Marketing is the activity before sales that if done effectively, you essentially make your sales colleagues more of order takers than sales executives. This however isn’t normally the case, even the most effective marketing campaigns will have areas to improve or other avenues to consider.

Benefits of Marketing for Franchisors

Franchises benefit more from the efforts of marketing than a traditional business because of the potential outcome for their activity. A traditional organisation will focus marketing activity to directly increase the number of customers they receive. Franchises will also want to increase sales, but they differ in the fact that this increased brand awareness will also drive more aspiring franchisees in their direction.

Marketing to increase the number of franchisees that apply to your organisation means you will receive more and therefor likely better franchise applicants. With better franchisees under your franchise umbrella, the performance of your brand and franchise will become exponentially improved, which ultimately increases sales.

Marketing a franchise opportunity is different to normal marketing to increase sales as the commitment required for a franchisee to apply is much greater than a normal customers journey. This is the reason we at Start Your New Franchise want to provide some useful tips for the best proven methods to market your franchise opportunity.

SEO & PPC

Search engine optimisation and PPC are tools used to increase the visitors you receive on your website. The usefulness of these tools is that you can be specific in what visitors you’re targeting to increase. This means that when you have a franchise opportunity you can target to achieve more visitors that are looking to become a franchisee in your industry.

It is important to note that while these activities can be very effective for bringing in visitors, it will be your website that they ultimately arrive to, meaning you need it set up to convert. If you feel that your website isn’t fit for purpose then spending money in these areas won’t provide a positive ROI and you should consider alternatives, or improve your website first.

Community or Local Marketing

What we mean by this, is the marketing targeted for a specific geographical area or community of people. This can be done using a variety of examples:

• Social Media
• Community Events
• Sponsorship
• Local Print Advertising

These marketing activities should all be considered as they can all potentially provide a positive ROI, however social media should be included in every franchises strategy. Social media is a free tool (unless you’re considering paid social media advertising) and it can be an easy method of getting information and content specifically to your target market.

When you’re considering this method, you shouldn’t just look at areas you currently have a franchise in, it can also be used to generate interest for your franchise in areas you are looking to move into. As most franchisees will want to work close to the area they live, conducting social media campaigns for a specific area will demonstrate your interest and raise awareness of potential franchisee recruitment opportunities within that geographical area.

Building Brand Trust

Brand trust is something that’s hard to earn, the days of trusting everyone before they give you a reason not to has gone for the majority. Now it’s all about earning the right to gain someone’s trust before they give you the opportunity and the most effective way of achieving this is through effecting marketing strategies.

Brand Recognition

This can be achieved using a lot of other methods in this article, but it deserves a spot of its own as it’s incredibly vital in the recruitment of new franchisees. As new franchisees are expected to provide the minimum investment cost of your opportunity, they must trust the brand they are applying to. A way to build brand trust is to be recognised as a professional organisation that has enough exposure to reach your target market, more than once.

What we mean by this, is that, you will see hundreds of advertisements every single day and most you won’t take a second glance. If you however continue to see a specific company being advertised, after a while or if they do a really great job of grabbing your attention, you will remember that company, either consciously or subconsciously. Then when they are searching for a franchise opportunity and come across your brand, it will stand out from others that they haven’t come across before.

Reviews

Reviews may be focused on increasing the customers to your franchise, but it also has the added benefit of convincing aspiring franchisees that your product/service is being greatly received in the market. The opinions of your franchises customers will be a factor for an aspiring franchisee to evaluate during their franchise opportunity search, after all, nobody wants to build a business on a bad product/service.

Online Advertising

Online advertising is a way to pay to market your franchise opportunities online. This can involve several methods and there is not one solution that works for everybody, for example, an app development franchise may use YouTube adverts that display on tutorials for app development. This would work well as they can be sure that a large percentage of their target market are the ones viewing those videos, however YouTube might not be something every franchise can use.

Other alternatives can include paid advertisement on the edges of websites, sponsored content or even social media paid ads. What you decide is the best for your franchise will depend on the industry you work in and the personas of your target market. It will likely be that you split your budget up to cover a few areas to provide maximum ROI.

Franchise Opportunities Website

A franchise opportunities website’s purpose is to host franchise opportunities for aspiring franchisees to compare and apply to. This is something that every franchise can benefit from as it provides visitors a site that is unbiased and is just there to provide information around franchise opportunities, franchising information and industry analysis.

The reason it works well as an advertising tool is that they are conducting their own marketing campaigns to get visitors to the site, this means you can feel sure that your opportunity is going to get in front of your target market. You will find with most reputable sites, they will produce a lot of content that will interest aspiring franchisees, which in turn increases the chances that they are going to apply through that site.

If you aren’t on any franchise opportunities site, you will find that a certain percentage of your target market won’t even know that your opportunity exists. This is because such a large percentage of applications for franchise opportunities now come through this method as they know they have most the information they need coming from a single site.

Startyournewfranchise.com is such a site, it’s there to do the marketing for you, to get your opportunity in front of the eyes of your target market. With an extensive effort in marketing and advertising, we ensure that any client receives only relevant applications and that aspiring franchisees know exactly what they are applying for.

If you are interested in how Start Your New Franchise can help, then please get in contact and one of our experienced sales representatives will be in touch.