To light the flame that fuels that fire that is strong brand awareness and lead generation, brands must approach their marketing efforts from a holistic perspective, above all.
What makes for strong marketing in the franchise world? There’s no singular, all-encompassing answer for what it takes to make a brand stand out, yet when assessing what franchisors at the top of the industry are doing to drive brand awareness and interest, it’s clear—a marketing strategy without multiple touch points isn’t going to cut it.
Today’s franchise buyer is more educated than ever, and as a result, a hard sell is no longer a viable option if a brand wants to scale effectively with the right franchise partners. This means franchisors must invest in improving their marketing efforts to present their franchise opportunity in the best way possible.
Franchise candidates will spend time, online to research the brand, the industry and even your competition – it is important to know what they will find.
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Do the necessary legwork ahead of time
As is the case with many aspects of franchising, there is no value in putting any budget behind marketing efforts unless your house is in order. When thinking about marketing a franchise opportunity, franchisors should ask themselves this before ever dedicating a single dollar to their efforts: Is my business in the best place it can possibly be to support these marketing and lead generation efforts?
Every franchise business wants more leads and to sign more deals. Franchisors shouldn’t invest in efforts to attract those leads, however, unless they’ve ensured their business infrastructure is capable of supporting those efforts. Franchise prospects are going to explore your franchise development site, view your social media pages and peruse your customer reviews.
Ask yourself: Does your brand have strong content populating your website and social media pages? Is everything consistent and up-to-date and with the right messaging? If not, there’s no point in spending money to direct interested prospects to a dead-end information-wise. This extends to validation, as well—any money spent on lead generation when there is poor validation within your franchise system is money lost.
So, assuming all of these qualifications have been met, now what? In short, brands should pursue all applicable outlets to create connection points throughout the candidate journey.
Use your real estate and branded customer-facing items to help promote your own brand and franchise ownership opportunities.
SMB Franchise Advisors: Teddy Fine
Consider your customers as prospects
A great place to start marketing your franchise opportunity is with your customers. These are the people who know and love your brand already but may not know of the business opportunity it presents.
For retail franchises specifically, it’s essential to market your franchise opportunity in your stores. Hang internal signage promoting franchise opportunities available and put the branded collateral already at your disposal to use, whether it be cups, napkins or anything else relevant. Educate your existing franchisees as to why this benefits them, too—after all, having another unit in their market only increases brand awareness and puts their marketing dollars to better use because historically, same-store sales go up when a given brand dominates a market with locations.
Have a strong understanding of budget constraints and target markets
Many emerging brands feel like they need an extensive lead generation budget and since they don’t have it, they can’t do anything. While having a larger budget definitely helps, it’s not everything—brands of all sizes have to figure out a way to compete in today’s franchise marketplace.
Understanding your own budget constraints is an important aspect of a successful marketing strategy. If a brand is based in Philadelphia and has three corporate locations, it stands to reason that marketing the brand nationally would prove ineffective. Directing the marketing budget toward growing concentrically in and around the Greater Philadelphia Market moving into New Jersey and Delaware, however, makes more sense.
Allow metrics to dictate strategy
An area where new franchisors commonly drop the ball when it comes to marketing their opportunity is failing to measure the effectiveness of their efforts. The most successful marketing efforts are those that are backed by data—tracking metrics is essential to understanding what works and where you’re finding success so you can better allocate your budget.
Curate a constant, consistent voice across multiple channels
Winning on the marketing and lead generation fronts requires a mix of digital, social, trade show and broker network representation, as well as Public Relations. Because prospects do the majority of their research online, strong Search Engine Optimization performance is also a huge component of whether your marketing strategy is successful. It’s simple, really: The more you advertise and market, the more your brand becomes known, so the more channels in which you can operate, the better.
Brands should acknowledge the fact that experiencing the effects of strong marketing takes time and doesn’t happen overnight or by itself. You need to work at building up consistency with a solid budget and plan.
Have a voice—and get it out there regularly. You can’t post something on one of your social channels and go dark for 60 days. Make an effort to find the stories happening in and around your brand that fuel content and share them consistently on the channels that are applicable to your concept and have the attention of your target franchisee demographic.
To amplify the effects of your own efforts, get other people to tell the story of your brand. Such is the value of Public Relations: third-party validation that has the potential to make your brand bigger than it is. Even if it doesn’t always translate into a direct lead inquiry, it amplifies validation for your concept for those leads that are coming in and deserves to receive consistent allocation as a part of the long game.