The Franchise Industry Blog

The simple truth of the matter is that many—if not most—times a franchise sales representative is attempting to sell a person on an idea that is primarily foreign to the individual i.e., franchising.   Layer upon that the franchise salesmen’s job of educating the prospective franchise about the merits of the particular franchise and one can grasp how difficult is the task of selling franchises.

St. Patrick was a missionary to the Irish, a people who upon his arrival in 432 had heard little or nothing of Christianity.  As a missionary St. Patrick’s “mission” was to sell the Irish people on Christianity.  As he canvassed the countryside he was assailed by bitter opponents who threatened his life and undermined his message.  But as any great salesman who earnestly believes in the “product”, St. Patrick was undeterred, and by the time of his death he had made thousands of converts.

Importantly, St. Patrick is said to have “sold” the idea of the Christian theological concept of the Trinity by recourse to a shamrock.   The concept of the Trinity is a difficult idea to wrap one’s head around.   The doctrine of the Trinity states that there are three unique divine persons that make up one divine being that coexist, are co-equal and are consubstantial.  Without proper guidance, the idea of the Trinity can devolve into polytheism fairly quickly.  Christianity maintains that it is a monotheistic religion.

St. Patrick clearly had his hands full trying to explain this abstruse concept.  Legend has it that he used a shamrock with its three leafs to explain the three parts of the Trinity.  St. Patrick purportedly would hold up a shamrock and challenge his listeners, “Is it one leaf or three?” “It is both one leaf and three,” was their reply. “And so it is with God,” he would conclude.

Whether this story is true or merely apocryphal is largely irrelevant.   What is important for 21^st century franchise salesman is the idea that in order to sell a difficult idea one must present the idea in simple terms.  St. Patrick took a very difficult product to sell and sold it by analogizing it to an everyday item—the simple shamrock.   He made the complex simple.   The longer the explanation of any concept the less likely the concept will be both understood and appreciated.  In legal brief writing where everything hinges on informing the judge about the facts and the law, the more tightly constructed the brief the better.

So too it is with selling franchises.   It is likely that the prospect is taking other calls from other franchisors pitching their particular brand.  The experience of St. Patrick would counsel to make the explanation of the concept simple and the benefits readily apparent.  Understand and internalize the nature of your audience and their ability to perceive the value of that which you are presenting.  Do not fall into the trap of assuming that just because the prospect was not interested in your concept that they had no interest in franchising or even in your concept.  Many times it is simply the fact that the concept was not presented in terms that were both understandable and attractive.   Use of analogies to explain certain unique aspects of the franchise might prove very useful in the same way that the shamrock proved useful to St. Patrick.

Recently I’ve encountered franchise marketing articles favoring DIY digital marketing in order to increase search engine traffic to franchisors’ lead generation web sites over leads from franchise portals.

One such article appeared recently on industry consultant Joe Mathews’ web site.

I’m sharing my rebuttal below for its general educational value. I believe that you’ll find at least a few benefits to franchise portal advertising that you were not aware of, regardless of how experienced you may be at franchise marketing.

Go ahead; take my friendly challenge, read the article below:

Good Morning, Joe

I’d like to challenge one of your key assumptions about organic search in this article and others you’ve penned.

I recognize you as a franchise industry expert, I’ve read your book and I appreciate your contribution to our shared space.

However, I think you’ve made an incomplete and thus incorrect assumption about the value of franchise portals to the current state of online marketing for franchise organizations. Specifically my input here relates to organic traffic from search engines.

For the folks that read this that don’t know me, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for FranchiseOpportunities.com. That indicates that I’m biased toward portals of course, but I wanted to take the opportunity to make an earnest, fact-based rebuttal to your assertion Joe that “Portals are ‘out’ and SEO is in.”

My responsibilities at FranchiseOpportunities.com include all things marketing and we’re nearly 100% on the web. That means that I don’t know much at all about print, radio or television, but this digital space I do know.

I believe that my insights as a C-level digital marketer in the franchise lead generation space can be valuable to you and to the people who follow your advice.

First let me state that you and I agree on many key changes taking place in the world of franchising. I believe also that both of us share a common enthusiasm and a bias toward building others’ success.

I’m electing on this forum to keep my thoughts succinct but I am very willing to discuss anything digital marketing with you at length perhaps on a phone call.

Over one year ago we implemented an optional tool for our advertisers we call the Free Prospect Counting Tool (FPCT).

We wanted to be able to communicate to our advertisers with concrete evidence that franchise prospects visit franchise portals such as ours then go directly to the franchisor’s site by guessing their domain name or by going first to a search engine such as Google.

We implemented publicly available, off-the-shelf technology commonly used to track visitors from one participating site to another.

What we found was frankly astounding.

We found that thousands, yes, thousands of individuals every month first visit our site, then a search engine, then a participating franchisor’s web site.

This technology is cutting edge and it is possible that many people including your team were not aware of its use. That’s why I thought I’d take the time to share it with you.

We consider this irrefutable proof that some of the organic traffic that you are rightly encouraging franchisors to get more of does in fact begin with the franchise concept first being discovered on franchise portal type sites.

We have proven, along with many other franchise portals that also conduct the same program under different names, that advertising on a franchise portal significantly increases visitors who arrive on a franchisor’s web site that are attributed to “organic” in their web site analytics programs.

The data set includes over 100 franchise companies, over one year of implementation, thousands of visitors each month from portals directly to or via Google and Yahoo to web sites owned by franchisors. The data includes date and time stamps, URLs of web pages on both our site and individual participating franchise sites as well as I.P. addresses.

Another very interesting fact is that there is almost no overlap between people that completed our lead collecting web forms and the visitors that went directly to the franchisors’ web sites, so it is incremental to the leads that we get paid to generate and deliver.

As you described in your article, there are many people that are “web form phobic.” So in the end, we’re providing leads via our forms and via organic search as well as direct traffic hitting the franchisor’s web site.

Frankly, we can’t stop this behavior and we can’t charge any extra for it. It is what it is. People that use the Internet today are sophisticated searchers and some of our visitors simply view our directory and head over to Google to locate the web site of the franchise.

This web visitor behavior validates your advice that franchise companies should maintain web content. It is this content that Google displays to visitors that have just left our site.

It’s not a stretch to understand that since most franchisors are local or regional players, that somehow they must get their brand and their general concept in front of ready, willing and able franchise prospects. It is only on portals that proactive entrepreneurship seekers can find a large list of franchises that they can filter by investment level, industry and by location and conduct their research.

By way of example, at the most recent Franchise Update conference a very large and successful franchisor told our company president, Garth Snider, that when it dropped its portal advertising the number of leads that it received via its own web site dropped by 50%.

In your writings you laud the quality of visitors from Google, and portals are the ones sending people into Google for both brand specific as well as industry terms. So by extension, shouldn’t your view of the quality of visitors to portals be at a minimum held with the same high level of regard as you hold for those visitors from Google?

Your writings don’t mention directly the amount of time and effort and the related costs of having a franchise organization’s staff generate content, place that content, optimize that content for specific and material keywords – even if eventually the visitor that sees and acts on that content comes from what is perceived as a “free” traffic source. An axiom in digital marketing is “SEO (search engine optimization) ain’t free”.

If the franchise company hires professional digital marketing staff for the same purposes the costs go even higher as expert level digital marketing expert commands wages that can exceed six figures.

Hiring a consultant to help has a cost that varies by project.

When you do the math, advertising on a portal is a far less expensive way to get traffic to a franchisor’s web site.

Since your article concludes with a recommendation of a marketing consultant, I thought that you wouldn’t mind me pointing out similar services that portals offer to franchise companies, and some are offered at no extra charge. Some of these services even yield the content that you’re encouraging as well.

We offer hosted and recorded telephone interviews with the principals of franchise organizations.

We offer webinars of the same nature where the franchise sales team can educate new prospects about their concept.

Both the above-mentioned interviews yield recorded media (.mp3 files and/or video presentations) that can be placed on the franchise company’s web site and/or linked to in their social media activity such as YouTube, Facebook and even Twitter.

Since I conduct these interviews myself in a kind of “Larry King” style, the content isn’t from a self-indulgent “we’re great” point of view and this adds to the trust factor that you rightly encourage.

We offer email campaigns that reach our lists of entrepreneurship seekers. What you aren’t aware of is that we utilize an enterprise level email tool and the highest level of list cleaning and maintenance that gives our emails a consistent 99% deliverability rate. Recipients of these email blasts can jump directly to the franchisor’s web site and some jump into Google the same way visitors to our web site do.

In addition to the general email deployment, we offer A/B copy testing and subject line testing at no additional charge. Why go to market with ad copy that isn’t the highest yielding? We’ve done this for years for our clients and the results differential between subject lines would astound you.

We actually write copy when requested both for brochures for use on our site as well as the email campaigns.

Once ad or email copy is actually A/B tested by use on our site and in our emails, some of our franchisors will take the resulting optimized copy and use it on their franchise web site. Why use un-optimized copy when you have us to help you determine winning copy?

We also place franchisors’ press releases on our site at no extra cost for additional exposure. Google crawls our site each and every day and has for years. Want to get your press release indexed by Google? Send it to us.

We even have a new advertorial product that creates new content and propels it into the sphere of influence that is well beyond our own web site.

Again, when you do the math, hiring a portal is far less expensive way to get traffic to a franchisor’s web site.

In addition to the many methods that you recommend I respectfully request that you consider further this technology-proven web visitor behavior and how it demonstrates the heretofore unknown additional value of franchise portal advertising.

It is our view that franchise portals and franchisors work together to contribute to the end we’re all seeking, and that of course is more franchises being sold.

Company President Garth Snider recently was interviewed by football great Fran Tarkenton and business educator Professor Jim Solomon about franchises.

Jim Solomon is The Entrepreneur Professor (www.professorjimsolomon.com) and he has an online mentoring program teaching entrepreneurs exactly what to do, and when to do it.

Fran Tarkenton is the former NFL Quarterback with a love for entrepreneurship. Fran’s One More Customer (www.onemorecustomer.com) is an online community for entrepreneurs to gain knowledge about running a business and to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

For a franchise development manager, there’s nothing quite as painful than hearing that a previously excited potential buyer has changed his/her mind and decided not to move forward because of some negative comment they found about your franchise offering online.

Regardless of whether these negative comments are false, one-sided, unqualified, originate from a competitor, or are posted by a disgruntled franchisee with an axe to grind, the financial impact can be devastating and be a real morale killer.

As unfair as it may be, just ONE negative comment can cause a prospect to have second thoughts, silently undermining your sales efforts. What’s more, social media can cause negative comments to quickly spread like wildfire and out of control across the internet.

The longer negative comments remain unchecked, the more difficult they become to suppress and the greater the damage they can cause. In some industries, companies have reported losing millions of dollars due to a single negative comment found next to their online listing.

• Use a tool or a service that continually monitors the sentiment related to your domain, your brand and franchise offering.
• Take immediate action to suppress negative comments before they spread out of control across the internet.
• Identify and engage with key influencers.
• Uncover relevant communities, target discussions, and conversations.
• Foster positive word-of-mouth advertising.
• Suppress negative comments and reviews through active engagement and content creation.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 100 million members and growing. While Facebook is viewed as a more casual and fun environment aimed at consumers, LinkedIn is all business – offering you the opportunity to connect with executives, join discussions about franchising, and reach prospects who might otherwise never have considered your offering.

Your LinkedIn presence can help boost prospective buyers’ confidence and streamline the due diligence process as they explore your LinkedIn connections, read endorsements, and discover what you’re saying and what’s being said about you in LinkedIn Groups.

• Set up a personal LinkedIn profile, complete with a professional profile picture and full biography.
• Carefully choose your connections; assume prospective franchisees will browse your connections and judge you by your associations.
• LinkedIn is a professional network so keep all of your communications professional.
• Join and participate in LinkedIn Groups that relate to your industry to demonstrate knowledge, reputation and thought leadership.
• Seek endorsements from professionals with whom you’ve done business.
• List publications that have featured you or your franchise offering.
• Integrate your blog and link to your business Twitter account.

Make sure all of your contact information is up to date and consistentWhile both Facebook and LinkedIn enable you to create groups, LinkedIn rules supreme in business to business use. Creating a LinkedIn Groups specifically for your franchisees promotes thought leadership, creates a thriving community, can help drive website traffic, generate leads and foster advocacy among your franchisees.

• Set up a LinkedIn group.
• Post questions and lead conversations.
• Send weekly messages to group members.
• Manage members and moderate content.
• Create subgroups for specific geographic markets or franchisee levels.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Social media can transform satisfied franchisees into brand advocates, amplify their voice and automate word-of-mouth marketing. Encouraging feedback from franchisees within a social media medium can simplify comment sharing and delivers positive reviews at the precise moment in the discovery process when it matters most.

• Encourage and incentivize positive feedback from existing franchisees via social channels.
• Develop and distribute case studies via social channels to maximize their visibility and reach.
• Encourage franchisees to share your content on their social media channel of choice.
• Single out and highlight your superstars and transform them into brand ambassadors.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Trust is the back bone of any business relationship. Trust is particularly important in the decision stage for the prospective franchisee. A well-thought out and well executed social media strategy can foster and further trust in both the franchise’s brand and its management. This will, in turn, greatly increase the likelihood of a successful franchise unit sale. Chances are, prospective franchisees are already engaging in conversations about your offering. Joining and proactively leading those conversations helps build prospects’ trust and confidence, thus gently influencing sales. It’s estimated that only about 20% of prospects actively engage in online discussions. The majority are influenced by the comments and reviews of others.

• Identify and enter into social conversations.
• Address questions and concerns.
• Share relevant content.
• Engage with key influencers.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Since the content aimed at prospective franchisees is unique from that of your brand’s customers, create unique social media channels with content specifically aimed at this audience.

• Create branded social media properties specific to franchise development.
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blog.
• Integrate social media icons into your franchise development specific website and cross-link to social properties.
• Post pictures and videos specific to your franchise offering.
• Develop creative Facebook promotions that entice visitors with special content, which becomes available to them after they “Like” or become a “Fan” your page. Be certain to have these promotions integrated with any franchise portal advertising you may be doing.
• Promote special events such as webinars, discovery days, trade shows and conferences. While at the shows and conferences, be prepared to interact with the attendees using social media. Develop your trade show and conference “presence” with social media in mind.
• Integrate social sharing functionality to display user generated content and encourage visitors to share brand franchising information with friends and colleagues.
• Aggregate socially created content oriented from your brand’s franchise community.
• Cross-promote social media channels and content; integrate YouTube videos, your blog, and your tweets into your Facebook page.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

A frequently updated blog with relevant articles can significantly increase a website’s search engine rankings.

More importantly, it can be a very effective marketing medium in which to set your franchise offering apart.

Integrating social media sharing features are a simple and time efficient way to help increase readership, engage audiences, and boost brand awareness.

• Design a blog that accurately reflects the brand image.
• Consider having a blog that is solely dedicated to franchise development. This blog can be post franchisee success stories, financing options available to the prospective franchisee, newest franchise unit opening, etc.
• Optimize your blog content with key words relevant to your industry and opportunity.
• Add social media sharing and Facebook “Like” buttons to each blog post.
• Encourage readers to share articles with their friends and peers.
• Invite readers to comment and be prepared to reply.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Integrating social media into both your digital and traditional advertising can increase overall response rates and yield a higher return on investment (ROI) from your advertising.

Specifically, integrating a social media strategy into your franchise portal advertising is important to fully optimize and take advantage of social media. The most reputable franchise lead generation portals (of which Franchise Opportunities Network is one such company) are constantly searching for ways to generate more value for their franchise clients.

Collaborating with the portals on a social media strategy is where much of the “low hanging fruit” in online lead generation resides.

• Add social media calls-to-action (CTAs) into your traditional advertising to encourage readers to engage with your franchise offering online outside of the traditional website. As to your franchise portal advertising, make certain that your brochure on the website is replete with CTA’s.
• Publish the number of Facebook Fans, Facebook Likes, and/or Twitter followers to help enhance your brand’s credibility and provide third party endorsements.
• Again, integrate social media into other online marketing efforts such as email marketing campaigns and develop dedicated landing pages to help increase search engine rankings and automate word-of-mouth marketing.
• Create advertising campaigns that encourage content sharing.
• Direct readers to an offer-specific web page (landing page) or a franchise development website instead of the franchise’s website home page. Doing so will improve your ability to track and optimize the performance of the advertisement.