LOMA Platform Boosts Hyperlocal Marketing for Franchises

If LOMA knows anything, it’s how to support franchise businesses.

Since launching last September with a $2 million pre-seed venture capital round, the data-driven platform is ready to take the next step in supporting local marketing efforts. (LOMA stands for “local marketing.”)

In recent weeks, LOMA launched the first enterprise software platform for multi-location franchise brands that can plan, activate, and measure local marketing spend.  Its client roster includes retail brands such as Papa John’s, Dunkin Donuts, Wingstop, Robeks, and Taco Bueno, all of which can license the company’s software, distribute media, and refer distribution by marketplace vendors.

Smoothie franchise,  Robeks,  has locations in 14 states and some franchisees wanted summer-specific menus and offers. LOMA helped Robeks activate store-level campaigns with store-specific creative ads. Its centralized workstream saved Robeks’ marketing teams significant hours of building plans, working with different vendors in different systems, coordinating creative with franchise partners, and managing all the spreadsheets that are required to track for compliance against their franchise agreement.

“LOMA’s platform is a game-changer for multi-location brands who are wanting to drive awareness in their local markets,” said Mitch Baker, VP of Marketing at Robeks. “We want to engage our local communities to drive excitement and trial. Having the ability to help our franchise partners by centrally planning, activating and measuring local advertising spend all in one system is a tremendous value to our brand and our franchisees.”

The new software platform has three noteworthy aspects to assist local marketing efforts of national brands:

• Marketplace. The first marketplace of offline and online local marketing channels promises centralized access to capabilities to deploy store-level advertising campaigns in an automated local ad builder. Brands can build a hyper-local campaign that includes canvassing, sampling, and local phone outreach to businesses. It also includes direct and shared mail with local, paid social in Snapchat, Nextdoor, and other channels to engage and reach local audiences.
• Franchise Fulfillment. National brands can plan and fulfill local ad buys on behalf of their franchisee partners to help drive local awareness and generate foot traffic and sales for their partners.
• Local Attribution. Real-time, store-level attribution to prove effectiveness of local ad spend against transactional volume, ticket average and same-store-sales.

“Our platform helps to ensure multi-unit brands have a top-of-mind awareness and presence in the local communities where they have customers,” said Alex Nocifera, CEO of LOMA.  “Local marketing is known to yield the best long-term and lifetime valued customers, but it is also infamous for being costly, resource-intensive and lacking attributable evidence.”

He added that brands want to engage with local customers and prospects, but many do not have the systems to act locally because such activation can be a tedious process that includes developing granular marketing plans and playbooks for franchisees. Each store may have unique attributes depending on their locations. (Think of special menu items popular with different ethnic groups in certain regions as one example.)

“Franchisees do not have the time or resources to execute effective local marketing campaigns,” Nocifera explained. “Field marketing teams, agencies, and partners can build local activation plans with one-click payment automation for their franchise partners.  The fulfillment dynamic also helps franchisors track the compliance of franchisees’ commitment to spending local ad spend, which most franchise systems have in their franchise agreement.”

LOMA’s platform is able to execute multiple types of local marketing plans by location or by marketing execution.  It can boost awareness of a new location’s grand opening or help low-volume locations as franchisees can choose a variety of tactics in the marketplace to address a specific need.

Bobby Meroney, who owns a Papa John’s pizza franchise, said, “Local marketing requires a ton of time to plan and execute. LOMA’s platform enables my team to centrally plan and execute our local marketing spend across our different locations to drive awareness in our competitive local markets.”

Nocifera estimated that consumers see more than 10,000 ad impressions per day. Unless a brand is conducting campaigns near their locations, they are not rising above the “noise.”

“When brands sign leases, they immediately obligate themselves to a community,” said Nocifera.  “If you aren’t staying top-of-mind in the community, you’re losing to your competitor.