How to Develop a Franchise Opportunity: Make Your Marketing Do the Talking

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Wondering how to develop your franchise opportunity into a must-buy for potential franchisees? Want to show off investing in your franchise as the best business decision someone will ever make?

developing-a-franchise-featured

Here's how.

Check out these unbeatable professional tips to sell more franchises. From a company that's fast becoming the industry expert in delivering more partners to deserving franchise companies:

1.Make finding out how to buy a franchise simple

When you're considering how to recruit a franchisee, try to look at things from a first-time buyer's perspective:

Is it immediately obvious how to continue with the process? Are they fully informed as to how long the process could take? If they have a problem, can they reach out to you and get an immediate response?

Don't keep it a secret. Don't make it a difficult path to take.

Strive for simplicity. Aim for clear direction as to what a potential franchisee should do next.

2.Inbound marketing is king

inbound-marketing

Gone are the days when bombarding your target audience with advertisements worked (if it ever did).

Nowadays, more than 80% of business decision makers prefer to get their information through a series of informative articles rather than advertising.

This means that informative content marketing - also known as inbound marketing - is the way of the future.

With this tactic, your goals are to:

  • Build a relationship with potential franchisees
  • Focus on informing rather than advertising
  • Use content like blogs, social media, and SEO techniques rather than cold calling or cold emails

We'll go into more detail about how to do this in Tips #3 and #4...

3.Ask questions and show interest

questions

One of the best tips to sell more franchises is to show some interest in your potential franchisee. People, as a rule, like to feel that they're being consulted - that their opinion matters.

You're not asking a stranger some in-your-face personal questions. You're asking a business professional about:

  • Their knowledge and experience - give them a chance to talk about what they know and what they can do.
  • Their goals and ambitions - let them chat about how they see themselves, and what they want to get out of the opportunity that you're offering them.
  • Themselves and their family - okay, this is a little more personal. But if you can find a way to make the opportunity present itself, this is a great way to find out if the potential franchisee will fit in well with your brand.

4.Tell them what they want to know

We'll unpack this in Tips #5 and #6, but part of using inbound marketing to sell your franchise is actually telling buyers what they want to know...

This doesn't mean a narrow focus on what you perceive to be the main positive features of your franchise. Although of course, this is part of it.

Instead, you should focus on:

  1. What your buyer will get - from your franchise opportunity
  2. Benefits - but without pushing or overselling.
  3. Authenticity - be happy that your franchise is attractive enough "as is". Without the need to exaggerate its benefits in order to sell it.

This means you really need to...

5.Focus on you

Spending a lot of time figuring out how to sell more franchises can mean a lot of concentration on your target audience. But how about a little more focus on your own brand?

Well established brands who have already achieved a large amount of brand awareness amongst their target audience often start to see a snowball effect. This is because people like to know what they're getting into and feel that the brand is a known quantity.

This doesn't necessarily mean bad things if you're a smaller franchise operation. In fact, you could find that you'll attract a more conscientious type of franchisees because they've actively had to go beyond the first big name they came across in your industry to find your opportunity.

That said, there are certain steps you can take to make sure your franchise opportunity is as professional-looking and credible as the big boys:

  • Get good at SEO, or hire the professionals - go back to Tip #1. It shouldn't be a closely guarded secret that you offer franchise opportunities. Your website and franchise page should be easy for people to locate using search engines and mobile searches.
  • Get good at web design - an old fashioned website, or one that isn't optimised for mobile devices, will instantly turn away a huge proportion of interested searchers.
  • Get good at social media - if you're not trying to engage with potential franchisees using social media, you should be. Driving engagement through social media takes a different skillset to other online communication. Feel free to get more personal with the way you communicate. Establish a brand voice.

6.Show potential franchisees how they'll save time and money

time-and-money

It's not all in the name. A potential franchisee wants more than just to be able to slap your name on the side of their building. They'll be looking at the way you do business and the processes you use before they buy - they'll want to know what they get from your package as a whole.

This means that any clear inefficiencies in the way you'll be expecting them to perform their day-to-day tasks will be glaringly obvious - especially to an experienced eye.

To combat this, if you haven't already, you'll need to:

  • Be ruthless in your review - a top to bottom review of all of your business processes is something you probably do on a regular basis anyway. But consider things from a potential franchisee's outside point of view. If you had to justify the way you delivered a certain process, how would you? "We've always done it that way" just isn't good enough.
  • Promote your unique methodology - do you have a slightly different way of performing a common process? What makes your way better? Promote even the smallest increases in efficiency - they're what set you apart.
  • Clean up your process software - does your sales department use software that doesn't mesh well with the software you use in your inventorying process? Do you still use emails to coordinate some tasks? Integrated systems will give you a massive efficiency boost. If you don't already, it's time you started using one.
  • Make the day-to-day things simple - make sure that any potential franchisee understands that any processes that may sound complicated to use - such as your integrated process software - won't be making their lives with you difficult. These processes are there to make their lives easier. In fact, you need to go further...

7.Make sure they know they'll get the support they need

phone-support

By following Tips #1-6 you'll have checked that you're doing lots of the basics involved in how to recruit a franchisee. But what would you know about the help that you offer on a day-to-day level if you were a potential franchisee?

Probably not much. For this reason, you need to ensure that your potential franchisees understand that you're going to be with them every step of the way. If not, what makes your opportunity better than them going into business for themselves?

It's a similar thought process to that involved in Tip #6. There you're demonstrating to a potential franchisee that your processes are better, smarter, and more efficient than the rest. Here you'll be showing a potential franchisee that with you, they'll get a whole lot of support that they wouldn't get elsewhere:

  • Give technical assistance - do your franchisees know how to set up and run profiles on all of your chosen social media marketing channels? If not, make it clear that you provide this sort of technical help.
  • Give them less to do - do your competitors expect all of their franchisees to negotiate individually with all of their suppliers, for example? The fact that you don't should be promoted. That's one less job your franchisees need to do every time.
  • Give training materials - your new efficiency-saving integrated software system might be brilliant as far as improving your business's bottom line goes. But does it sound incredibly complicated to the untutored eye of your potential franchisee? Make sure they understand how simple it is - and that you'll provide hands-on as well as online training.

Implant the idea that their daily life as one of your franchisees will be simple.

Making yourself the path of least resistance will let you develop a franchise opportunity that your audience wants to get on board with.

How to Develop a Franchise Opportunity The Easy Way

Want to know how to sell more franchises?

Local Fame can teach you.

Get in touch now and chat with the local experts about how big you want your franchise company to be. You'll always find an experienced professional here ready to talk to you about your plans.

To start with, why not get a FREE report on your online marketing power? (It's just what you need to get started on Tip #5.)

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