We’ve all heard the saying, “You can catch more bees with honey than vinegar,” right? How does that apply to franchise marketing?
To put it simply, we must strategically place those jars in the right locations to attract the exact types of bees we want – ones seriously interested in the honey, your franchise opportunity.
The Search for Potential Franchisees
Finding a potential franchisee takes skill, determination, and well-planned, yet agile, marketing strategy. Keeping this in mind you need a defined budget, prospect profile to better target your market (know your audience), lead strategy (how are you going to keep them interested in the honey jar), and the all-important factor of timing.
Timing and budget are factors with finite parameters, franchisors know them. It’s the audience and development giving franchisors a run for their money so to speak. Let’s start with audience.
Audience
Without going into detail, you know what you want your ideal franchisee looks like, right? If not, now is the time to do your research, explore who is interested in selling your products or services, and put together a profile of your top franchisee prospects.
While your profile may not be perfect, and can certainly evolve, if it’s not clearly defined, your marketing strategy will stumble. You can use Google Analytics to help you refine your audience. Using Analytics, you’ll be able to see where users are coming from and to explore how they are using your site. The new Audiences function allows you to examine the demographics and interests of visitors to your site.
After your audience is defined, so you can focus your ads to sites those users frequent, thereby getting your ads for the franchise opportunity in front of the right eyes. Using this type of analytics can help you to put your ad budget dollars to work in the right place. And with so many options these days, it’s a good idea to do a little research to find the one best suited for your budget and needs.
Marketing Development Strategy
You need an army to do all the things you need to do, but if you do one thing to improve your marketing development strategy, use SEO and paid AdWords campaigns (PPC) in tandem for the best results.
It is imperative to have an ongoing SEO plan to ensure your franchise opportunities remain fresh and in front of the eyes of entrepreneurs. Without this important piece of the puzzle you could be trying to sell your Cactus Nursery franchise to people in Siberia.
Liane Caruso, Qiigo’s Director of Professional Services and in-house Franchise Development strategist says,
“At Qiigo, we recognize that our franchise development campaigns are most successful with a fully integrated campaign that involves long-term and short-term campaign goals. While SEO efforts may not immediately offer up candidates or associate a number of conversions to dollars spent, the long-term gain is being found in organic search.
‘Franchise opportunity’ is a highly competitive and expensive marketplace, and those who can be easily found will win in the end.
In the end, it’s all about resources and budget. Whether you have the budget to outsource this part of your franchise marketing development strategy, or if you do the work in-house, putting in the ground work will help drive more prospective franchisees to your site.
When it comes to the success of both the franchisor and franchisee it’s about the marketing and location. Where are you going to start?
