Local marketing shouldn’t mean choosing between control and relevance.
SmartBranch exists because franchise networks are forced to make that choice every week — and both answers are bad ones.
The problem we kept running into
A franchise network with two hundred locations has two hundred Facebook Pages and two hundred Instagram accounts. Head office is judged on how the brand looks across all of them, but has direct control over none of them.
So networks compromise. Some centralise everything and push one national creative to every location — safe, on brand, and completely generic. A post that could have named the customer’s own city instead says nothing in particular to anyone. Others hand the accounts to branch managers and hope for the best, which produces off-brand logos, mismatched fonts, and offers that expired two months ago.
Neither option is a failure of effort. Both are what happens when the work grows faster than the process that handles it.
What we decided to build
The insight is that localisation is a rendering problem, not a design problem. A skilled designer should make the creative once. Turning that one creative into two hundred versions — each with the right city, the right opening hours, the right phone number, the right photograph of the right shopfront — is mechanical work, and mechanical work should be automated.
So the designer keeps working in Figma, tagging which layers are local. Everything downstream is handled: each branch gets a finished image, with text scaled to fit its container rather than clipped or overflowing.
Why approval happens on WhatsApp
This is the decision people question most, and the one we are most confident about.
A branch manager runs a shop. They are not going to learn a marketing dashboard, remember a password for it, or check it on a schedule. Any system that requires them to do so will quietly fail — not on day one, but by month three, when the novelty has worn off and approvals stop coming back.
WhatsApp is already open on their phone. So the finished post arrives there, and approving it is a reply. Requesting a wording change is also a reply. There is no account to create and nothing to install, which means there is nothing to abandon.
We deliberately did not build a dashboard for franchisees. That is a feature, not a gap.
How we think about access
Publishing to somebody else’s social account is a serious permission to hold, and we treat it that way.
Branches connect through official Facebook Login. We never ask for a password, and we never store one — beyond being against Meta’s platform rules, it is the wrong way to build this. We request only the permissions the service actually needs for the accounts a branch selects, and nothing touching a personal profile.
Access tokens are kept apart from the content database, so brand administrators using the product cannot read the credentials for their branches’ accounts. Any branch can revoke our access from Facebook at any time, and publishing stops immediately.
Where the product is today
SmartBranch is early. Facebook and Instagram publishing is what the product does now; TikTok and Google Business Profile are on the roadmap, not shipped. Localisation of text, imagery and branch data works today. AI-assisted imagery — adapting a creative around a real branch manager rather than a stock model — is in development and will ship with an explicit consent step, because it involves a real person’s likeness.
We would rather tell you what is not built yet than have you discover it in month two.
Talk to us
If you run marketing for a network of branches, agents or dealers, we would like to show you the product running on your own creative and your own locations rather than on a demo account.