Growing a national massage franchise with a centralized digital marketing strategy

Female client receiving deep tissue massage

Client overview

Elements Massage is a franchise-based massage therapy company that provides a variety of massage services to promote relaxation, stress relief, and overall well-being. It distinguishes itself through its commitment to personalized and therapeutic massage services and highly trained therapists. Their membership program and wide range of massage options also contribute to their appeal, making it convenient and beneficial for clients to maintain a regular massage routine.

With over 200 independently-owned locations across the United States and Canada, the brand reached out to Parallel Path to unify and improve its digital marketing for the benefit of the entire franchise network.

Challenge

With over eight different digital marketing vendors, multiple DIY approaches, and no overarching oversight, the strategy, tactics, performance, and digital assets across the franchise network varied wildly.

Unbeknownst to the franchise network, the brand experienced cannibalization of paid media dollars among its various locations, particularly in branded paid search. Without a centralized marketing strategy, they couldn’t demonstrate the value of their digital marketing efforts for new customer acquisition and brand awareness. Data was fragmented across its 200+ locations, leading to unreliable lead acquisition data by channel or conversion type, multiple analytics and Google Ads accounts, and no consistent benchmarks or active data for cost per lead, conversion rates, or return on investment.

Insights

What we know from our experience is that the foundation of any successful franchise is unification. As soon as there’s a lack of unification in systems and processes, a franchise system will inevitably limit its growth potential, and likely begin to erode. When digital marketing is not unified, franchisee are left to their own trial and error approaches and the result is limitations on franchise network growth and franchisee success.

Solution

Parallel Path unified the entire franchise network by building centrally-managed digital marketing technology, management tools,  strategy, and scalable execution that included paid search ads, SEO, display, remarketing, and social media advertising. This was familiar territory for Parallel Path because of its experience over the previous years helping other franchise brands transition from fragmented to centrally managed (aka Corporate Managed) digital marketing. 

Parallel Path was confident in rolling out its playbook to unify the entire franchise network with one centralized marketing system. To do so, Parallel Path set the franchise network up for success with education sessions and worked arm-in-arm with the brand’s internal marketing and executive leadership teams through in-person visits, workshops, training, and webinars.

While the centralized managed marketing framework enabled economies of scale, data-driven optimization depth, and technology implementation that previously was unattainable with a fragmented system, it was Parallel Path’s approach to the strategic direction and its best-in-class management and optimization that drove performance data.

Digital Marketing Implementation

Comprehensive Support & Training

Enhanced Performance

Services Provided

Paid Search

Paid Social

Remarketing

SEO

Marketing Strategy

Channel Strategy

Content Strategy

Analytics Consulting & Dashboards

Results

0 %
Decrease

in branded paid search cost per lead

0 %
Increase

in paid search leads

0 %
Decrease

in paid search cost per lead

0 %
Increase

in social media ad leads

0 %
Decrease

in social media ad cost per lead

0 %
Increase

in YOY organic session growth

Consumer Study Webinar

Please fill out the form below to watch the webinar

Consumer Study Webinar