Four Keys to Successful Franchise Development Ad Programs

Leveraging New Technology to Find More of the Right Candidates for Less

1. A Strong Brand Trumps All

One of the benefits of building a brand that is both recognizable and reputable is its positive influence on franchisee recruitment. Brand identity and awareness helps create a "network effect" that produces more qualified candidates, which leads to greater growth that produces more qualified candidates, which leads to greater growth, etc.

Brand building differentiates one company from the others in its category. Well-known brands with strong reputations are able to charge higher prices—not only for their products, but also for their franchise units.

Brands are built over time through a combination of identity, marketing communication and service. As former Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, famously stated, "A brand is a living entity…the product of a thousand small gestures."

TV advertising is renowned as a brand-building medium because of its visual-audio power, broad reach and frequency—the ability to deliver the message over and over again until it resonates subconsciously.
The good news is that franchise organizations don’t need Subway budgets to fuel award-winning brand creative and massive media buying any more. Thanks to the Internet, mobile technology and the massive audience shift from single-screen TV viewing to multi-screen video, franchises today can build their brands faster and less expensively online than their predecessors using online video advertising.

2. Local Focus – Familiarity Breeds Response

Localizing franchise opportunity messages and running them in their respective development markets will resonate more with prospective candidates than generalized, one-size-fits all pitches that don’t change regardless of where the ads play or the booths are set up. Why? Because people respond to what's familiar to them.

Recent research reports¹ support this notion:

• National-local advertisers have seen a lift of 70% on click-through rates for ads dynamically localized and optimized versus generic ads
• Locally relevant ads seem to be more engaging regardless of where consumers are in the purchase funnel
• Even the simple mention of a location or city name in a mobile ad can improve click-through rates by 200%

3. Audience Targeting – It's Not Me, It's You

Most franchise organizations have a good understanding of their candidates' characteristics and psychology because they have profiled their high-performing owners over time.

Targeting ad campaigns to reach prospective candidates requires creating personas that take into account ideal candidate demographics (age and gender), as well as lifestyles, interests and activities. Visitor and user data collected through the Internet enables advanced multi-faceted audience targeting that far exceeds traditional advertising media.

The core candidate persona was likely developed for traditional media and simpler targeting methods. Consider broadening the target when initially setting up franchise development video ad campaigns. Digital technology makes it easy and cost-effective to test and discover other lucrative candidate audience segments.

4. Track, Measure and Optimize

Every successful franchise development ad campaign begins with objectives and benchmarks.

What results will determine success of the campaign? Of course, the ultimate objective is to sell franchises, but what are the objectives that lead up to a sale?

Realistically, ads don't close franchise sales. Franchise development teams do that. But franchise growth advertising starts the entire process rolling by:

• Creating awareness of the opportunity
• Encouraging interest by offering a next discovery step

Ideally, franchise growth ad programs should track how many people are exposed to the ad, how many engage with the ad and how many take the next step offered by the ad.

Franchise growth teams that track and measure the performance of all advertising and development programs compared to their costs then create benchmarks for future performance that consider:

• Impressions or exposure
• Ad engagement
• Next step actions

The real key to highly effective advertising programs is optimization. It’s both art and science. Track results over a statistically significant time period and then adjust ad creative, audience targeting and even budget to improve performance and manage costs.