The countdown to IFA 2026 is officially on. Each year, the International Franchise Association’s Annual Convention brings together the leaders shaping the future of franchising. Founders, franchise development teams, marketing executives, operators, and suppliers gather to exchange ideas, solve challenges, and prepare for what is next.
The residential home services franchise sector is entering a period of remarkable growth, with projections indicating it will reach $150 billion by 2033, according to Open PR and Industry Today.
Discover how AI, data-driven marketing, and brand consistency drive trust, growth, and retention in financial services and insurance.
We know from our work with distributed organizations in industries like banking and financial services, franchising and insurance, that corporate marketers often look for ways to make marketing easier for their frontline operations.
Competition, regulatory requirements, an intangible product, and a distributed field organization of agency partners – these are among the top challenges insurance brand marketers face.
Getting consumers to talk about and share their positive experiences with your brand, product or service with other people is the Holy Grail of marketing. It’s called word-of-mouth (WOM), and it’s one of the oldest and most effective forms of marketing.
It was a valuable and inspiring three days in Atlanta last week at the Franchise Customer Experience Conference (FCXC).
This year’s Franchise Customer Experience Conference brought together industry leaders, innovators, and experts from every corner of the franchise industry. The 3-day event was jam packed with informative workshops, breakout sessions, panel discussions, and of course networking.
Digital is king for today’s direct marketers. Or is it? Based on the findings of its annual direct marketing survey, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) reported that while marketing professionals certainly make use of modern technology in their direct marketing efforts, traditional methods, such as sending messages in letter-sized envelopes via the U.S. Post Office can be remarkably effective.
As we’ve written about previously, multi-brand franchising is on the rise. Experts estimate more than half of all franchise units in the U.S. are owned by either multi-unit or multi-brand franchisees.
Face-to-face conferences are back – thankfully! If you’re like me, you value the chance to learn, in-person, from the leaders in your industry, discover the latest trends and best practices, and connect with peers and prospects.
When it comes to driving business growth in distributed organizations, the importance of local marketing campaigns cannot be overstated. How quickly you get campaigns to market across your footprint, your system or your regions is critically important for staying ahead of the competition or for responding to changing market conditions.
Marketing is not a static discipline. New trends, new technologies, changing consumer behaviors, and unforeseen world events. Every year seems to bring a new set of rules and a new playing field for marketers to navigate. If there’s one thing we in marketing can count on, it’s that marketing is constantly changing.
Buying a franchise can be a life-changing decision. So, it’s not surprising that prospective franchisees look at a variety of criteria when evaluating their potential investment in a franchise business. As franchise marketing leader and Social Geek podcast host Jack Monson explains, “They are not just buying a job – they are buying their future.”
Did the pandemic reveal areas within your organization that were, or are, in need of restructuring in order to build greater resilience or to develop capacity for future growth? If so, you most certainly are not alone.
What do your end users really think about your organization’s approach to marketing resource management? Even without explicit feedback, you can gauge their level of satisfaction by whether or not they use the marketing materials you create for them, or by how many questions or special requests you receive about your marketing resources.
A colleague recently wrote about how marketing organizations are being asked to do more than ever to contribute to operational effectiveness company-wide. This expanded role requires investments in talent and advanced, often complex, software systems. Choosing the right marketing technology for your organization is essential, but it’s only part of the equation.
Advances in technology, changing customer needs, and other market and societal forces are converging to evolve and expand the marketing function. Indeed, “Marketing’s role in strengthening a company’s operating effectiveness has never been more important,” according to a recent report in Harvard Business Review.
Most every industry goes through a renaissance at some point. A moment when markets align, lucrative business models come to life, investors flood in and sustained growth becomes possible. The franchise industry is seeing this renaissance right now, as many emerging companies are creating new opportunities for franchisees in new consumer and B2B categories.
Multi-brand franchising is on the rise. Experts estimate more than half of all franchise units in the U.S. are owned by either multi-unit or multi-brand franchisees. Franchisors are strategically developing new complementary brands and acquiring brands in adjacent industries to build brand families that diversify and synergize their franchise businesses.
Since 2020, the home maintenance services market has been experiencing a pandemic boost, as people’s lives have become more focused than ever around house and home. Homeowners are expected to continue spending in the year ahead.
What does the term brand mean to you? Many people mistakenly see brands as merely logos and color palettes, when in fact, brands are so much more. Your brand is the platform for presenting your business and its values to the marketplace.
Through our Bank Marketing Today podcast, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of speaking with a number of successful financial marketing executives who have taught me and our listeners a great deal about successful marketing strategies for banking products.
Like so many businesses, Vya has been assessing the longer-term impacts of COVID-19 – for our own business and for our clients. While we can’t fully predict what will happen next, we do believe that in a post-COVID economy, you can’t just go back to being the company you were before 2020.
A primary goal of industry conferences is to make important connections – with customers, prospects, partners, peers and others, who can help you advance your business goals.
For marketers, a primary goal is to maximize marketing ROI by ensuring marketing spend produces the best results. This means sending campaigns to the right people, at the right time, with the right message. But how can you know what’s right?
For the first time ever, the Big Four U.S. banking institutions—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo—saw their combined assets exceed $10 trillion, which represents more than half the U.S. total.
Marketing Operations emerged in 2000, driven by rising pressure on marketing to provide greater efficiency, transparency and accountability. The function was officially recognized by analyst firm IDC in 2005 (source: MarTech Advisor).
When a marketing analyst begins the quest to build a predictive model for a marketing campaign using past data to forecast future actions, it should be simple, right?
Marketers invest significant time and resources in creating campaigns they hope will engage their target audiences, increase sales and grow their businesses. But, of course, in today’s marketing environment, hope is not enough.
As you may have heard, Direct Options recently became part of the Vya family. This gives us the opportunity to share our customer data management and analytics experience and knowledge with the growing community of Vya friends and followers. I am thrilled to be able to kick off this knowledge sharing with some thoughts on what I believe is the essential element of any data-driven marketing strategy: usable data.
With more and more video conferences, meetings, and gatherings happening over Zoom, we thought it would be fun to offer some creative backgrounds for you to download and use.
At this time of year businesses often assess their performance of the past year and determine priorities for the year ahead, while looking at the broader trends that may impact their future success. Among these trends in 2020 is a focus on humanizing interactions and experiences in an increasingly digital world.
Whether your marketing budget is growing or shrinking, you no doubt need to figure out how to fund marketing’s expanding role, a growing number of marketing channels and the integration of new marketing technologies.
Today’s technology helps us address our goals of working smarter, faster and better. But even with the latest innovations, are there activities that Marketing continues to spend too much time on?
At Vya, we’ve seen how marketing can contribute to a bank’s strategic success. Marketing bridges a bank’s strategic direction and daily execution, with a keen understanding of what matters to today’s banking customers.
Most marketers would agree, color is a vital component of everything they do. Color can be used to represent essential attributes of your brand, express key messages or tap into emotional and psychological impulses, as this infographic by The Logo Company colorfully illustrates.
Planning for long-term success while addressing short-term goals isn’t easy for a bank marketing organization. It can feel like a tug-of-war between two opposing forces. A Deloitte Insights post about The Future-Ready CMO put it this way: “Effective marketing leaders often live in two realms—the present and the possible.”
If you’re not already aware, the U.S. Postal Service is ringing in the new year with a postal rate increase. Beginning January 27th, 2019, the price of a first-class stamp will go from $.50 to $.55, the largest jump since 1991, when the rate went from $.25 to $.29.
A quarter century – that sure sounds like a long time. Think back 25 years… what do you remember about 1993? Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd president of the United States. Top films were Jurassic Park, Mrs. Doubtfire, Groundhog Day, Sleepless in Seattle and Schindler’s List. The cost of a first-class stamp was $0.29.
In a Harvard Business Review article, a team of experts from Bain & Company presents an analysis of B2B client data that offers insights into what matters most to B2B buyers of business products and services. A framework emerged from their research – a pyramid which organizes 40 fundamental “elements of value” within five categories.
In its 2018 Banking Outlook report, Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services talks about the multiple challenges banks face as they aim to transform into “more strategically focused, technologically modern and operationally agile institutions.” Among the challenges Deloitte identifies are: complex and diverging regulations, legacy systems, disruptive models and technologies, new competitors, and an often-restive customer base with ever-higher expectations.
The number of innovative ways to use large format printing continues to multiply, making it one of the hottest areas in marketing. According to a report in Printing Impressions, the wide-format market is growing at a rate of 10% to 12% annually.
How would you characterize the strength and effectiveness of your marketing organization? Do you have the right talent, martech tools and focused strategy required to compete at the level necessary to grow within your industry?
Technology’s role in transforming marketing cannot be understated. Digital channels, automation and a multitude of platforms have helped expand the marketer’s role, requiring expanded skillsets and increased IT investments for successful execution of marketing plans. Yet most marketing teams remain understaffed and overburdened.
A client recently asked me, “Why should I consider including direct mail in my marketing mix? And if I were to use direct mail, how would I track it in a meaningful way?”
Relationships have always been at the core of bank marketing success. While face-to-face transactions and handwritten notes have largely given way to mobile deposits, online bill paying, emails and texts, knowing and connecting with your customer on a personal level is as important as ever.
Whether you’re a bank with local branches or a franchise business with multiple locations, local sponsorships offer a powerful way for your local representatives to build relationships and visibility in the communities they serve. Sponsorships are effective because supporting local sports teams, charitable causes, the arts and other cultural organizations puts your brand in front of the customers and prospects you most want to reach at the local level.
With the recently signed executive order requesting a review of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Trump administration has taken a first step toward potential regulatory relief for banks and financial services companies.
Despite digital marketing’s dominance in today’s marketing mix, printed materials continue to play a vital role for end-product manufacturers. From product manuals, operating procedures and material safety data sheets, to price books and hang tags – there are certain applications that demand printed materials.
Branch employees are the face and voice of your company to local communities. Engaging local branches and ensuring they use appropriately branded and compliant marketing material is a challenge that can seem insurmountable. It’s essential to achieve the right balance between empowering branches to reach local audiences with relevant messages and the clear need for oversight in order to maintain compliance and brand consistency.
Managing local grand opening events can be a challenge when you operate in a distributed marketing model. As a corporate marketer you want to support the success of the new location and ensure brand consistency. At the same time, you want to enable your local team the flexibility to create an event that resonates with their local market.
We’ve all heard it before: Content is king. But how are you getting the most out of your content? A big part of what makes content “good” is context – where is the content showing up and who is reading it? Did the audience discover the content on their own, or did the content find them? In other words, localization of content is incredibly important.
The onset of the Digital Age has added layers of complexity to the challenges faced by marketing leaders. For those in a distributed marketing environment, where corporate marketing and local sales channels simultaneously represent a single brand, the increase in complexity is exponential. As sales and marketing teams attempt to leverage digital channels together, the slightest disconnect in strategy or execution between the two departments can lead to brand erosion and confusion in the marketplace.
As many marketing professionals know, the marketing management process often gets bogged down in redundant, routine tasks. These tasks, such as tracking down approvals, locating collateral, managing budgets, do little to help you achieve corporate goals. To really make an impact on the business, marketers need to identify opportunities to automate insignificant tasks to free up time for strategic endeavors.
This time of year, excess can be all around us. Too often, the holidays quickly become overwhelming and a source of stress instead of something to enjoy. To me, it’s all about getting back to the basics. It’s about making things easier by removing items off my to-do lists, where appropriate, and staying focused on what really matters.
Today’s business landscape is constantly changing. Customers are in the driver seat, demanding new products and services, and expecting businesses to always be available. All the while, technology lets us deliver more faster than ever before, while connecting with more and more consumers.
Every day, marketing and operations teams face a number of hurdles just to get the right message in front of the right consumer. They need to help local branches and employees customize marketing materials, but still maintain oversight of marketing pieces.
Inspiring brand loyalty these days can be challenging. Many experts argue that building loyalty is no longer just about offering the best prices or strong customer service, but rather the entire experience a consumer has with your brand, its products, services and your employees.
There’s no industry more dynamic than the insurance industry. Facing strong competition, evolving customer needs and strict regulation, insurance companies need to be able to operate consistently—while also staying flexible to quickly adapt to change.
If you’re reading this at work right now, stop. Take a deep breath. Roll your shoulders back and straighten up in your seat. Now proceed.
Feel slightly better?
A growing body of research shows that the way most of us work…well, isn’t working.
Today, financial services marketing teams face what seem to be competing needs: They need to reach more local consumers, but still need to maintain control of marketing materials to ensure compliance is met and brand standards are upheld.
Today is an exciting, and emotional, day for me. Today, DocuStar is becoming Vya.
More than 20 years ago, I had a vision for the print industry. I saw the opportunity to provide quality, reliable print jobs quickly to our clients. Since DocuStar opened its doors, our clients came to know us for not just the quality of our work, but also the quality of our people and the care and attention we bring to every single one of our jobs.
Last week, I shared tips on maximizing print budgets. In a similar vein, this week, I want to share tips on how direct mail campaigns can stand out in your target consumers’ mailboxes.
Printing your marketing materials can seem like a simple task. But if you’ve ever managed a print process, you know there’s more to it than meets the eye. And if you have local contacts that all need individual materials printed, the campaign can quickly grow in complexity and cost—and you can wind up with inconsistent, less-than-stellar results.
It wouldn’t surprise anyone if I said technology plays a big role in our daily lives. We spend most of our days staring at a screen of some sort, whether it’s in our office, on a bus, train or airplane, walking down the sidewalk, or just sitting on the couch. And as we become more comfortable with technology, we’ve placed more of our responsibilities in the hands of technology. This is as true of people as it is business.
The evolution of the Internet and digital platforms might have altered the popularity of print, but it didn’t change the need for it. Print materials are a necessary part of a successful and effective communication strategy and exist in places digital media can’t, giving cross-media campaigns the chance to reach a bigger audience.
You know direct mail – you receive it, you use it, and it’s more effective than ever. But why? Why in our era of feature-rich, multimedia, permission-based marketing does direct mail still endure? Why do marketers know in their gut that direct mail is irreplaceable?
As we’ve discussed on this blog before, technological changes and economic variables are putting more and more pressure on marketing teams and businesses in general to justify strategies and quantify results with data. The problem with data is that data, in its simplest, just-collected form, is completely raw. Knowing that 10 of your leads this month came from Ohio doesn’t really tell anyone anything about how well you did or how you should run your business going forward.
Everyone has caught themselves daydreaming of a scenario where they said the right thing at the right time in the right place. Maybe it was about a marriage proposal, or falling into a dream job; either way, that goes to show that all (or at least most) of us at some level recognize the inherent value in the relationship between message, time and place. These elements are no less valuable when it comes to marketing and sales.
It’s a no-brainer to say customer service matters, but some recent studies really quantify just how much it matters. In one study, respondents indicated that they stand to lose up to 21% of annual revenue as a result of not offering a positive, consistent and brand-relevant customer experience.
From Deadlines to bottom-lines, I put my marketing department under constant pressure to show ROI. This means every project and every process must be evaluated and prioritized based on the resources available and the return it will generate. In short, you need to get the most out of your team at all times.
Part of any marketer’s role (and any executive’s role, really) is to identify emerging industry trends and separate those with real staying power from the mere flavors of the week. This is particularly difficult when it comes to tracking emerging digital resources.
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Our industry is evolving, and we've evolved right along with it. Docustar is changing its name to Vya. We saw the need for simple solutions to help distributed marketing companies manage their workflow and overcome the complexity of localized campaigns. The name Vya represents this simplicity. And stands for our mission to use systems, solutions and print to help free your time and simplify your workflow.