An effective franchise marketing plan contains the essential elements to improve conversion rates and drive customer engagement.
In the world of franchise sales, it is essential that marketers have a deep understanding of their product, their target audience, and the conversion path said audience is expected to follow. Having a solid message a brand identity is important as well, but it means nothing unless you have a clear audience that is receptive to your message.
It’s rare that a franchise is sold by coincidence; the vast majority of franchise sales are executed because a franchisor has developed a thorough, targeted marketing plan and stuck to it. Keep reading for 3 necessary factors of an effective franchise marketing plan.
#1 Develop Your Market
One of the most impactful ways to enhance your franchise marketing plan is to develop your buyer persona. Curate an idea of “the perfect buyer” to gear your marketing towards. If you simply market to franchise buyers, you’ll have to keep your messaging very general in order to appeal to everyone.
Not only this, but you’ll probably need to use traditional franchise and business channels to promote your franchise, at which point you’ll have to compete directly with other franchises .. while promoting a general message.
While competing with other franchise opportunities is inevitable, it proves to be much more effective to narrow your buyer persona, focus your messaging to appeal to this persona, and advertise in media that is tailored to your specific audience (and inherently less rampant with competition).
#2 Develop Your Budget
This may be the most important factor to any marketing plan. It’s essential that you set your budget before you can begin to plan your efforts, allocate your resources, and think of how you can scale said efforts. The key to developing an appropriate budget is finding the equilibrium between obtainable, trackable goals and the resources available to your marketing efforts.
Best practice for creating a realistic budget is to set long term goals (cash flow, business value, etc.) and a specific time frame in which you’d like to achieve those goals. Once you have this general outline established, create a hypothetical business that could achieve these goals in said time frame (for example, x number of franchises, producing x amount in revenue each year), then work backwards to establish a more specific budget plan, complete with short-term objectives.
Learn More: 22 Ways Marketing Automation Software Increase Marketing ROI
#3 Your Conversion Path
You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again, success in sales is simply a matter of numbers. The more you invest into your franchise marketing efforts, the more success you’ll see. Money invested into franchise marketing will generate leads, and a fraction of those leads will complete an application. A fraction of those who apply will actually show up for meetings, and a fraction of those will become franchisees. Now obviously this is a very high-level example of the sales process but my point is this: When it comes to your franchise marketing initiatives, don’t be cheap.
CampaignDrive by Pica9 Powers Franchise Marketing
CampaignDrive by Pica9 is franchise marketing platform that helps some of the world's best brands effectively manage their brand across hundreds and thousands location. With decades of experience, working in a variety of industries, Pica9 commits themselves to helping franchise brands successfully scale and streamline marketing tasks.
For more on optimizing your franchise marketing efforts, check out The Franchise Marketing Playbook.
