Local Store Marketing at Scale: What Actually Works (and What We Keep Getting Wrong)
I've built the playbook. I've recorded the webinar. I've made the checklist, added the case studies, attached the video walkthrough — the whole package. And then I've watched it die on the vine while franchisees look at me waiting for me to just do the marketing for them.
If you've been in franchise marketing long enough, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you're being honest with yourself, you've probably wondered — more than once — whose fault it actually is.
That's the conversation I had recently with Laura Peever, Head of Marketing at Sportball, and Marci Kleinsasser, CFE, VP of Marketing at Voxie. Two people with real hands-on experience running local store marketing inside systems — not the CMO version, the in-the-trenches version. And they didn't sugarcoat it.
The myth we all carry
Marci named it right out of the gate. The biggest myth in local store marketing? That the playbook is enough. That you can hand it over, walk away, and trust that franchisees know what to do with it. They don't. Not because they're not smart, but because they didn't sign up to be marketers. They signed up to run a business.
Laura added the other side of that coin: we love to make local store marketing entirely the franchisee's responsibility, and the franchisee loves to push it back to corporate. "You're the marketing expert," they'll say. "That's your job." And the answer — as Laura put it — is that it's neither. It's a team sport.
I've been guilty of the opposite failure: believing that if I just created enough marketing support at the corporate level, the franchisee wouldn't have to get out into their community. I've had to unlearn that. The corporate team cannot do local store marketing for a local owner. We just can't.
The playbook isn't dead — but it needs a redesign
Here's where it gets interesting. Marci isn't saying playbooks are obsolete. She's saying the way we hand them off is broken. "The franchisee wants the brand to solve the marketing problem," she said. "But they want to solve the local — the timing, the who in their specific market." The ICP should come from the brand. The local nuance has to come from them.
Laura took it further at Sportball. They don't even call it local store marketing. They use an OKR framework, and from day one — including the franchise development conversation — expectations are set around outcomes, not tactics. What are you trying to achieve? What does success look like at 30, 90, 180 days? The playbook is less of a rulebook and more of guiding principles with infrastructure the franchisee can adapt.
"Running the same campaigns in Brooklyn is not the same as running in Phoenix," Laura said. Car culture versus walking culture. Same brand, completely different execution reality.
The attribution trap
This is the one nobody likes to talk about. Local store marketing doesn't convert tomorrow. You're not going to hand out cards at a farmers market and see ten new customers by Friday. And franchisees — especially new ones — lose faith fast when the ROI doesn't show up on the timeline they expected.
Marci's reframe is useful here: shift away from direct attribution and toward proxy metrics that build momentum. If you ran a community event, did you post about it on LinkedIn? What was the engagement? Did you use a QR code on your leave-behind? How many scans? "You may not see direct sign-ups," she said, "but there are indirect measurements that show these activities are building the long-term health of your business."
Laura put it in terms of lead indicators. The registration — the sale — is the ultimate truth. But there's a path to get there, and that path has markers. Use peer data from across the network to show franchisees what growth looks like at each stage. Show them that the operators who did the work in months one through six are the ones with a full pipeline in month twelve.
Katherine's honest reality: even when you've said all the right things in discovery, the franchisee slips the script once they're on board. And sometimes, if we're over-supporting them corporately, we're actually confusing their expectations. Worth sitting with that one.
The real levers
Marci's must-have is text marketing — easy, inexpensive, and attributable. But she was direct about the non-negotiable underneath all of it: the franchisee has to show up. "They have to commit to not hiding behind a computer," she said. You can have all the media tactics in the world, but if the owner is not the face of their brand in their community — being the mayor of their town, as she put it — the rest doesn't matter.
Laura's pick was customer experience. Not an ad creative. Not a campaign. The experience. "If you don't have an interest in working with kids, you're not getting hired at Sportball." That standard — maintained at the hire level, at the training level — is what makes customers come back and tell ten friends. Laura was pointed about it: "They're not coming back because they loved how our ads looked."
Marci connected the chain: brand experience drives brand reputation, which drives reviews, which affects your entire ability to show up online — including your GEO and AEO visibility. It's all downstream of experience.
What's actually working for franchisee activation
Budget Blinds keeps coming up in this conversation as a best practice. Marci described their daily marketing calendar — literally a calendar with a daily link, a single 5-to-15-minute tip. Check your Google Business Profile. Send an SMS campaign update. Leave behind 10 door hangers on the way to your next job. Marketing is not a black box — it's shaking somebody's hand. Breaking it into pieces that don't feel like marketing is the whole game.
Laura's approach at Sportball: peer-to-peer amplification. Every quarterly town hall includes growth awards celebrating franchisees at every stage of the growth curve. They actively repost franchisee content from the corporate channel. Not as gatekeepers — as amplifiers. And when a newer franchisee is killing it with talking-head videos on social, that content reignites the passion in legacy operators who've been around long enough to need the reminder of why they joined.
She also shared something worth noting: they ran a media pilot that didn't work. They were transparent about it. Paid the franchisees something for their participation anyway. "Sometimes you try stuff and it doesn't work. And that's okay because we can figure it out together." Fail forward. It's not a cliché — it's the difference between a franchisee who trusts you and one who checks out.
The thing nobody talks about
Laura closed with something that's stuck with me. She said customer experience is "one of the more underrated growth levers in marketing." And she's right. We're out here building paid campaigns and running events, and not nearly enough of us are sitting in the operations training asking: are we training franchisees to create an advocate in every single customer?
If every customer walks out telling ten friends — not because the ads were great, but because the coach loved working with kids and it showed — how much more momentum does that build than any campaign we could run?
How much of your operations training is written through that lens? And what would have to change if it were?
This post was inspired by a conversation with Laura Peever, Head of Marketing, Sportball and Marci Kleinsasser, CFE, VP of Marketing, Voxie, recorded for the Franchise Marketing Spotlight in September 2026.
Listen to the full conversation at https://youtu.be/xcEDryZB-0k
