How to Build Different Marketing Campaigns for a New Franchise Location

Building marketing campaigns for a new franchise location means thinking in multiple stages: 

• a grand opening campaign to build initial awareness, 
• seasonal or limited-time campaigns to drive action around specific offers, 
• and an evergreen campaign to maintain steady customer acquisition once the location is established. 

That kind of tailored approach matters because nearly 90% of consumers say they prefer personalized ads over non-personalized ones. Each stage has a different goal and the campaigns should be built around their goals rather than reusing from whatever ran before it.

Stage one: Grand opening

Before a location has any local reputation to lean on, the job of marketing is simple, make sure the surrounding community knows it exists. A grand opening campaign should be built around awareness first. Social media is an especially valuable channel at this stage, with 58% of consumers saying they first discover new businesses on social media. Getting the new location in front of as many local people as possible helps more than pushing for an immediate conversion before anyone's even heard of the place. Although, if the opening does have a specific, measurable goal, like getting people to book an appointment or register for an opening event, the campaign's objective should match that action directly instead of defaulting to a generic awareness push.

Timing matters as much as the objective here. Starting to promote a location before it physically opens gives the local audience time to become familiar with it, rather than announcing everything the day the doors open. It's worth letting the messaging evolve as the date approaches too, shifting from "coming soon" to "opening soon" to "now open," so the campaign tracks the actual excitement building around the launch rather than repeating the same message for weeks.

Stage two: Seasonal and limited-time offers

Once a location is open for around 90 days, the marketing job shifts from introducing the business to giving people a specific reason to visit right now. Seasonal and limited-offer campaigns work well here precisely because they're temporary and specific. For example, a holiday promotion, a new product launch, a limited-time discount, something with a clear beginning and end date.

Unlike a grand opening, there's no single objective that fits every promotion. The right choice depends entirely on what you actually want a customer to do. Choose the following types of campaigns, based on your objectives:

• Awareness → if the goal is simply getting an offer in front of more people
• Traffic → if you want them clicking through to a landing page, leads if you're collecting information from interested customers
• Sales → if the promotion is meant to drive an immediate purchase

MassageLuXe's Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign is a real example of this kind of limited-time offer done well at scale. With Flamel’s social ad playbooks they were able to generate over 68 million impressions and a 512% ROI across its 100+ locations. Building the campaign's timeline around the offer's actual availability matters too, giving it enough runway to reach the local audience, but with a clear end date so the promotion doesn't quietly linger past its relevance.

Stage three: Ongoing, evergreen marketing

Once a location has moved past its opening period and isn't running a specific promotion, it still needs to keep showing up. This is where an evergreen campaign comes in. It's a repeatable, always-on presence built around the location's core business. Whether that's ongoing brand awareness, steady lead generation, or consistent customer acquisition.

The objective here should reflect the actual ongoing business goal, not just repeat whatever objective worked during the opening phase. 

• Awareness → A location focused on staying visible locally.
• Leads → A location focused on filling a consistent pipeline of inquiries. 

Evergreen campaigns also benefit from having more creative variety than a single ad running indefinitely, since the same image and message running for months starts to blend into the background. Refreshing the creative periodically with local images and videos keeps it from becoming something that stops being noticed.

Putting the stages together

These three stages aren't meant to run in isolation. A location's marketing naturally moves from grand opening awareness, into seasonal or limited-time campaigns once it's open, and settles into an evergreen presence as its foundation. Evergreen marketing becomes the steady baseline, and seasonal campaigns become the periodic spikes on top of it.

This same lifecycle approach applies across different advertising platforms though their own available objectives, creative formats, and targeting options. The core logic works whether a franchise is running these stages through Meta Ads, Google Ads, or newer channels like ChatGPT Ads. 

Knowing whether it's working

Once a location has been running these campaigns for a while, comparing its performance against other locations at similar stages is one of the clearest ways to see if your location’s ads are performing. You can tell whether a grand opening built real awareness, or whether an evergreen campaign is still pulling its weight months in. We covered how to make that kind of comparison useful in How to Compare Your Franchise's Social Media Performance by Location.

FAQ

Does every new location need all three campaign types right away? Not simultaneously. A grand opening campaign comes first, seasonal campaigns typically start once the location is open and has something specific to promote, and evergreen marketing becomes the ongoing foundation once the location is established.

Should a new location's ad objective stay the same across all three stages? No. The objective should match the goal of that specific stage, awareness during a grand opening, an objective matched to the offer during a seasonal promotion, and whatever reflects the location's ongoing business goal during the evergreen stage.

If you want to see how these campaign stages come together as reusable playbooks for your own network, you can schedule a demo to walk through it directly.