Thirty terms that come up when a franchise network runs local marketing, each defined in a sentence or two. Written for a brand team rather than for a search engine, which is why there is no filler and no term nobody says out loud.
Everything an individual store does to win customers inside its own trade area. Local ads, local offers, local partnerships, local print. It sits underneath the national campaign rather than replacing it.
The same thing as local store marketing. Australian franchise networks tend to say LAM, American ones tend to say LSM. If a document uses both, they almost always mean one activity.
A head office building marketing centrally and letting many local operators activate it. The defining feature is that the person spending the money is not the person who made the asset.
The vendor term for the same category. It covers franchise networks but also company owned chains, dealer networks and any brand with many physical sites.
The geographic area a single site realistically draws customers from. It is decided by drive time, physical barriers and competitors, not by a neat circle on a map.
Used interchangeably with trade area in Australia. A gym catchment is measured in minutes of commute, a pizza catchment in minutes of delivery, and they behave completely differently.
A pooled fund franchise partners contribute to, usually as a percentage of revenue, which head office spends on advertising for the network. In Australia it is a specific purpose fund under the Franchising Code.
The Franchising Code term for money partners pay in for a stated common purpose. It carries disclosure, annual statement and audit obligations that ordinary business spending does not.
The contribution itself, the percentage a partner pays into the marketing fund. Separate from any money that partner then chooses to spend locally.
Money pooled by a group of stores in one area, usually to buy media that is bigger than any one of them needs. Common in radio, outdoor and metro press.
The rules a local campaign cannot break. Which logo, which colours, which claims, which offers, what a partner may edit and what is locked. Guardrails are what makes self-serve local marketing safe at scale.
A step where head office reviews a local campaign before it runs. Useful as a safety net, expensive as a habit, because every approval queue eventually becomes the reason nothing launches.
The actual area a store will deliver to. It is a real shape with real edges, set by the business, and it is the correct target for a delivery brand's advertising.
Drawing a circle of a set distance around a store and advertising inside it. Simple, supported everywhere, and wrong wherever the real service area is not a circle, which is nearly everywhere.
Fitting the ad's target area to the real shape of the delivery or service area instead of a circle. It removes spend on people the store cannot serve and picks up people a circle would have cut off.
Triggering advertising when a device enters a defined area. Related to polygon targeting but usually about real time presence rather than where someone lives.
Running ads only at the hours that matter. A lunch offer served at 9pm is spend with no path to a sale.
The free listing that puts a store in Google Maps and local search results. Not advertising, but the thing local ads usually send people to, and often the weakest link in a network.
Return on ad spend. Revenue attributed to a campaign divided by what was spent on it. It ignores margin and counts sales that would have happened anyway, so it flatters local marketing more than any other number.
The share of sales during a campaign that would not have happened without it. The only number that answers whether the money was worth spending, and the only one an ad platform will never tell you.
What it cost in media to get one new customer. Useful across stores, misleading across categories, because a new gym member and a new pizza order are not the same event.
Tying spend and result back to a single site rather than a network total. Without it, a network average hides the stores doing well and the stores wasting money equally.
When the local campaign and the national campaign buy the same customer twice, usually by bidding against each other in the same auction. The network pays twice for one order and both reports claim it.
The share of stores actually using the tool. The number that decides whether a platform rollout worked, and the one most often left out of the business case.
A campaign head office builds once, with the creative, copy, targeting rules and budget range already set, which any partner can order for their own store without rebuilding it.
Where the approved logos, images and templates live so partners are not making their own. Sometimes called a DAM, a digital asset manager.
Posts on a store's own page that cost nothing to publish. Different from paid social, which buys reach beyond the people already following the page.
Advertising bought on Meta, TikTok or similar, aimed at people who have no existing relationship with the store. It reaches new customers, which owned channels by definition cannot.
Email, SMS and app messages sent to people whose contact details you already have. Cheap and effective for repeat business, and useless for finding anybody new.
The brand team that builds the campaigns, holds the fund and carries the brand risk. Every design decision in a franchise marketing platform is really a decision about how much head office keeps and how much it hands over.
Most of these terms are unpacked properly somewhere on the site. Start with local store marketing.