There is no benchmark percentage that settles the local versus national question. There is a list of things national cannot do for a franchise network, and the size of that list is your local budget. This is how head office works out the split, how the two layers make each other work harder, and how to keep the local layer aimed at extra volume rather than volume you were getting anyway.
The argument about local versus national is usually framed as a split, as if there is a percentage somewhere that solves it. There is not. The two budgets are buying different things, and once you are clear about what each one can and cannot do, the split mostly decides itself.
Build the brand at a price per thousand no store can match. Launch a product across the whole country in one week. Hold a consistent story in front of people who are nowhere near buying yet. Buy the big formats. None of that works store by store, and no local budget should try.
Know that store 214 has a new competitor two streets away. Know that one suburb is quiet on Tuesdays and busy on Sundays. Know that a store opened six weeks ago and nobody there has heard of it yet. Know where a store can actually deliver. National is spread by audience, not by trade area.
Instead of asking what percentage other brands spend locally, ask what your national plan leaves on the table. Each of these is a gap national cannot close, and each one has a price you can put a number on.
| The gap | Why national cannot close it | What the local layer does |
|---|---|---|
| Uneven reach across the network | National buys by audience, so delivery lands unevenly by postcode | Tops up the trade areas that under-delivered |
| New and reopened stores | A national flight cannot say "this one is new" | An opening package the partner runs for the first eight weeks |
| Local competition | A competitor in one suburb is invisible at national level | A response campaign in one trade area, this month |
| Weak dayparts | National creative is built for the average week | Offers aimed at the hours that particular store is quiet |
| Lapsed customers | National treats them the same as everyone else | Winback that only runs where the customers actually are |
| The gap weeks | National goes dark between flights | Keeps the brand present when nothing else is running |
Swipe the table sideways to see the rest.
Price those six and you have a local budget with a reason behind it. It is a far better conversation with a franchise board than "the industry average is x percent".
This is the part that gets treated as a nice idea when it is actually mechanical. Someone who saw the national ad on Sunday is not a cold audience on Wednesday. They recognise the brand, they scroll past less, they click more. Ad platforms price response, so a better response rate means the same local dollar buys more impressions and more clicks than it would have bought cold.
It runs the other way too. National awareness only turns into sales where somebody can actually serve the order. If a store can deliver to a suburb and national is under-delivering there, a small local buy in that exact area converts demand the brand has already paid to create. That is why targeting the real delivery area matters more here than anywhere else. A radius that reaches past the delivery boundary is spending the national brand equity on people who will be told the store cannot come to them.
The failure mode of local marketing is quiet and expensive. You run a local offer, the platform reports a healthy return, and most of those orders were going to happen anyway. You did not grow the store, you discounted it. Worse, you spent national money and local money on the same customer.
Aiming at incremental volume is mostly a question of who the local layer is pointed at:
Not the loyal customer who orders every fortnight. The households inside the trade area who have never ordered, in the postcodes where delivery under-indexes.
Volume moved from a busy Friday to a quiet Tuesday is still worth having, because the store already pays for the Tuesday. Volume moved from Friday to Friday is not.
A lapsed customer coming back is close to pure incremental. It is also the cheapest audience most networks never bother to build.
How to actually check it, without a research budget, is on the return on local marketing.
Both sides need the other one to hold their end. A partner who cannot choose anything stops logging in. A partner who can choose everything is a brand risk. What head office keeps goes through that split in more detail.
The practical version of all this is a calendar partners can see. National flights, the packages built to sit under them, and the local-only slots in between. When a partner can see that a national campaign starts in three weeks, they plan around it instead of accidentally competing with it.
Head office builds that catalogue once and loads the calendar in one go. If you already wrote the plan in a document, you can hand it straight to Amplaro's MCP connector and have the entries created rather than typed. Then running it across the whole network becomes a question of adoption rather than production.
National marketing buys attention for the brand across a whole country at a cost per thousand no single store could ever reach. Local marketing spends a much smaller amount inside one trade area, on people who could actually walk in or order tonight. National is about being known. Local is about being chosen this week.
There is no single right number, and any vendor who gives you one has not looked at your network. The split follows what national cannot do for you. If your stores all sell the same thing at the same price with the same trading hours and the same competitors, national can carry most of it. The more your stores differ by suburb, by daypart, by competitor pressure or by how new they are, the more of the budget belongs at store level. Most networks we talk to under-spend locally, not because they decided to, but because there was no easy way to spend it well.
It can, if the local layer is just the national offer shown again to the same people. That is not extra sales, that is paying twice for the same order. The way to avoid it is to give the local layer a different job: reach the people national did not reach in that postcode, fill the weak dayparts, bring back lapsed customers, and answer a competitor that only exists in one suburb. See the return on local marketing for how to check whether the volume was incremental.
Two ways. The first is on the ad platforms themselves: people who have already seen the brand nationally respond better to a local ad, and better response is priced in, so the same local dollar buys more. The second is coverage. National spend is spread by audience, not by trade area, so it always lands unevenly across your network. A local layer lets you top up exactly the postcodes where a store can serve the demand and the national buy under-delivered.
Both, on different questions. Head office decides what may run: the offers, the creative, the copy, the guardrails and the calendar. The partner decides what does run: which of those campaigns, in which weeks, at what budget, for their own area. Head office picking campaigns for individual stores does not scale, and partners inventing their own creative does not hold the brand.
Usually yes, and deliberately. A local campaign sitting under a national flight rides on awareness somebody else already paid for. The exception is the gap weeks. When national goes quiet, local is the only thing keeping the brand in front of people, and those weeks are often where a local budget earns the most.
Do not let the price be free text. If a partner can type a number into an ad, someone will eventually type a number that is cheaper than the national offer, and your national campaign is now competing with your own network. Offers should come from a catalogue head office controls, with real start and end dates. That is what brand control is for.
You cannot cleanly separate them by attribution, because the same customer sees both. What you can do is compare stores. A franchise network is a large set of near identical units, which makes it one of the few businesses that can run a proper holdout without a research budget. Hold a matched group of stores out of a local campaign, run national as normal everywhere, and compare.