Over the past 13 years, the Franchise Marketing Awards have become one of the industry's most highly-coveted accolades. They are renowned for celebrating innovative marketing campaigns and effective marketing support offered by franchisors to their franchisees. The 2018 winners were announced at The National Franchise Exhibition at the NEC, Birmingham, on Friday 5 October.

Sandler Training (UK) won the award in recognition for the delivery of its targeted and impactful PR programme, underpinned by audience insight, which enhanced the quality and quantity of coverage so that it personally resonated with the reader.  To have owned content, it commissioned research on key topics to a third-party research company, to give the company primary data to feed the PR programme – results were broken down on a national and regional level, to ensure that franchisees also had content for local PR.

Fiona Thomson, Operations Director, Sandler Training (UK), explains: “In franchising it’s very rare to have a successful PR approach that works at both a national and local level. We consider PR to be a key part of our marketing machine and it needs to seamlessly support the brand. Having clear themes, external insight and a mechanism that feeds relevant content to our network has meant that our external communications has worked harmoniously – consistent messages are reaching prospect customers via national, business and local media at the same time.

“Our network has been very positive about this approach and crucially we have seen an uplift in web traffic as a result. Winning the award for Best PR Campaign is hugely rewarding as reassures us that we are on the right path and setting a great example for the UK franchise sector."

About Sandler Training (UK) 

Sandler Training is the UK’s leading management and leadership training organisation, with 30 centres of excellence across the country.  The Sandler method uses non-traditional, disruptive methods Sandler gives busy entrepreneurs the freedom to change on a personal and professional level.

Sandler Training in the UK is part of a global organisation with over 40 years’ experience; its headquarters are in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.