Effective Ways To Market For Your Franchise Business
There are many methods to look at promoting your franchise business. Furthermore, in the light of the internet, there are ever cheaper ways to find the exposure required and get hold of those all important prospect leads.
Consider the market carefully and be certain you approach it with return on investment in mind. Firstly, its prudent to ask yourself what is the conversion cost to gain a franchisee? What tracking will you have for marketing your franchise opportunity? Can you track enquiries and from what advertising source they heard about you from?
The new age of internet marketing has brought with it detailed and new ways to monitor performance and track enquiries which can reveal such detailed statistics that you can calculate your cost per prospect lead received and even the cost of what it takes to convert those leads into franchisees.
Advertising your franchise can be done through many mediums such as:-
Exhibitions – both national and regional
National & Local Press advertising
Specific Franchise magazines and publications
Publications and Magazines targeted specifically at your industry
Online franchise directory & business directory websites
Attending business investment type events and networking
Releasing company news via media channels
This is not a full list and depending on your business, there may also be further routes you can take advantage of. The list mentioned above can form a good ideas list of some of some common routes to marketing and covers a wide price range.
Whatever you decide its highly important to set budgets that is affordable and ensure you have tracking systems implemented. Advertising spend with no real tracking process is akin to throwing a bucket of paint at a wall to see what sticks. Theres no way to see what is working and being the most effective in converting your spend into leads unless you have some sort of lead tracking in place. Think about what each campaign is expected to achieve and remember to keep that purpose in mind.
Certainly for a new franchise business, the driving force is prospect leads that will become franchisees. Allocate your advertising spend prudently and be careful to track the source of where your lead enquiries come from, right the way through to them turning into a franchisee. Remember to use this to your advantage as marketing through one medium might be more effective for one franchise system and not for another.
As an example, a franchise in the gardening industry may find that his advertising in a gardening magazine converts than his advert on franchise directory websites. An important factor to think about not the volume of leads but the wider picture of conversion cost in hard cash. One source may generate many leads but convert very few while another may produce few leads but many more of those leads convert into franchisees as a percentage. Look then at the cost of each advertising campaign and divide this by the leads each has produced. You will now have an accurate cost per franchisee aquisition and show you where your marketing spend is being utilised most effectively. If you are needing help on the best ways to manage and track your advertising costs there are some good franchise media houses or franchise experts to help you manage this important task effectively.
By monitoring each enquiry carefully, you will be sure you are spending your budget on that which will provide you maximum return on investment and also get some valuable insight along the way into which advertising media works best for your franchise offering and which do not deliver a good return.
October 22, 2009
· 
Marko Ketolainen · 
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Tags: franchise · Posted in: Marketing
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