Brooke Janousek: Communicating with Franchisees is an Art

Brooke Janousek cut her teeth in franchise marketing by helping launch a new one. After decades of marketing experience on the agency side, she started working for Supportworks right as they decided to launch their first franchise, Hello Garage. Brooke got to build the brand and recruit franchisees from scratch, resulting in ten franchises within the first six months.

She has since overseen over 1,100 franchisees as the SVP of Brand at Liberty Tax, launched a fractional CMO consultancy, and landed her current role as the CMO across a portfolio of companies:

• GarageExperts, which has 80+ locations
• Versatile High-Performance Coatings
• And a new franchise to be announced in 2025

All this experience has given her plenty of lessons on how to successfully market a franchise brand. In this conversation, Brooke shares the most helpful strategies she’s implemented since starting her tenure at GarageExperts, how she collaborates and communicates with franchisees, and why personal branding is becoming more important in the franchise space.

I don't believe in coming into an organization and completely disrupting everything. I wanted to take my time and not only get to know the franchisees better, but then really dive deep and audit the partners that we currently are using.

In that process, I decided to pilot paid advertising on Meta. Traditionally, in home services, Meta is a good lead source from a volume standpoint but not quality — franchises will get leads from it but they don’t necessarily convert to an appointment. So there’s a narrative in the system that people don’t want to do paid advertising on Facebook, that the leads are trash. I wanted to find a partner that was going to help us combat that.

I did a bunch of interviews and found a partner with a strong data science team, which is important to me, and ran a three-month pilot with ten different franchises using three different audience types. We let Facebook choose one audience, we uploaded our customer list and did a lookalike audience, and then we uploaded information about our ideal customer persona based on consumer research I did when I first started.

While there was some variation market to market, generally the customer persona audience performed best. And, in those three months, the locations participating in the Meta pilot saw a 41% increase in site traffic year-over-year while locations outside of the pilot actually saw a 6% decrease in web traffic. So it proved that the consumer research was worth the investment because we found the right people, really understanding their media consumption habits, mindset, values, and beliefs. Now we’re rolling it out to the entire system using the target audiences in each individual market.

The second thing we’ve done that had really good results was automating the review solicitation process for all franchise locations. We partnered Podium to automatically send out a text message soliciting a review after our jobs are completed. We started that in February, and our system-wide reviews increased by 11.31%. In March, we generated 167 reviews; in April, 156. This may not sound like a lot to the average person, but we have franchises that are 15+ years old and have a couple hundred Google reviews – they should have thousands. This will help from a local SEO perspective and with brand proof.

It’s important that we’re automating everything. Franchisees are worried about five million other things, I want to take this off their plate and make it easy for them.

We've done a lot of research as to what lead sources are going to generate the number of leads that our franchises need at an allowable cost. When a new franchisee is launching, we guide them through the process of setting lead goals.

We say, “How much do you want to sell in your first year of business?” Then, using the average conversion rates for the system, I can help them back into a monthly lead goal and share some of the best tactics to help them do it. It is always a mix of top, middle, and bottom of funnel tactics. Currently, our top five sources are: internet, referrals, social media, home shows and events, and online referral sites.

Then, we back into the lead goal based on their average job size and their conversion rates. From there, we determine how many leads a month they need. I guide them through the process of what tactics are going to help them achieve that lead goal.

I also find it important to impress upon the franchisees that, while they did enter into a franchise system for the tools and the turnkey approach, they have a responsibility in their local markets. So we educate them on going to events, joining the Chamber of Commerce, networking with their neighbors and friends, seeking out networking groups in their area, and generally helping them understand that this is a critical piece of the launch as well.

When a new franchisee enters our system, we have almost two weeks of training that we do, including one full day of marketing training. So I get very granular and walk them through things like: What is branding? What is the difference between branding and lead generation? Then we work together to build out a plan of the five things they’re going to do right when they get home.

We also do monthly webinars. I pick a different topic each month: best local SEO practices, best practices for home shows, and how AI-generated search is affecting SEO. The first half hour is education, and the second half hour is for the franchisees to ask me questions — almost like a fireside chat with a CMO.

I don’t believe in a blanket approach to every market: What works in Nashville might not work in Buffalo. We have some areas that respond really well to home [trade] shows, for example, and others that respond better to television.

Yes, at a high level, we want everyone to do things like PPC and social, but I want each franchisee to have a plan that is tailored to their local market. To get them there, we use a matrix with four quadrants that I have them plot their lead sources into, using our CRM to understand past performance: high CPL and high conversion rate, low CPL and low conversion rate, high CPL and low conversion rate, and low CPL and high conversion rate.

We want them to be in that last category, but I also guide them through which tactics top, middle, and bottom of the funnel and why we want a mix of all three. The exercise helps them understand where to focus their budget.

All franchisees ask very similar questions: Where are my leads, and why do I have to spend so much money on marketing? Education is key to help them understand why we ask them to spend on certain things — for example, that I can’t make people search for garage floor coatings, but you can spend money to appear when people do search those things.

I think communicating this successfully is about getting down to the fundamentals: I don’t want to talk over them, I don’t want to get too technical. They have a business to run, they have operations to figure out, they have accounting to figure out, they have customers that they have to service — marketing is just one piece of it. If I can make it super digestible for them, and just say, “This is what you need to do, and here's the why,” I’ve found that that really goes a long way.

I have found that you have to tell the franchise system things several times before they remember it. So usually I'll do a dedicated email, and I'll invite them to a webinar to hear more, and then we follow up in our monthly newsletter.

I also rely on our franchise business coaches to help carry that message to the franchisees. We have three full-time employees who each focus on different regions, supporting the profitability and success of our franchisees. They coach them on everything from their P&Ls to sales to marketing through weekly phone calls and quarterly site visits.

I think franchise systems should really be paying attention to how AI-generated search is affecting SEO. More people are going to ChatGPT and Perplexity to find their answers, and if you're not getting ahead of it, you're going to fall behind very quickly.

Not only do I have to figure out how to explain to franchisees that they may see a dip in their search rankings because of this change, I have to focus on creating valuable content that will get pulled into those AI search results.

We’re doing this on a national level first, working with a partner that does research and will come back and suggest topics to write articles on, like bike storage or trends in floor coatings. And the research we’re starting at the national level is because we do have a locator on our site, so if we’re driving traffic to garageexperts.com, people can find their local expert. It’s a lot to get the franchisees to write their own content in addition to everything else. I don't want to put that on them if I don't have to, so we try to do as much in-house as we can.

I saw a stat the other day that corporate pages on LinkedIn dropped to like 1% of the impression share. So I am a huge believer that individuals in a corporation should be talking about the brand on their personal pages.

But I also think people buy from people. There’s no reason that franchisees shouldn’t be putting things out there at the local level. They can do quick videos giving tours of the facility or showing themselves on a job. And more and more people are skeptical of things because of AI, wondering if they’re talking to a real person. So it’s helpful to show your face and say, “Hey, when you hire GarageExperts, you're hiring this person behind the brand.”

Right now, we just encourage this via one-on-one calls. But we’re toying with the idea of launching a calendar of weekly videos they can create: a selfie video on a job site, a video introducing yourself and three things you love about the brand, etc. If we feed them ideas for content and an overview of how to shoot it, it makes it digestible, and they’ll be less fearful that they can’t do it.

Marketing and operations have to be on the same page. We are the same team, we all want our franchisees to be successful, and the right hand needs to know what the left is doing.

If marketing is putting out campaigns, we have a responsibility to let the ops team know what we’ll be telling franchisees and what we need their support on. If franchisees are coming to ops to complain about a channel or lack of ROI, we need to know about that. So, we just instituted monthly meetings between marketing and ops.