templates, you reduce or eliminate the time spent assisting each individual franchise with creating their own campaigns. You also save time chasing down off-brand collateral.

Habit #3: Building franchise community

In our recent study, we found that 35.2% of franchise marketers say a lack of franchisee engagement is a challenge.

Instead, move your operations to a community-based approach where franchisees can easily share what’s working, what they’re struggling with, and answer one another’s questions.

Take a moderator role and empower your franchisees to freely share best practices. This has the dual benefit of empowering your franchisees and allowing trends to quickly surface so you can make better strategic choices.

Over to you

Creative work often takes large, unstructured blocks of time—that’s difficult when you’re managing endless inbound requests. Begin by practicing the habits above to get to a place where you’re proactive, not reactive.

Interested in the stats included throughout this article? Learn more about how successful franchise marketers operate and download the full report now.