A franchise marketing audit that ends in a plan, not a list of ideas.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors, and lifecycle. For a franchise system we read them at two levels, brand and unit, so the ad fund, local co-op media, brand consistency across location pages and listings, lead definitions and unit customer acquisition cost are all inside the scope. The output is a findings workbook with evidence and severity, plus a 90-day action plan.

Access and reconstruction on days one and two, measurement testing on days two and three, then spend, sites, journey, local search, reviews and competitor analysis through day five. Day six is judgement, where each finding is written with its evidence, a severity band and the cost of inaction. Day seven delivers the action plan and the handover call. The scope is fixed so nothing gets skipped when the week gets busy.

A checklist tells you what to look at. An audit tells you what is true in your system. We use a fixed nine-area scope so nothing is missed, but every line in the workbook comes from your analytics, your ad accounts, your unit reporting, your invoices and your live sites. Findings are ranked by severity and cost of inaction rather than listed in the order the checklist happened to run.

Yes, on one restated set of definitions. Spend, enquiries, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, local search position, listings health and review velocity are reported unit by unit, so a strong market stops subsidising a weak one in the reporting. Where a unit is genuinely better run, the workbook documents what it does differently so the brand can transfer it as a best practice.

It can settle what the ad fund bought and what that produced, which is usually the real question. We trace allocation to campaigns and markets, measure output against restated definitions, and separate national brand media from co-op and local media instead of blending them. Where the answer is genuinely unmeasurable with today's tracking, the workbook says so and the plan fixes the measurement first.

Yes. We audit location pages, local listings, offers, creative and claims against your own playbook, and record where local execution has drifted far enough to cost enquiries or dilute the brand. Findings name the standard, the gap and the owner. We do not police franchisees on your behalf; the workbook gives the brand the evidence to have that conversation.

No. We do not sell franchises, we do not place franchisees, and we give no FDD, franchise-law, accounting or M&A advice. We review the marketing function with evidence. Where franchise development marketing is in scope we audit it as a demand channel with its own funnel and cost per qualified candidate, kept separate from consumer demand so the two never flatter each other in one report.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of brands, markets and ad accounts in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end, and no retainer is attached, which is what lets the workbook say that a channel we would happily sell is not worth funding for you. Your brand team, your current agency roster or another firm can execute the plan. If you later want us to run something, it is scoped and quoted separately.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Growth is exactly when waste compounds across units. FRANdata and the IFA project franchised establishments up about 1.5% to roughly 845,000 units in 2026, employment up about 1.8% to nearly 8.9 million workers and output up about 2.6% to more than $920 billion. In a system that size, a measurement error repeated in every market is the most expensive thing on the balance sheet that nobody has priced.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. Franchise marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides segments and unit priority, positioning, channel roles between national and local, budget and measurement. Many brands buy the audit first because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint on growth wherever it sits, including the unit-economics spread, ad fund structure and territory sequence. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence and a 90-day plan. If you already know marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

Whoever owns brand marketing, one operations leader who knows the units, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, call tracking, reporting and invoices. A handful of cooperative franchisees helps, because their numbers are the reality check. Expect roughly four hours of your team's time across the week: a kickoff, short interviews, and the handover call.

Your team runs it, and every action has a named owner and an acceptance test. Many brands book a review at ninety days to check the leading indicators, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back, and the parent engagement is the marketing audit itself.