Franchise Development

What Are Some Of The Best Lead Sources For Franchise Development

Overview:

Looking for help with franchise development lead generation or PPC for franchises?  This is exactly what we do!  I actually originally wrote this article back in March of 2019.  SEO articles tend to take so long to index that I often times will just write an article with basic information on it and then come back and say what I truly want to say months or even years later once I know what keywords it has Google’s attention for.

In this case, I wanted to take a moment and discuss franchise development strategies in general.  Back around 2010, I became the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for a franchisor out of Southern California.  Marketing’s primary responsibility is always to help support the franchise sales team.  So, everything that we did was always centered around helping to sell more franchises.  We tracked the performance of not only SEO versus PPC versus PR, but we also meticulously tracked the performance of each campaign and article down to a keyword level (back before Google Analytics stopped providing organic keyword information).

We learned an incredible amount about what kinds of keywords people typed in and how those related to actual franchise sales.  Some common trends that we discovered were that industry terms such as “vending machine franchise” converted well.  Also, people would buy franchises off of terms like “vending machine business”, “vending machine business opportunity”, and “vending machine business plan”. 

Initially, I was expecting that terms like “franchise opportunities” would work well.  But, they tended to be so generic that they didn’t yield any real franchise sales (although they did drive a lot of tire kicker leads or people who were interested in some other type of franchise).

Another interesting discovery was that we sold A TON of actual franchise development deals from competitor terms such as “fresh healthy vending” and “healthier for you vending”, which were competitors of ours.  Those keywords didn’t have a massive amount of traffic so it wasn’t a trend that we recognized initially.  With time, however, we came to understand that competitor terms had both the cheapest CPL (Cost Per Lead) and CPS (Cost Per Sale) of every keyword except for our own branded terms.

After working several years as a CMO, I eventually decided to start my own advertising agency to help other franchisors.  Fast forward more than a decade, and we have seen the same types of trends across 200+ franchisors.  Industry terms, competitor terms, and even various Facebook / Instagram Ad strategies have consistently performed well across the entire franchising industry.

High level, we have determined that franchise development representatives can only perform as well as the leads that they are given.  If you have bad leads, you’re not going to have very many franchise sales.

The hope of every franchise system is to have such a good product and ROI that it requires little to no franchise marketing in order to find new franchisees.  Good examples of this might be franchisors like Chick-Fil-A, Crumbl, and McDonald’s.  But, for every Chick-Fil-A out there, there are hundreds of franchisors that need to actually do some amount of marketing to get their name out there and source the right new franchisees for their franchise system.

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What Is Franchise Development?

The term “Franchise Development” is a niche expression.  If you know what it means, it probably because you are either a Franchisor or you work in Franchise Sales.  

The bigger question, however, is not “what” franchise development is… it’s “how” to be successful at it.  More often than not, there is a single person or small group of people within each franchise system tasked with creating massive growth for the franchisor.  Each year lofty goals are laid out, the burden of which is almost exclusively placed upon the 1-2 people who are supposed to sell all of the franchises.

To make matters worth, any time a budget for leads is discussed, it almost immediately gets thrown back on the sales rep with even more pressure to perform.  This is one of the primary reasons why generating high quality leads from the beginning is important.  If the CPL and CPS numbers look good, at that point it becomes the CEO or CFO who tends to push for more leads rather than the franchise development head of sales.  This is an ideal situation.

Importance Of Franchise Leads

Most Franchisors have a major need for Franchise Leads.  Without them, it is difficult to grow.  With them, the world is your oyster.

One of the most important responsibilities then for the head of franchise development is to partner with the right franchise lead generation companies so that management has positive data to look at and the desire to spend more money on quality franchise leads comes from the top down with management rather than from franchise development reps trying to constantly push for more leads.

Acquiring New Franchisees Isn’t Cheap

The problem is, however, it is expensive to acquire new franchisees.  If you pay a franchise broker, on average it costs around $22,000.  That’s a hefty price to pay if your initial franchise fee is only slightly larger than that.  And these days, many franchise broker networks charge closer to around $40,000 per deal if a franchisor has sold less than 5 units previously because it so hard for them to close deals for newer franchise systems that they pass that expense back on to the franchisor.

Alternatives To Franchise Brokers

There are alternatives, however, to franchise brokers.  You can try to rank organically via SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  You can try to grow via word-of-mouth.  Or, you can try what we do, which is PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising.

Try Testing PPC

If you do try testing PPC as a strategy for Franchise Development Lead Generation, do not make the mistake of driving your paid traffic to your normal SEO Franchise Development web page.  Doing so will cause your Cost Per Lead (CPL) to go through the roof!

Importance Of Landing Pages

We tend to see an average CPL of anywhere between $150 – $1,000 for people that drive website traffic to their existing SEO driven web page.  That is WAY too expensive!

However, if you send your website traffic to a highly optimized landing page, you can expect your CPL to be similar to what you would pay a Franchise Portal (around $30).  The difference is, however, these leads tend to be much more qualified AND you do not have to compete with other Franchisors who are trying to contact the same leads at the same time.

Franchise Development Companies

As an advertising agency, we do not handle any of the Franchise Sales ourselves.  However, we do work with several highly qualified firms who do this.  So, if need Franchise Development Leads and you don’t want to spend your time talking with those people in order to sell them on your Franchise, no worries.  We can make some introductions to companies that do that work as well.

Or, if you’re in a rush, here are the links for a few Franchise Development Companies worth checking out:

Raintree Franchise Development

Pinnacle Franchise Development

BodeTree Franchise Development

Martin Franchise Consultants Franchise Development

Need Help?

If you just need Franchise Development Leads, feel free to reach out and let us know.

Additional Franchise Development Tips:

Leveraging Technology To Boost Results In Your franchise development Campaigns

Technology is becoming an integral part of the franchise development process, and with the right tools, can help you get more out of your campaigns. Technology makes it easier to reach new customers, scale up operations, streamline processes and reduce costs. It also increases efficiency, enabling you to focus resources on achieving measurable results.

To ensure that technology is being effectively used in your franchise development marketing efforts, here are a few tips:

1. Establish a Clear Vision: Before launching any campaign or investing in new technology solutions for your business, make sure you have a clear vision for how this technology fits into the overall business strategy. This will help you choose the most appropriate technology solutions and create a roadmap for deployment and optimization.

2. Leverage Automation: Automating processes can help you save time, increase efficiency and reduce costs associated with franchise development campaigns. By using automation tools to boost productivity, you can focus more of your resources on the tasks that require greater levels of creativity and thinking.

3. Prioritize Data Analysis: Collecting customer data is essential for any business seeking to maximize returns from its franchise development campaigns. Analyzing and utilizing this data helps you understand how customers are engaging with your brand and create strategies tailored to their needs.

4. Invest in Mobile-Friendly Solutions: With mobile devices becoming increasingly popular, it’s important to invest in solutions that are optimized for mobile use. This includes optimizing content for mobile viewing, developing mobile-friendly websites and creating mobile applications that enable customers to engage with your brand on the go.

5. Focus on Security: Businesses need to ensure that their data is secure and protected from unauthorized access, for example by investing in advanced security solutions. This is especially important when you’re leveraging technology for franchise development marketing efforts, as customer data should never be shared without prior consent.

By leveraging technology effectively in your franchise development campaigns, you can create more engaging experiences for customers, increase efficiency and boost returns on investment. Make sure that all of the processes related to franchise development are optimized to make the most out of the available resources and technologies. Ultimately it’s up to each business to identify the most appropriate technology solutions to best serve their objectives. A franchise development company with expertise in this area can help you get started and ensure that your technology investments are paying off. Taking advantage of these modern tools and techniques for franchise development will help you remain competitive in today’s digital landscape.

To summarize, leveraging technology is a great way to boost results in your franchise development campaigns. Make sure you have a clear vision, invest in automation and mobile-friendly solutions, prioritize data analysis, and focus on security. With the right strategy and tools, you can be sure to maximize returns from your campaigns while providing customers with engaging experiences. A professional franchise development company can help guide you through this process, ensuring that all of your technology investments are paying off. With the right approach and technologies, you can leverage technology for maximum benefit in your franchise development efforts.

This article is intended to provide an insight into how to effectively utilize technology for franchise development. To get the most out of these tools and techniques, it’s important to make sure that all of your processes are optimized, including marketing campaigns and data analysis. A professional franchise development company with expertise in this area can help ensure that your technology investments are paying off. Additionally, by taking advantage of automation tools and mobile-friendly solutions, you can focus more resources on creative tasks while also streamlining processes and reducing costs associated with franchise development campaigns.

 

Video Transcript

For instance, for us never really yielded anything, and I will say that now that I’ve been doing this for 13 years with my ad agency, it’s something we see across the board. You kind of want to steer clear of those generic terms. Those are great if you are a franchise portal and your sole purposes to get people who are interested in any type of franchise and resell those leads as many times as you can to turn a profit on those leads then that works. But from a franchise or’s perspective you really want people who are searching for very targeted terms, obviously branded terms, so like the name of your franchise. Plus the word franchise is a good way to go but not always necessary. If there are other people advertising on your terms your branded terms, then you may want to do it. Otherwise I would just save the money and just show up organically number one rather than adding adds on top of it that you have to pay for it. Other things that tend to work are uh, competitor terms as one of the things I talk about in here. So we had for human Healthy vending.

We had a handful of other groups like fresh Healthy Vending, healthier for you like all sorts of other vending machine business opportunities and franchises, and when people typed in those keywords. Plus the word franchise the most really converted very well for us because a lot of times people are very far down that kind of discovery life cycle and they’re very ready and they’re just trying to decide who they want to go with. And so that’s a really good place to insert yourself. Just make sure not to use the name of the competitor anywhere in the ad, but you can advertise on the term. The next thing I bring up in the article is what is franchise development? If you’re on this article you’ probably are a franchise development representative you’re in sales something like that, um, but the bigger question is not like what it is but how to be successful at it. And one of the points that I kind of make in here is that a lot of times its franchise sales reps who are pushing for more leads.

Um, and a lot of times that’s because you don’t have very good high quality leads and so one thing that you may want to consider is trying to have high quality lead sources because that way when your cost per lead and your cost per sale are both good, then people in management are more likely to look at those numbers and be like hey, let’s just go drive more leads and that’s kind of what you want rather than trying to push from your side up the chain. The importance of franchise leads if. You don’t have them most cases. You’re really gonna kind of struggle to sell deals of acquiring new franchises isn’t cheap. I know a couple years ago was around $22,000 of sale.

I don’t have what it is for 2023, um, but I do know that in the last year and 1/2 a lot of groups franchise broker networks are charging up to $40,000 if you have less than 5 units, so if you’re brand new franchise or without references without an item 19 and a lot of signs they’ll charge, they’ll pass that um cost onto you because it’s much more difficult to sell those types and it makes it so that their book of business isn’t just a bunch of new franchise ores. They’d rather have older ones that their brokers are having more success with selling. Landing pages are important.

I do mention a couple franchise development companies Rain Tree, Pinnacle. There’s a handful of those types of groups that are out there. Rhino 7. If you need help you can always reach out to us here on this part right here either clicking on here or contact us. It takes you to the same place and here you can fill out first name, lasting email, phone number, business name, kind of business you are and request an appointment and then right there through Calendly you can just book an appointment probably with me. Hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks again for visiting our website or YouTube channel. And we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks!