McDonald’s

Supersize me: How we doubled McDonald’s franchisee pipeline with an audience-first strategy

Challenge

Project background

Historically, McDonald’s pipeline of Franchisees came mostly from within—either relatives or employees of current owners. And a smaller pool came from external candidates through traditional recruiting methods like events and job fairs. This is how franchise recruitment operated for more than 50 years.

But a new era demands new types of franchisees.  McDonald’s needed professionals and entrepreneurs-in-waiting from all types of jobs—retail, consulting, military, finance, real estate, and more. People with 2–3 decades of experience, P&L know-how, team leadership chops, and $500k in the bank. McDonald’s put extra emphasis on underrepresented communities, but did so without excluding qualified candidates from any group.

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Approach

What we did

Taking a high net worth prospect from  zero awareness to wanting to share their financial records required a lot more than conventional marketing. We developed an end to end journey that ensured we met the right audience with engaging content and nurtured them(through paid and owned channels) based on their behaviors. We found our audience by translating the life event, demographic, and financial attributes of an ideal franchisee into a layered data strategy. This allowed our team to create discrete segments that incorporated both the “hard” and “soft” attributes of our core audience, and reach just the right people.

“More than a single activation, this program was a series of connected and sequential moments designed to propel target prospects through a journey.”
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Results

How it went

McDonald’s is, of course, world-renowned for its marketing. But franchise recruitment had never been thought of as a problem that marketing could solve. We brought the best in customer journey strategy, creativity, data science, and martech to an innovative, highly efficient, end-to-end campaign. For the first time, the Franchising team has a clear view into what channels are driving interest, what pathways are driving conversion, rate of conversion across campaigns, and time to progress from awareness to conversion. 

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applications year over year
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increase in applications among target audiences
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ROMI

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