How to Customize Your Franchise Marketing Toolbox and Know Which Metrics to Follow

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Monitor your marketing components and calculate how much you’re spending to capture leads; if you’re not happy with the results, reassess.

By Bill Donato

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For most franchise brands, there are multiple tools working together to drive franchise lead generation to help convert existing leads in the funnel.

While teams can pour countless dollars into these efforts, understanding exactly which tools are necessary and tracking those that help convert leads can allow franchisors to reduce their cost per lead and cost per sale. Your recruitment spending is an investment in your brand so it’s important to make sure you’re allocating funds to the best channels.

The Tools in Your Franchise Development Tool Box

Begin by understanding what you need to measure. Not every franchise development strategy should be measured the same way. In fact, in many cases your marketing mix works together in coordination to reach a specific goal — making it difficult to isolate which tactic is providing the greatest return on investment. Regardless, it’s important to break down what each component does and how it could impact your bottom line.

No matter the size of your concept, I advise each client I work with to divide their franchise development spending into three specific buckets: portals, digital marketing and public relations.

Franchise Portals

The use of franchise portals for lead generation has been a significant part of many franchisors’ marketing budgets and overall strategies for well over a decade — and for good reason. Portals have been one of the most consistent and highest volume producers of franchise leads and deals on the web. That isn’t to say they aren’t without flaws. Portals, as of late, have been losing traction. Anyone on your franchise development staff can tell you, likely, that the leads they receive from portal sites are not always the most qualified.

That said, franchise portals are still one of the most effective ways to generate leads. Although the quality of leads may sometimes be questionable, there is still plenty of evidence to suggest that serious franchise buyers are continually turning to portals. Prospects are using these portals as a directory to help customize their search. It’s a convenient and effective way for them to see what opportunities are available. And frequently, they are using these portal listings as a starting point to further research a concept.

Still, it’s important not to put all your eggs in one basket. Franchise portals are really only the starting point. In addition to allocating your budget to include portals, you should also invest in other avenues to help move a potential investor along the sales funnel.

Digital Marketing

While portals serve to get your brand in front of the right people, the digital content you create provides them a place to research your brand further. The term “digital marketing” encompasses a multitude of channels, including your franchise website, company blog, social media pages and online advertisements.

Creating a dedicated landing page for your franchise opportunity and populating it with useful opportunity-related content is a great place to begin. If a prospect is interested in learning more about your concept, filling your page with brand-specific videos, testimonials and franchise overviews will help keep them engaged and ready to get on the phone. If someone stumbles across your page but isn’t ready to hand over their contact information, you can guide them back using digital advertising. For example, the brands I work with find a fair amount of success using retargeting ads. This form of advertising allows you to show ads exclusively to people who’ve already visited your site. Because prospects who’ve visited your franchise site are already familiar with your brand, these ads are designed to recapture their attention, remind them of the opportunity and direct them back to your page.

Digital marketing is also very easy to track and measure. Your website analytics let you know exactly how much traffic is coming to your website, how much time they’re spending on each page and which actions they’re taking while on the site. Meanwhile, your advertisement analytics let you know where your leads are coming from and exactly how much you’re spending for them. Digital ads also allow you to set very specific spend limits, customize messaging, imagery and A/B test ads to let you know which ones are working best.

Public Relations

The third vertical is public relations, and out of all three, this is the hardest to assign a value to and track. The purpose of PR for franchise development is to increase brand awareness and inform a broader audience of your franchise opportunity. It can be very difficult to know exactly which article or news segment made a prospect want to learn about your brand.

That’s where all these marketing tools begin to supplement each other. If your public relations efforts have led potential franchise leads directly to your website, your content-rich franchise opportunity page will be what helps educate them about your brand and gives them the motivation to reach out and talk to you. If media coverage inspires prospects to research your brand on a franchise portal, their familiarity with your brand will likely lead to higher click-through rates on your listing. Depending on your objectives, here are a few ways to measure whether your PR campaign is working:

Number of website visitors: Carefully monitor your website traffic around the time of a major PR segment or placement; ideally, there should be an identifiable growth related to your efforts. Be sure to measure traffic in the days before and following the hit. The effects of a PR hit can be long-lasting, so monitor your analytics to see how it impacts traffic in the coming weeks.

Number of actions taken: As previously mentioned, your franchise page should be populated with engaging content. Using your analytics, pay attention to any increase in the number of actions people take on your site. This could include what can be directly linked back to a PR placement such as your franchise video receiving an increasing number of plays or a clip of your news segment or article that is being shared on social media.

Number of high-quality leads: For a PR campaign to work effectively, it needs to target your ideal franchisee demographic. For example, if you are targeting middle-aged, C-suite level executives with $400,000 in liquid assets, then ideally a media placement should bring you an increased number of candidates who fit that description. If you notice more qualified leads coming through, that is a strong indicator the campaign is working.

What to Look For

To measure your marketing ROI, you must know what to look for. I advise franchises to focus on the cost per “closed” sale instead of cost per lead. Remember, your cost per lead really isn’t always directly reflective of any return. A good rule of thumb is to have your franchise fee set about five times your cost per sale.

Look at your marketing components and calculate how much you’re spending to capture leads; if you’re not happy with the results, then it is time to reassess.

Bill Donato is Founder of Conversion Whale, a marketing firm dedicated to lead generation and digital marketing.