6 PPC Tips For Franchises
6 PPC Tips For Franchises
- Overview
- Question #1: What Is Your Average Cost Per Lead (CPL)?
- Question #2: How Long Have You Been In Business?
- Question #3: Do You Make Your Own Landing Pages?
- Question #4: What Is Your Pricing?
- Question #5: What Networks Do You Advertise On?
- Question #6: How Long Is The Commitment?
- Video Transcription
Overview
Looking to drive leads via PPC for franchises? Are you looking for an advertising agency that specializes in PPC leads for Franchises and Franchise Lead Generation and Franchise Advertising? Congratulations! You found us!
We currently work with over 70 brands doing Franchise Development Lead Generation. While we do not work with Franchisees doing Consumer advertising, we are exceptional when it comes to driving qualified prospective Franchisees.
PPC Franchisees advertising is a niche specialty. There are hundreds of markets that we do not even touch because each market is different from each other. However, if you are looking for a specialist that loves working with Franchisors, that’s us.
As you go through the process of evaluating various advertising agencies, here are a few questions that you will want to ask each group:
Question #1: What Is Your Average Cost Per Lead (CPL)?
Knowing ahead of time what the average Cost Per Lead (CPL) is for the firm that you are evaluating is extremely important when evaluating PPC for franchises. Make sure when they answer that question that they are talking about franchise development specifically.
For us, we average $32 per lead across all of our brands, all-time. However, within that number there are many caveats. For instance, for restaurant franchises, our average is actually lower at $26 per lead. You may even want to ask the agency what their average CPL is for your specific type of franchise.
Just because a company specializes in PPC for franchises, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have experience with your specific type of franchise. So, be sure to ask the franchise ppc agency what there experience is like within your specific franchising market.
Question #2: How Long Have You Been In Business?
Sadly, when it comes to marketing and advertising via PPC for franchises, many firms are extremely small and have only recently started their business. Make sure that you are not their first test subject.
If you can, try to go with an agency that has been around for at least 5-10 years.
Also, it may not hurt to ask them how many Account Managers they have, what certifications they maintain with Google, Facebook, and Bing, as well as the average # of years of experience that their Account Managers have in general and within franchising.
Question #3: Do You Make Your Own Landing Pages?
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is vitally important to the success of a franchisor. When it comes to PPC advertising for franchises, if at all possible, avoid sending your clicks to your existing franchise section of your website.
On average, we find that the CPL sky rockets if you send your traffic to the existing section of your franchising website. Instead of a lead costing $30, it may end up costing $300-$1,000 simply because the page that you are driving your website traffic to doesn’t convert.
Instead, try using a multi-step landing page where you give something away, such as a free franchise guide, and you gradually ask the person for more information to qualify them.
Question #4: What Is Your Pricing?
We have come across a lot of agencies out there that charge way too much for their services. Try to start with a small budget of around $2,000-$3,000 or so, including the management fee of the agency.
The important thing here is understanding that your Cost Per Lead and lead quality will both be at its worst point typically when the campaigns start. So, you don’t want to blow all of your money on your most expensive, lowest quality leads. Start small, and expand from there.
Question #5: What Networks Do You Advertise On?
As often as possible, we try to start our advertising on 2 or more ad networks. Usually, these two networks are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. You can also find good franchises on Bing/Yahoo, LinkedIn, and other networks.
It is important that you don’t just advertising PPC for franchises on 1 network alone so that you can get some different types of leads coming in through the door from various keywords and audiences. At the same time, there needs to be a bit of a balance because you don’t want to be advertising on so many networks that you spread your budget out too much.
A good rule of thumb is to at least spend about $30 / day on Google and probably $600 / mo. on Facebook in order to see results.
Question #6: How Long Is The Commitment?
The last thing that you want to do is to be trapped in a long commitment with a group that is doing a bad job. Make sure you know how long the commitment is. Month-to-month is best. Make them earn it.
You don’t want to blow all of your budget right out of the gate. The best time to increase your budget is when you are closing deals at a good price.
Have a question? Feel free to reach out and see if we would be a good fit for your organization!
Video Transcription
I’m going to just take a second and just real quickly go over some different tips for franchise development lead generation more specifically doing paid advertising, trying to generate franchise leads. And really this has more to do with just some tips while you’re evaluating different vendors more than anything else, but I’m going to get into a couple of more granular things when it comes to conversion rate optimization, landing pages, and knowing what networks to advertise on, so here we go.
So, yeah, on this page I basically go through, we work with 70-plus franchise brands doing franchise development. We’re really not strong in consumer advertising. We don’t do any of it at all, but when you’re looking for new franchisees, that’s really kind of our cup of tea.
But it’s definitely a niche type of thing. You want to go with a group that really understands franchise development, and that is different from consumer advertising, that you’re looking for investors and show them places that those investors either can find you or you can find them.
So, the first question that you want to ask is what is your average cost per lead? You want to come in with pay per click around the same price that you come in for working with the franchise portal, so that’s going to be around $30 up to maybe $50 a lead. When you get into hundreds of dollars per lead, it’s just too expensive to find those investors, so you want to keep your cost per lead down pretty good.
We average $32 a lead all time across all of our brands. We actually track every single brand we’ve ever done, what their cost per lead was, and what the industry was for that. That way the next time someone asks us what do you think the cost per lead is going to be for a pest control franchise, or for this type of a restaurant franchise or what have you? Then we kind of know. You never know 100% what it’s going to be but at least internally you have a benchmark.
For instance, I think I mentioned here we’re $26 a lead for restaurant franchises. But that’s totally different than someone who wants a multi million dollar trampoline park, or a salon suite franchise, or something like that. So, even in franchising there are lots of different sub-niches. So you have to be really careful with that.
Another good question when you’re evaluating vendors is how long you’ve been in business. This seems like a no brainer with any type of a vendor, but a lot of times in marketing, especially people that just started their businesses, they just left a company, they have a little bit of an idea of something, but they don’t know anything. They just happened to throw up an ad, or you know you get introduced to somebody. So go with someone, a group that has at least five to ten years of experience. Even internally with our own staff, that’s something we require that all of our account managers have around that amount of experience because it’s just so easy to make mistakes, and you don’t want to get into that. You don’t want to have mistakes when you’re doing advertising.
Next question, do you make your own landing pages? This is key. So if we sent traffic to … Let’s just look up maybe like math franchise or something. So if you sent traffic, like to Mathnasium. For instance, if you sent the traffic here to just his page, it’s not going to convert very well, because it’s just your main page, or to your franchising page. See this is really made organically, made for organic rankings. You have all this navigation, phone calls. This phone stuff doesn’t really work very well. All these different things that people can click on, and videos, and all that stuff. It’s great for organic listings, but it’s just … Like where is the call to action? And all this stuff drives up your cost per lead.
So you want to avoid doing that at all costs. What you really want to do is have something that’s just very focused. So, let’s see what would be … Let’s see what comes up here. So I’m on Bing. Let’s go to Google, Microsoft. Okay so let’s look up let’s see if there’s like a bowl franchise or something.
So, Rush Bowls. We do their stuff, so this would be an example. A better way to do it is going to be just with a landing page where, enter your email address to download a free franchise opportunity guide. That’s a really good way to go. It’s just very focused. There’s nothing that somebody can do, except for just fill that out. So, let’s see if it will take that email. Okay. Then, on the next page it’s pretty smart, because then you ask for first name, last name, email is there, phone number, state, whatever other questions you have. That’s a really good way to go is just … There’s nothing else that someone can do except for fill out that form, or kind of get off.
So landing pages are super important. If they’re not going to make their own landing pages … A lot of times we see a cost per lead of like $300 to $1,000. So you want to avoid that. Pricing, so when you’re first starting, you want to have an ad budget of like $2,000, maybe $3,000. We usually won’t start with a group for more than that unless they have a long ad history. We have some groups that spend 40 to $60,000 a month. But that’s something you do with a very mature brand who has a lot of franchise development reps that they’re just trying to make sure that they feed leads to. But if you just got your FDDs done, or you have less than 50 units or something, there’s no reason for you to go spend a bunch of money. So start with like $2,000 or so, all in with your ad budget and management fee.
But also, understand that if you’re going to have like a $2,000 ad budget for instance, then your management fee is not going to be like 10% of that, $200. No one’s going to be able to do a good job on $200. So, you just got to kind of weight all those different kind of things in there. Us for instance, if a group were to say 2250, we would probably do like 750 management fee, and 1500 on their ad budget, and we’d still be able to hit those numbers of like an average of $32 a lead on the ad side of things, and then be able to scale from there. So you just don’t want to spend that much.
Networks to advertise on, Google and Facebook are going to be best out the gate. Bing and Yahoo can work okay. A little older audience, which is good for investors, but not as much traffic. LinkedIn is super expensive. So Google and Facebook are best to start with. I think Pinterest may get there eventually, maybe, we’ll see.
Last question you should ask, how long is the commitment. So you don’t want to get locked into a long contract. We’ve seen people that have like a year commitment, and yet you don’t even know what the cost per lead’s going to be. They’re not even doing landing pages, all that type of stuff. So you want to be really careful there.
Anyway, hopefully these are some good questions to ask. We’ll go from there, thanks.
Entrepreneur with a focus on Lead Generation, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, and Conversion.
I’ve been trying for 3 months, but unfortunately could not resolve the issues Google Adsense detects on my website.
Thanks for sharing this informative article. I’ll definitely try to follow these steps and get it done.
Thank you so much.