Whether you’re a business owner or easy to identify as an executive on LinkedIn, you’ve likely experienced franchisor marketing, but it’s now what you would expect.
Like many B2B and business in a box plays, franchisors haven’t by and large caught up with the digital side of franchisor marketing.
To be clear, this article is about the way in which franchisors find franchisees.
Have you ever been solicited to buy a franchise? I bet it wasn’t by a franchisor.
The Franchise Broker Distribution Model
Ever receive a connection request and then follow up like this?
Hi [Your Name],
Thank you for connecting with me. If I can help with advice or introductions to anyone in my network please let me know. Goodwill goes a long way.
Let me tell you a bit about what I do and see if there’s a bit of synergy between the two of us.
I am [The Founder/A Consultant] of [Franchise Broker Company] – a value add franchise & business consulting partner for business owners like you!
As a Franchise Consultant, I help business owners identify and evaluate franchise opportunities that align with their individual goals, skill sets, interests and investment criteria.
If you have ever considered the idea of adding business assets to augment your income base, I’d love to chat and give you more information about what we do.
I promise this is not like any other call you have ever scheduled from LinkedIn. My services are FREE, and if we can’t help you, we will do our best to find you a resource that can.
Book time with me here: [Meeting Link]
I look forward to hearing from you.
[Sender]
Franchisors by and large grow their franchisee base via paying commissions to franchise broker firms like these. However, leveraging Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) techniques can dramatically increase the effectiveness of inbound marketing efforts. A skilled CRO Expert can help franchisors turn interest into actionable leads by optimizing their digital sales funnels, improving conversion rates, and reducing reliance on traditional broker commissions.
Instead of representing any particular franchisor/franchise system, the approach is to be a sort of buyer’s consultant even though they get paid by the seller. It’s not all that different from how buyer’s agents work real estate deals in the US.
But just like with real agents, the commissions to franchise brokers are quite high and there’s no guarantee that they’ll push your franchise over all the others on which they can earn a commission.
Franchise Brokers Are Swimming Upstream
When I’m targeted by franchise brokers (1-2 times a week), it’s pretty clear the outreach is templated and they haven’t taken the time to suggest any particular franchise as being a better fit for me.
The signals used to reach out to me are my age and the perception (based on my LinkedIn profile) that I probably could afford to purchase one or franchises/territories within a single franchise.
So think of that as ABM lite. There’s some targeting but it isn’t even industry specific. The messaging is super vague as well.
Guess who else targets this way…meeting setters. Whether they brand themselves as “marketing agencies” or “tools,” meeting setters send outreach exactly the same way but in aggregate, the volume is already overwhelming.
Bot profiles, real profiles run by bots/AI, overseas SDRs, and the list goes on. Spray and pray all day as they say.
“What if I could get you 5 meetings a month and you only pay if they show up/close? Would you like to learn how we helped [random company] get 20 new clients last year?”
So it’s becoming even harder for franchise brokers to get a response because so many people just don’t accept LinkedIn connection requests or don’t answer correspondence anymore.
Weak/generic messaging representing 100s of franchises on a platform that will likely have to take drastic SPAM prevention measures soon doesn’t look like a winning formula for your franchise to attract franchisees does it?
There’s Hope for Franchisor Marketing
Franchise brokers that don’t understand non-relational sales would be well-served to read this as well.
Inbound Marketing Is Really Competitive in Certain Industries…In Which Franchises Don’t Exist
Ever heard of an [E-commerce] franchise opportunity? It makes no sense. An e-commerce company can already service the globe without franchising itself, but guess what, so can all the other E-comm companies and there are a whole lot of them.
What about retail clothing, automobiles, or even personal injury attorneys? Nope! No franchises.
Companies in those industries are in a stats-based war game, trying to squeeze out margin on multi-million dollar/month ad budgets across PPC, SEO, Organic Social, Paid Social and for some, billboards and print media.
What about home services, haircuts, spas, gyms and more? Not so much. These companies are in a locals only competition.
So as a franchisor, what if you could win that battle in any territory you might have a franchise before you’ve even sold that franchise?
Could Your Franchise Be the Most Attractive Because of How Much You Contribute to Client Acquisition?
At Sales Funnel Professor, we’re sometimes tasked with building [sales funnels] for products or services that don’t even exist yet, but you know what does exist for a lot of them…demand.
What do you do with demand for a product or service that doesn’t exist? Create a waitlist.
So let’s imagine your franchise is in a head-to-head competition with 1000s of others that franchise investors could choose. Your potential buyer likely has multiple options from which to choose just in your industry: fast casual food, haircare, gyms/exercise centers, home services franchises, and the list goes on.
But you know what your franchise marketing competitors don’t have? A client list just waiting for the service as soon as your future franchisee takes possession of that territory.
Use the AirBnB Model for Getting Franchisees to Come to You
Back when AirBnb came into the vacation rental market around 2010, they had a small point of differentiation with regards to the worst tenant segment: people with no money who would actually pay to sleep on a stranger’s couch.
But they very quickly started taking vacation rental market share from VRBO, Homeway, and TripAdvisor without marketing directly to homeowners or property managers simply because they could stay in the news and boast about tenants/renters joining their platform in droves.
If you ever looked at their website, it’s probably 98% tenant-facing but they get owners/managers joining because of how good they are.
You already have the buyers I want? Sign me up.
Most franchisors have a similar opportunity. Show the market that you’re good at getting buyer leads for whatever those franchisees sell and you’ll see them coming to you directly, with much better understanding of what you offer, and much more likely to close.
Our Franchisor Marketing Experience
At time of writing, Sales Funnel Professor is still a toddler, barely past two years old and we’ve grown our business 100% on inbound marketing: referral, SEO, PPC, social media, etc. People see us, connect, request a meeting with us and we figure out if we’re a good fit for each other.
Most franchisors either completely ignore these channels or “do them” without any serious thought to brand, positioning, targeting, etc. Franchisors often use cheap websites that signal the exact opposite of what we suggested above: they’re actually telling their franchise buyer market that they are not good at marketing so you’d better be great yourself if you want to buy one of these.
So when a client of ours for whom we had already built a >$10M inbound funnel in roughly 3 months on a brand new piece of specialty equipment asked us to help them get their home services franchise sales funnel flowing, we applied the same process we do to the funnels of [Saas], EdTech, Professional Services, Marketing Agencies, and others:
- Working with the owners, we captured their origin story, which helped us understand who their [ICP] was and what they cared about.
- Roleplaying their ICP in the buying cycle, we did a bunch of research to figure out what terms a stranger who wanted their particular type of franchise might search and how many of those searches were available per month. This gave us what we needed to power both SEO and PPC inbound funnels.
- We took their origin story and turned it into a positioning statement ([StoryBrand] framework), About page, and origin story blog.
- We fleshed out their home page, other critical pages, and made it crystal clear why they were different, with heavy emphasis on how much emphasis they put on lead gen and taking care of franchisees.
- We configured HubSpot and hooked up their contact forms.
- We turned the funnels on.
And then…we built a franchisee funnel of >$30M in less than 6 months. Over $8M of that was organic search to a brand new site, which takes time to get ranked high enough to get search traffic and that funnel will just keep getting stronger with time.
Looking deeper at the searches that led to franchisees inquiring about territories, many were running searches roleplaying what their buyers would search.
We got inbound franchisees and leads for those franchisees. We thought they’d be in the US only. It turned out the value prop for both the franchise and the service was so strong that people internationally have been steadily reaching out about both as well. The franchises will soon be available in Canada.
So instead of waiting around for franchise brokers to send onesie twosie deals over, they currently have >800 franchisee prospects and don’t have to pay commissions on any of them.
What Can Franchise Brokers Learn
While you may carry 100s of listings, most franchise brokers prefer to recommend the cream of the crop franchises.
Franchises that make money are much more likely to have other happy franchisees and be purchased. Brokers who make good matches are more likely to be referred. That’s just common sense.
So what can franchise brokers do? Start funnels around the types of franchises that they like to sell.
Conceptually, this is similar to a real estate agent building funnels around a particular neighborhood. Instead, a franchise broker can development content about their preferred franchise opportunities and why their special.
While we were developing funnels for this franchisor, we noticed that the digital landscape for home services franchises but also home services is not that challenging. And even the landscape for “best franchises” and searches of that nature isn’t either.
So perhaps the next great franchise broker will build their business off of inbound instead of continuing to spray and pray on LinkedIn or via email.
What Does Your Franchisor Marketing Opportunity Look Like?
While we haven’t run the analysis for every type of franchise in existence, we do happily provide this research during our free consultations.
If you’d like us to take a look at your franchise marketing opportunity, we’d be happy to do. We looked into cryo spas recently and it looked just as open as the home services client referenced above.
To request that analysis, simply book a free consultation.
