Franchise marketing is still often judged by national spend, campaign activity, and total lead volume.
That can hide what’s happening in each local market.
Customers search by city, service, distance, reviews, hours, and availability, then make a decision before the brand ever sees a lead.
That creates a risk many leaders may only notice after one location starts missing calls, another asks for more media, and competitors keep showing up first.
The data supports that concern: 85% of consumers consider contact information and opening hours important when researching local businesses, according to a BrightLocal 2025 Consumer Search Behavior report.
That makes local visibility more than an SEO task. It can affect whether a customer trusts a location enough to call, visit, book, or keep comparing.
Andrew Beckman is the Founder and Chairman of Location3, a digital marketing agency and technology partner that helps franchise and multi-location brands connect corporate strategy with local execution.
For Beckman, the problem is that many franchise brands are active in local marketing, yet still don’t know how much available demand they’re failing to capture in each market.
“Content is king. It sets you up for organic results. It sets you up for large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini to learn from your content and pull your business into AI overviews,” Beckman tells DesignRush.
In episode No. 141 of the DesignRush Podcast, Beckman explains why franchise growth depends on more than national media spend.
It depends on whether content, data, media, technology, and franchisee execution are strong enough to win demand at the local level.
Watch the full episode now on YouTube or listen on Spotify.
Who Is Andrew Beckman?
Andrew Beckman is Founder and Chairman of Location3, a Denver digital marketing agency and technology partner for franchise and multi-location brands.
A Certified Franchise Executive, he founded Location3 in 1999 and advises brands on local SEO, paid media, data, AI search, and franchise growth.
The Local Demand Gap Behind Franchise Growth
Beckman’s view of local marketing started before search became the system brands know today.
In the late 1990s, he worked at DoubleClick, selling ads across AltaVista and the DoubleClick Network.
That was when search advertising still looked more like banner advertising, and many brands were only beginning to understand how customers would use the internet to find businesses.
For Beckman, the lesson carried into the company he later built.
“Location 3 is location, location, location,” Beckman says.
“I always felt that every website and the domain is a specific location.”
That idea became the foundation for Location3’s work with retailers, service-area businesses, franchise systems, and multi-location brands.
The company’s focus is helping brands connect corporate marketing with what happens in individual markets, where customers search, compare, and choose.
“That is really what our focus is. It’s location- based advertising at scale,” Beckman says.
In franchise systems, that work becomes complicated quickly.
Corporate teams may manage brand funds, media planning, SEO, content, listings, analytics, and paid channels. Franchisees may add their own budgets because they want more leads in their specific markets.
That creates a gap many reports do not make obvious.
A brand may know how much it spent nationally. It may know how many leads came in across the system. But it may still not know how much local demand was available in each market, or how much of that demand competitors captured first.
For Beckman, one of the biggest issues is lost impression share.
In other words, a franchise brand may be active in search and still be underrepresented where buyers are already looking.
That is where local marketing becomes a leadership issue.
If a brand is appearing for only part of the searches that matter, the problem isn’t only campaign performance. It’s market coverage, franchisee support, media allocation, and whether the company can see demand clearly enough to act on it.
According to Beckman, franchise and multi-location brands risk missing three issues when they treat local marketing as a collection of campaigns instead of a market-level growth system:
1. Reading Lead Volume Instead of Lost Local Demand
A franchise location asking for more leads doesn’t always mean the market needs more spend.
Sometimes, it means the brand is missing searches that are already happening.
Beckman says that becomes clearer when brands look at non-branded search terms by market, rather than only reviewing campaign totals.
“What business needs to understand is if there are non-branded search terms that they want to rank on within a specific market, they need to understand what the inventory looks like,” he says.
That inventory matters because local demand has limits. A market may have a clear number of valuable searches for a service, and every competitor is trying to win a portion of them.
Beckman says many companies are only appearing for part of that demand.
“Where most companies are falling short is they're like 20 or 30% of the time. And then that Delta is going to the competition,” he says.
This is why more spend isn’t always the full answer.
Search can still be one of the strongest channels, but it can’t create unlimited demand in a specific market.
“Search is always going to outperform, and they want more of it, but they're up against competition, right?” Beckman says.
“There’s only so much you're going to get on plumber near me or taco near me.”
That makes the middle of the customer journey harder to ignore.
If the brand has already captured the obvious searches, the next problem is whether people in that market know the brand, understand the offer, and trust the location before they search.
For Beckman, that’s where many multi-location brands need to think harder.
“Mid- funnel stuff is really where the next phase of strategy and challenge and opportunity is for these multi-location brands,” he says.
For leadership, lost impression share can reveal three problems earlier:
- A market coverage gap: The brand may be active in paid search while still missing most of the local searches that matter.
- A budget allocation issue: More media may not help if the brand does not know which terms, services, or locations are underrepresented.
- A franchisee support problem: Local operators may ask for more leads without seeing how much demand competitors are already capturing.
If leadership only reviews total spend, total leads, or systemwide campaign performance, it may miss the local demand gap forming inside individual markets.
DesignRush’s guide to local SEO strategy explains how Google Business Profile, local keywords, reviews, citations, and website content help brands appear in local search results.
2. Letting AI Learn From Weak Local Content
Beckman says the local demand problem also reaches AI discovery.
That’s because AI tools and automated ad platforms rely on the information brands publish.
For franchise systems, that includes location pages, service pages, listings, creative, and the website content that explains what each business offers in each market.
This changes the role of local content.
A thin location page isn’t only a weak customer experience. If that page does not clearly explain the service, market, location, and customer need, it gives search engines and AI tools less useful information to work with.
Beckman says he sees this problem often.
“Nine out of 10 companies that I look at on a daily basis, just have what we call keyword gaps,” he says.
Those gaps can be basic, but they still matter.
“They are missing content, whether it's a service by location or product by location,” Beckman says.
When that content is missing, someone else gets the chance to answer the customer first.
“It's just missing. It's a void that a competitor is going to fill and be on that result page when someone does a prompt, or someone does a query search,” he says.
The same issue is starting to affect paid media.
“Google has rolled out about a year ago AI Max, which is learning from the content of your website,” Beckman says.
Meta, TikTok, and Reddit are moving in the same direction, according to Beckman.
“They're all gonna start learning from the content on your site, as well as how your creative is and what your KPIs are,” he adds.
For leadership teams, this makes content ownership a governance issue.
The company needs to know who owns local pages, who reviews service and product gaps, how listings are maintained, how creative is tied to local demand, and whether the website gives AI and media platforms a clear picture of the business.
Without that ownership, the brand may keep funding campaigns while the systems behind those campaigns are learning from weak or incomplete information.
DesignRush’s article on AI SEO tools explains how teams are tracking rankings, citations, brand mentions, and visibility across AI-generated answers.
3. Letting Vendor Sprawl Hide the Real Cost
Tech problems often look like marketing problems from the outside.
One location wants more leads, another wants a different vendor. Corporate sees rising platform spend, and a new marketing leader comes in with a different view of what should be fixed first.
Over time, a franchise system can collect more tools, more reports, and more local opinions without getting a clearer answer to where demand is being lost.
Beckman says many companies are dealing with that problem already.
“They don't have the right pieces or they're way overpaying certain platforms,” he says.
That spending can create a trade-off many leaders may not see until the local gaps become obvious.
“They can't do the content because their budgets go into platforms,” Beckman adds.
The problem gets harder inside franchise systems because local operators often feel the pain first.
If a franchisee is not getting enough leads, the reaction may be to bring in another provider, run another campaign, or pressure corporate for more local support.
But if each market starts solving the problem differently, the system becomes harder to manage.
Beckman gives the example of a 200-franchisee system where multiple vendors may be advising different operators at the same time.
“If you could be like 200 franchisees, which is not a large system, they might have multiple vendors and all these vendors are chirping in the air saying, do this, do this,” he says.
“The tech stack is fragmented. Their strategies are fragmented.”
That kind of fragmentation can hide three problems leadership needs to see earlier:
- A spending problem: Budget may be tied up in platforms while content, tagging, listings, and local pages remain underfunded.
- A reporting problem: Different vendors may give different versions of performance, making it harder to compare markets.
- An ownership problem: Corporate, franchisees, vendors, and platform partners may all touch the customer path without one clear view of what’s working.
If leadership only sees campaign dashboards, it may miss the operating issue underneath.
The brand may be spending more, but still failing to answer local demand clearly enough for customers, search engines, AI tools, and franchisees.
DesignRush’s article on why multi-location brands outgrow their agencies explores how local complexity can strain agency relationships when ownership, store-level performance, and local execution become harder to manage.
What Leaders Should Fix First
When local demand is being missed, leaders need a clearer view of where the problem starts.
Beckman’s first recommendation is the tech stack.
“The tech stack, it would be the first thing,” he says.
“How are they centralizing their data sets is really important.”
That audit should show whether corporate teams, franchisees, vendors, and platforms are working from the same view of local performance.
It should also show which tools are being paid for, which systems are underused, and where budget is being pulled away from content, tagging, listings, and reporting.
Beckman says leaders should then look at the connection between data, content, and creative.
“The tech stack, the data, the content, and creative, these three will really dial in for what is moving forward with machine learning and AI.”
- Tech stack covers the systems behind local marketing.
- Data shows how each market is tracked and compared.
- Content shows whether the brand has the right service, product, and location pages in place.
- Creative shows whether campaigns reflect what customers are searching for in each market.
The work starts before the next media buy.
A franchisee asking for more leads may need more media. It may also need better content, cleaner listings, stronger local visibility, or a clearer view of where competitors are already winning the search.
That is why local growth cannot remain split across disconnected vendors, dashboards, and franchisee complaints.
For CEOs and CMOs, the priority is to know where demand is being missed, why it’s being missed, and which part of the system needs to be fixed first.
A strong local SEO agency can help franchise and multi-location brands improve market-level visibility, local content, listings, reporting, and demand capture.
