Empowering Local Marketing: Insights for Service Businesses from Franchise Pros

Jeffro (00:00.982)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, I’m joined by Brett Campbell and Alex Nosifera. Together, they founded a company called Loma, which you’ll hear about today. And this is not the same as the residence hall that I was an RA of in college, which was also called Loma. Different story. Brett is a marketing expert with over 25 years of experience helping multi-location and franchise brands grow through innovative locally relevant advertising. So as the co-founder of Loma and a former marketing leader for brands like Papa John’s and Tropical Smoothie Cafe, Brett knows firsthand how to balance the big picture strategy of corporate marketing with the hyper local tactics needed to succeed at the community level. And Alex doesn’t get as much of an intro because he didn’t tell me he was coming. He just showed up. So anyways, we’re going to explore how service businesses can apply lessons from their model for franchise and multi-location marketing. So whether that’s empowering teams to scale their efforts or kind of leveraging local connections to drive growth, I think we’ve got a lot of cool and practical things to talk about today. So welcome to the show, guys.

Brett Campbell (01:00.472)
Thanks for having us.

Alex Nocifera (01:02.184)
Thanks for the great introduction, Jeff.

Jeffro (01:03.918)
Well, I’m excited to have you guys here because I think there’s a lot we can learn from your approach. So as you guys know, there’s a big difference between the large brands of the world like the Coca Colas who thrive essentially on pure branding. And then there’s the local small business that lives and dies by word of mouth on the other extreme. But the franchise model is interesting because it kind of bridges that gap and takes advantage of both the branding efforts and the local marketing tactics. So I thought we could start by having you guys tell us what you mean when you say local marketing.

Brett Campbell (01:04.626)
I’m

Brett Campbell (01:36.344)
Yeah, so I’ll jump in on this one. So typically in a multi-unit franchise system, they’ll contribute a percentage of sales that goes to a national ad fund and that’s managed by the brand and it really manages the brand itself or creates the creative and the overall look and visual menu items, research, any of those sort of elements that go to supporting the product as well as the brand. And then the individual units or individual franchisees typically are required to spend a percentage of their sales at the local level to really drive what you were explaining, that awareness inside of their communities. And a lot of times because of the inability to scale local marketing and sort of ideas are simply thrown out at the individual franchisees, it’s kind of left to them to do it. And so they’re… is a huge short gap in the industry on supporting these franchisees at the local level on executing local marketing in their trade area. And that’s where Loma comes in and sort of where our thesis was developed with my background and Alex’s background coming together to create what we’ve created through Loma, which is this marketing platform that allows the franchisees to go into this Amazon shopping experience that’s full of local marketing vendors. And in a couple

Alex Nocifera (02:44.592)
you

Alex Nocifera (02:58.452)
you

Brett Campbell (03:02.472)
clicks they can place an order to help support and drive their awareness and drive sales. And then all that is overseen and monitored by the brand itself. So it creates that scalability that the brand is looking for, creates that local awareness that the individual franchise needs, and it creates that time savings on everyone’s front to help it get it executed. So when an order is placed through our platform, it simply goes straight to the vendor and the vendor executes it and pulls

Alex Nocifera (03:20.564)
.

Brett Campbell (03:32.298)
back the KPIs directly in our platform and then the end user gets to see how it performed as well as the brand itself. So it’s sort of a win-win dynamic and definitely something that’s revolutionary in the industry, something that’s never been there and has always been needed. So kind of in a nutshell.

Jeffro (03:51.766)
Yeah, well, I think it sounds like it really fits a cool need because, like you said, there’s going to be a variety of different types of approaches, right? Some corporate offices will be like, here’s what you have to do. Bye. See you later. And then others are like, here’s what you have to do. Here’s some collateral you can edit. Here’s some suggestions and templates you can follow. You know, that’s obviously going to be more helpful for the company, but they’re also going to have to spend different amounts of time and money depending on how much support they got. So this kind of, yeah, makes it way easier, it sounds like.

Brett Campbell (04:20.022)
Yeah, and the uniqueness of what we both bring to the table is I bring that brand side where, you know, how to scale and help support your local franchisees and your local markets. And Alex brings the vendor side. So his experience, I’ll let him talk about where he comes from, but his experience brings that side. So that melding together, we’re understanding both of those dynamics to help generate what we’ve created in the platform.

Jeffro (04:47.244)
Okay, so why is it important to have both? Why can the franchise location itself not only rely on the corporate ads and things? Is it because prices are different? Is it because menus are different? All of the above?

Alex Nocifera (05:05.748)
Well, the one thing you think about is like, think about the area you live in and go drive, you know, in Orange County and think about, you know, all those strip centers and all the little retailers and restaurants that sit in those strip centers. A lot of those are franchise. So what happens when a franchise signs up to become a franchisee is they sign a lease in an area, a trade area, in a neighborhood, a community, a strip center.

Brett Campbell (05:06.104)
It’s.

Alex Nocifera (05:33.832)
They’re signing a lease and they become part of that community. And the number one way to get your doors to swing and business to flow is to drive awareness. Now, obviously in a service industry, it’s a little bit more reactive. If I need a plumber, I Google, where’s my plumber? But if you’re looking for a restaurant at this point, you you Google restaurants, a bazillion will show up, right? And so generating that acute awareness is not easy. And now, now put on your consumer hat.

just think about all the options, think about all the ways you ingest media, think about all that time you’re spending on your phone. There’s this fire hose moment that we’re in as consumers. And it’s really hard for a little service operator or a little franchise brand to cut through that noise and get to Jeffro. And so what Loma helps do, as Brett mentioned, is we’ve created a one-stop shop that operators service operators, franchise operators can go in and go, you know what, feel like I think direct mail is going to work well in my neighborhood. I think maybe an ad on Snapchat will work well in my neighborhood. This amalgam of options that allows you to acutely advertise in an area, matter where throughout the United States, anywhere we have a nationwide presence. And that’s the whole sort of massive benefit that Loma brings is we’re bringing hyper local activation capabilities across scale, across the United States scale. So you can get down to the street corner anywhere throughout the United States on Loanless Platform. And that’s just a hard thing. again, in the criteria to be a good operator, no matter if it’s service business or a restaurant or whatever, if nowhere in there really states you got to be a good marketer to be a good operator. So this is just making marketing easy, plug and play.

And if you have the luxury of a franchise or helping, they put some guardrails into there that make it like, so they don’t mess it up too bad. But the reality is you could come in here and buy us even if you were one owner, you know, dry cleaner at this point.

Jeffro (07:41.684)
Do you guys vet your vendors that are allowed on the platform or can anyone sign up and say, yeah, I do ads.

Brett Campbell (07:42.572)
And ultimately, here’s the…

Brett Campbell (07:49.848)
So we vet the vendors that we allow on the platform. So we do have some criteria. We definitely want vendors that can get to the hyper local level. And so can you provide a solution that can be executed at an individual trade area? So that’s one. Also, we like vendors that have a little bit of a unique niche to them that can really integrate into the communities that do phone outreach straight to businesses to introduce your businesses and see if there’s any needs that they may have from like for example a catering perspective. We’ve got vendors that will that have flyers or certificates that go directly to schools to give to kids. We’ve got vendors that you can place you know video content on scoreboards at the high schools so etc etc and then we go all the way into typical types of digital vendors as well as some social vendors as Alex mentioned, Snap and Nextdoor, for example, are on our platform. And then in general, just looking to make sure that they can execute, like as Alex said, across the nation. So we’re available for anyone.

Jeffro (09:06.74)
So that kind of brings up my next question is let’s say you’ve got different franchise locations. Maybe the new guy comes up and he’s looking at all these options like, I don’t know which one has worked well for the other El Pollo Locos. Do you have a way of indicating that, hey, this company has hired these guys and they’ve been with them for this many years. They’ve done this well, maybe you should try them too.

Alex Nocifera (09:29.64)
Yeah. mean, big emphasis of Lomas technology, proprietary technology is we’ve built a predictive ad engine. So to your point, does Snapchat work in my area of Orange County during this time of year, even further with an offer like a buy one, get one free. So we’ve really sort of unpacked the dimensions of an ad message. And the ad message usually includes the brand, any sort of limited time offer any sort of coupon or discount, any sort of, location specific elements. So come here to this store and worry are measuring and clocking those at the customer point of sale level. And it’s able to build a predictive path. And that that’s sort of the Holy grail to advertising. If you knew you put in, you you, bought a thousand dollars worth of advertising and it actually yielded you back $8,000 worth of sales.

I’m going keep doing that. And so that’s a big piece of low-miss technology right there is predictive ad answers.

Jeffro (10:29.865)
So keep doing that, yep, all day.

Brett Campbell (10:34.177)
enough.

Brett Campbell (10:38.168)
And that’s one of the huge gaps that we wanted to solve for was the ability to have that predictive element to it, then to understand by pulling. So we pull in the point of sale data straight into our platform from the brand. So we’re able to see that directly inside of our platform and then leverage that information to provide more insight on what’s next. so, again, like just telling someone what to do is one thing, but having it come full circle of making it as simple as possible for them to actually go do it and then let them know if it worked or didn’t. So we’re also tracking the actual vendor and holding the vendor accountable. They’re required to pull in benchmark KPIs on the front end and then they pull in the results and we pair those against the benchmark KPIs. So we give it a red, yellow, green, a very simple grading system if that tactic worked or didn’t work based off of the KPIs and how they performed against the benchmarks the vendors gave us originally. So all that’s embedded and set up on the inside of our platform. So again, it’s as turnkey as possible for the franchisee. They can come in, click, click, click, place the order, and then follow back up, look back into the platform. There’s a results tab. They see the results of the actual execution. They see the KPIs. If there’s any data that needs to be delivered, it’s put there. They can go look directly there, and then they can actually see what’s next and what they should do next based off of the

Alex Nocifera (11:43.188)
Thank

Brett Campbell (12:07.806)
the amount of data that we’re getting from the brand. So I might have a location that’s right next door to me, but I need to do something totally different just based off of some situational scenarios that may be happening in my location versus the location in the same brand that’s two miles away. So we know that that’s the problem with scaling is that it can’t be the same thing for every location. It has to be a little bit of uniqueness based off of the dynamic of that trade area. And so that’s sort of what we’re solving for.

Jeffro (12:37.0)
Yeah, that makes sense. I’m also curious if, so you’ve got a lot of data, you’re using your algorithms and your proprietary stuff to figure out what to recommend, but how available is that data to the franchisee or the business owner who signs up and is looking at this stuff? Is it just based on suggestions or can I say, that’s nice that you’re saying this Snapchat works in my area, but I want to remove dry cleaners from that equation. Can you tell me if it worked for, you know, these guys over here, this type of industry, is that possible?

Brett Campbell (13:11.938)
I’m not sure if I’m understanding the question. we have. We have some vendors that actually do some competitive blunting directly where they’ll follow cell phone data and actually target very specifically folks that have visited either competitors. You get to give them sort of your audience that you want to go after. And so they can be very, very efficient with their dollars to make sure that they’re not just spraying and praying and wasting their dollars on advertising. So from that perspective, on the vendor execution side, we definitely try to push the right vendors to make sure that they have the advancements to make sure that the end user is not wasting dollars. Now from a data perspective for the franchisor, because we usually go in and we’ll talk to the franchisor and get the franchisor set up and then they push the platform to the franchisees, that data is available for the franchisor. Specifically, the results of any campaigns that they’ve run, that all comes into our platform and that franchisor can look at all those results of every single campaign based off of all the locations. If I’m an individual location, I can only see my stuff. I can’t see anyone else’s.

Jeffro (14:33.03)
Right, so it’s kind of Siloedoph based on the franchise. Right? Okay.

Brett Campbell (14:38.006)
the franchise and then the franchisor has access to everything. The franchisee only has access to their stuff.

Jeffro (14:43.067)
what they’re giving. Okay, that makes sense. I recently heard that Barnes and Noble is kind of modifying their approach to let each local store choose which books to stock. They hadn’t really done that in the past. I thought this was a great example of how doing things differently at the local individual units makes a big difference. And so they’ve been seeing great results with that because if their location is in a more conservative neighborhood, maybe they’re not going to be putting the Kamala Harris books up front. Maybe they’ll rotate the Trump ones in and vice versa and other, whether that’s political ideologies or anything else. could be, you know, local hero, maybe put his book up front, you know? So it’s kind of the same way with any franchise, right? Whether it’s book products on the shelves or the services you provide or the types of promotions you offer, like, okay, our statue got blown down because of a windstorm. We’re going to do a promotion and give back 10 % to this organization to help fix it or anything like that. So now you open up all these specific opportunities that you can’t do at the national level and wouldn’t want to.

Brett Campbell (15:47.608)
That’s right. So we become truly scalable because of our platform. So the scalability is what that limit is because you can’t get, when you’re talking scalable, you want to get scalable and very, very hyper local as part of that scalability. And so we can do that from the actual vendors. We can do that from the actual creative. If the brand provides that solution for the creative to be modified based off of the local, the offers that they want to choose to put into the

Alex Nocifera (15:48.756)
That’s right.

Brett Campbell (16:17.562)
these executions, all that can be set up and managed through our platform again, unit by unit by unit. We’re built on a location level basis.

Jeffro (16:27.823)
Now mentioned before that the franchisee can only see what the franchisor decides to give them. But you also mentioned that an individual business could sign up and use this to run marketing efforts. if I’m an individual business and I sign up, what am I going to see? What are my options?

Brett Campbell (16:45.154)
So if let’s say we’ve signed up a franchise organization and I’m the individual unit that have a franchisee, I get to come in the marketplace and we can set up our marketplace based off of the franchisors discretion. So if they have vendors that they want in our marketplace that aren’t already in our marketplace, we can put them in there. We’ll work with those vendors to get them into our marketplace.

And we can, let’s say they don’t want any direct mail vendors or something like that in our marketplace. We can remove those specifically for that brand. So then that franchisee can come into our marketplace, have a predetermined list of vendors that they can choose from, and then go purchase as they need to through our experience. And our experience is very similar to Amazon. mean, you go in and it’s a shopping cart and it’s a checkout, and then that order is pushed directly to the vendor. We have a vendor portal we’ve created.

The vendor has a communication ability with that end user and then takes it from there and goes and executes. So they see what’s determined by the franchisor.

Jeffro (17:50.466)
Right, so you’re saying you have to be part of a franchise to use a platform.

Brett Campbell (17:55.114)
At this point,

Jeffro (17:55.938)
Okay. So then what are some common mistakes you’ve seen businesses make when they’re trying to localize their marketing efforts and how have you guys kind of tried to bridge that gap with the platform?

Brett Campbell (18:11.606)
Alex, you want to dive on that one?

Alex Nocifera (18:13.848)
yeah, I mean, I, I would say the early learnings have been heavily to do about putting the ball on the tee for local operators, just making it easy as possible. So templatizing the creative. Again, I think the core thesis we’re drafting behind is that an operator is super busy and in, in marketing in 2025 is way more complicated than it used to be. It used to be more kissing, baby shaking hands type stuff. Now it’s more algorithmic more targeted. And so just the more help a franchisor can help a franchisee, a local operator, the more again, if you think about the parent child relationship of a franchise or in a franchisee, again, say I’m, I’m franchise or and Jeff, you’re the franchisee in the agreement that we have, it stipulates that you should be spending somewhere between one and 3 % of your annual business on local ads and in the last five years, COVID, pandemics, labor shortages, supply chain breaks, all these crazy headwinds have happened. And there’s a bunch of really good, legit excuses why you, the franchisee, haven’t been spending those dollars. But the breakage there is us franchisors as parents, we have a meaningful stake in your business. Usually it’s somewhere between five and 10 % of Every dollar you make we get it. We that’s our take and if you’re not spending on local ads People aren’t really knowing about this brand in the market and that’s sales So I think what we what we’re really gonna see in 2025 is a comeback where the parent starts to regulate softly It says hey franchisee. Let’s start spending those local ad dollars again. Let’s help drive some awareness in those markets and Here’s some help and that’s why LoaMa first starts with the franchisor to help them bring a system to the franchisees that’s guardrailed and it makes it more fluid and easy to spend those local ad dollars, which again helps both. It’s gonna help the franchisees drive more awareness and dollars into their pocket and then it’s gonna help the franchise or drive their business overall.

Jeffro (20:29.261)
That makes sense. Another question I had is that the way you’ve described it, sounds kind of transactional in a way. Like I say, okay, I want to run this campaign, ding. All right, next time I’m to run this campaign, ding. But what if you want to kind of align these digital marketing efforts with in-person customer experiences or having a seamless connection between what’s showing up on the website and this local marketing campaign? Is it possible to pick these campaigns from the same vendor repeatedly? Are they going to have this relationship or is it just kind of one-off over and over repeated?

Alex Nocifera (21:00.468)
you

Alex Nocifera (21:06.014)
I mean, you can curate it to do exactly what you said. mean, the franchise or could dictate and curate it exactly how they want it to see. mean, there’s definitely franchise orders who’ve said, we don’t believe in this type of advertising format. And they’re going to remove that from the marketplace. So the franchisees can’t see that we give, we enable those sort of like rails and curations by the franchise or, and that can include, could include your point. mean, full digital embedded ads that get put on all these different places and pixelized throughout websites and on franchisees, et cetera. So there, I think what we’re doing is we’re building an open system. The sort of rules the roost in that they can create rules and, curations that they, you know, that really kind of go downstream throughout a system.

Brett Campbell (21:56.916)
And we have an element of the platform where the franchisor, the brand level, can upload the creative. And then when the individual unit is ordering and they have to choose creative, they can limit what’s the available option. So they have to choose what the franchisor is defining as them to use, which is pretty standard in a multi-unit sort of setup to where you might have, for example, a large two top pizza offering going for your promotion in February. so everyone, everything that goes out has to be pushing that creative. It doesn’t matter the tactic, it just has to have the end creative has to be that promotion. It’s all over their website, it’s everywhere. And so if you’re pushing it locally, it’s got to be, and the brand can limit what the end user can choose from. So that could be the only creative choice that they go and they execute at the local level.

Jeffro (22:55.81)
Okay, well that makes a lot of sense and I think you guys have done a good job of setting this up, especially with that unique franchise or franchisee relationship to have these guidelines in place to help make sure that this is actually happening. Before we wrap up, do you guys have any advice for a service business that maybe isn’t part of a franchise that’s trying to work on their local marketing efforts? What would you say to them?

Alex Nocifera (23:23.764)
Look, we’re early in our journey and our mission to help bring an easier path to generating local awareness to drive sales and traffic and success in their local market. Any service operators that have an appetite to spend dollars to drive growth, have them reach out to us. It’s alexatlomaplatform.com or brettatlomaplatform.com When we’re early in our journey, we’re here to help drive that local awareness and success. It’s a more efficient growth path for our sake to do that through franchise systems that operate a meaningful number of units. at this point, we have an authentic, genuine desire to help drive local awareness and success. And that includes service operators or local operators that aren’t part of a franchise.

Jeffro (24:21.794)
Well, thank you both for being here today. I find this to be really fascinating and I like the setup that you guys are creating and this ecosystem that you’re building. Hope the listeners were taking good notes. And for those of you that are listening, there will be a link to the Lomo platform in the show notes and Alex and Brett gave you their emails. So feel free to reach out to them, especially if you run a multi-location business. So final question for you guys, what’s, I mean, you kind of just answered that. I was going to ask what the biggest lesson is that service businesses can learn, but we just talked about it actually put in some guidelines. You don’t have to wait for some other organization to give them to you, but decide, okay, I’m going to budget this much and I’m going to run these ads. Month in, month out, I’m going to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and keep doing it. That’s part of the game, right? Is not giving up and not just throwing spaghetti at the wall, but actually consistently trying, improving, and so on. Do have anything to add to that?

Alex Nocifera (25:15.636)
Yeah, I mean, I definitely, the analogy, Brett, I, you know, I, it’s heard me say a bazillion times is very similar to like a 401k. Like, you know, the reason you take a sliver of that paycheck and go put it to work is to grow your wealth. Right? Well, the reason why you take a sliver of your business and go put it in advertising is to grow your business. So if you disciplined yourself to take a little sliver and put it in, and we believe local outperforms anything else, the closer, the more proxemic.

Brett Campbell (25:15.809)
Yeah.

Alex Nocifera (25:45.524)
the more convenient you drive awareness to people who could come in and experience your service business, whatever the business is, you will drive success. It’s a guarantee. The question is, is experimenting what areas do you invest in? Do you invest in newer influencer ways to market? Do you invest in old school ways to reach household residences and maybe direct mail? Yeah.

Honestly, there is not one proven way to drive success. There’s a multitude of ways. So we just offer the platform to enable that investment methodology into different channels, diversified channels.

Jeffro (26:24.33)
Yeah. And I’ve seen a lot of companies, what they do is they’ll spend 500 bucks on ads. Facebook ads don’t work and they never try again. And so that I think is the take home point. if, do it every month, make it something that you can afford to spend each month, build it into your budget and then you’ll figure it out. It may not be month one, but keep trying and you will find something that works. Especially if you’ve got a platform like this where you have all the options laid out in front of you. So thanks again for being here guys. It sounds like you have one more thing to add, Rhett.

Brett Campbell (26:54.506)
I was just going say empower your entrepreneurs that are part of your system. These are entrepreneurs, they’re smart people, they’re franchisees. Empower them with a platform or a tool that can help them get the job done. And they’ll take it to the next level that’s in their mindset and their DNA.

Jeffro (27:09.003)
Yeah, agreed. Well, thanks again, guys, for talking through all this with me. And thanks to all of you guys at home for listening. Keep pushing forward. Don’t give up. Keep trying stuff. Keep marketing. And we’ll see you back here soon for the next episode of Digital Dominance. Take care.

Alex Nocifera (27:22.92)
Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Jeffrey.

Brett Campbell (27:24.056)
Thank you.