About Franco 

Franco is an integrated communications agency based in Detroit – working across strategic PR, marketing, social media, and advertising for B2B and B2C brands. With about 30 team members, Franco delivers big-agency thinking with the flexibility and collaboration of a smaller team. 

For this case study, we spoke with Lexi Trimpe, Director of Digital & AI at Franco, who leads the agency's digital team and AI task force. Her role sits at the intersection of strategy, innovation and implementation – supporting clients while helping internal teams adopt tools and workflows that make their work more strategic and efficient. 

Challenge: Franco was outgrowing their approach to social strategy 

When your social media tool becomes a bottleneck 

Franco's rapidly growing client roster created a problem many agencies face with social media management tools: profile limits. They constantly hit restrictions on how many social media profiles they could manage in their tool. 

The agency’s previous platform grouped all profiles into one shared view, making it difficult for different account teams to access and organize the channels relevant to their work. Each time client needs changed, the team had to adjust access, reorganize workflows or find temporary workarounds to ensure the right people could manage the right channels. 

"We tried to work around those limitations by adding or removing seats and profiles as needed, but that quickly became inefficient," Lexi explained. "It made scaling our social media management work more cumbersome than it needed to be and created friction for our teams." 

Looking for deeper insights 

Beyond the operational headaches, the Franco team needed greater visibility into social media conversations, competitive benchmarking, and the ability to turn social listening into strategic recommendations. 

"Clients are more interested than ever in understanding what people are saying about their brands, industries and competitors. Social media management is no longer just about publishing content. There's a bigger expectation that social media data should help inform strategy, identify trends, monitor sentiment, and connect our work to meaningful KPIs." 

For an agency supporting clients across industries – from healthcare to mobility to nonprofit – that meant monitoring different conversations, understanding varied audiences, and providing insights that went beyond basic engagement metrics. 

Solution: Finding the tool that can scale with the team 

When evaluating new solutions, Franco had three priorities:  

Priority 1: Flexible channel and team management. A growing number of client profiles across social channels meant the agency needed to organize teams by roles and permissions without hitting profile limits. 

Priority 2: Robust social media listening. The team wanted to go beyond monitoring brand mentions and dig into real conversations happening online – to track trends, audience sentiment, and uncover insights that could help shape client strategy. 

Priority 3: Competitive monitoring and benchmarking. Franco needed to give clients a clearer view of where they stand in their respective industries – comparing performance, spotting opportunities, and making data-driven recommendations. 

These factors led Franco to choose Brandwatch Social Media Management. 

"Brandwatch is much more robust than the platform we were previously using, so there was a learning curve as we explored publishing, approvals, listening, reporting and benchmarking," Lexi noted. "Our rep did a great job helping us work through each solution, answering questions as they came up and showing us how different parts of the platform could work together." 

One feature stood out: multi-step approval workflows. 

"The multi-step approval workflows have been a game-changer," Lexi said. "For an agency, approvals can get complicated quickly, especially when multiple internal team members are involved. Being able to create a more structured approval process directly in the platform has helped us reduce back-and-forth, maintain quality control and keep content moving more efficiently."  

Results: Moving from a publishing tool to strategic platform  

Switching to Brandwatch’s Social Media Management gave Franco a scalable platform that handles daily execution while providing strategic intelligence. 

With an all-in-one tool in place, the agency team has streamlined how they work internally – and with clients. For example, for some clients, the publishing process involves sharing review links for approval, making edits, and scheduling directly in the Publish module. With Measure, the team can quickly identify what content performed well and why, then translate that data into clear insights – showing Franco’s clients how social media supports their broader marketing goals.  

Franco uses Listen to monitor brand mentions, industry conversations, and emerging trends – tracking what audiences are saying, where conversations are happening, and what topics are gaining traction. When a sensitive issue emerges, the team has real-time visibility into conversation volume, sentiment, and public reaction, helping them and their clients determine whether and how to respond. 

"We use Listen to monitor brand mentions, industry conversations, priority topics and emerging trends," Lexi explained. "This helps us move beyond basic social media metrics and better understand what audiences are saying, where conversations are happening and what themes are gaining traction." 

Franco also evaluates how clients compare to competitors in share of voice, engagement, messaging, sentiment, and content performance to identify where opportunities exist. 

In one scenario, Franco used Brandwatch to monitor brand mentions and discovered significant conversation on Reddit. The team translated those listening insights into content, SEO, and reputation strategy recommendations and showed the client how social listening informs work beyond social media management. 

"Brandwatch has helped us think about social media less as a publishing function and more as a source of business intelligence," Lexi said. "We can use listening to understand what people are actually saying about a brand or topic, then translate those insights into content strategy, reputation counsel or crisis response." 

What changed operationally 

The operational results are clear. The Franco team can now: 

  • Manage more channels without profile limits or access issues 
  • Streamline approvals that maintain quality control 
  • Respond faster to monitoring needs during crisis situations 
  • Deliver more informed reporting and strategic recommendations for clients 

"We can manage more client channels with more flexibility, organize teams and permissions more effectively and connect social media execution with listening, reporting and competitive benchmarking in one place," Lexi noted. "We're also able to monitor broader conversations and use those insights to inform content, strategy and client recommendations." 

The platform reduced administrative friction, allowing Franco's team to focus more on strategy, content quality, and insights.  

"Brandwatch has made my job easier by giving our team one platform that supports both day-to-day execution and higher-level strategy," Lexi explained. "Instead of treating publishing, reporting, listening and competitive monitoring as separate efforts, we can connect those pieces more easily." 

Franco now delivers more strategic value to clients while maintaining the operational efficiency needed to manage multiple accounts across industries. 

Published on June 10th, 2026