At Coconut Creatives, we see so many franchisors making the same mistakes with their marketing time and time again. They spend thousands of pounds per year on their recruitment marketing but find that it just isn’t effective and they’re not recruiting the franchisees they need. Here are just some of the mistakes we see franchisors making on a daily basis and how you can avoid making the same mistakes.
- Not understanding your target audience
This is one of the top mistakes made by so many franchisors. When we ask them who they’re looking to target with their marketing efforts, they have no idea! They throw money at a variety of marketing campaigns without knowing exactly who they are targeting. The first step in any marketing strategy is to understand who your target franchisees are. Who do you want more of in your network? Spend time profiling your top performing franchisees and collate 2-3 perfect franchisee profiles. Once you have this information, you will have a much better idea about their decision making processes and how they came to join your network. Knowing this will help you to form your marketing messages and where to target.
- Not planning your marketing strategy
Another huge mistake that many franchisors make is not drawing up a marketing plan or having any sort of strategy in place before they start allocating their budget. Putting together a marketing plan will not only help you to work out a budget for the next 6-12 months, it will save money in the long run. The information you have gained from researching your network will help you to form the marketing plan by forcing you to think about the places you will target, how often and the messaging you want to get across.
Part of forming a marketing strategy is tracking and measuring your return on investment. How will you know if your marketing activity is effective if you do not track and measure it? Tracking could include directing prospects to a landing page so that you know exactly which marketing activity led them to you and will, eventually, help you to determine how many prospects you converted to franchisees in the long run.
- Seeing marketing as an expense
Marketing should be seen as an investment and not an expense. If you start to believe that every marketing activity you do is an expense, you will start to see it as something that needs to be cut if it doesn’t work and, by doing this, you are setting yourself up to fail. Marketing is a process and it requires regular and consistent investment to help you increase your visibility and make sure that your prospects are finding out about your franchise opportunity. Some marketing activities can take a while to build traction so it is important that you don’t stop them before they’ve had a chance to be effective.
Marketing your franchise is essential if you want to keep recruiting franchisees so make sure that you have a yearly budget set aside for marketing – you will find that it is returned when you recruit those all-important franchisees.
- Reviewing marketing activity
As part of the above, to ensure that you’re not losing time and money, you should review your marketing activity on a regular basis. Assess what’s working and what isn’t and cut the activity that’s not giving you a return on investment. By cutting out the activity that isn’t working you have more room in your budget to spend on the activities that are bringing in the most prospects. Is there a way to make certain activities more effective before you completely cut them?
- Lack of content
In marketing, content is King. How can you expect prospects to find out more information about your franchise if they can’t find any information about you? Before they finally decide to contact you, prospects will have researched your franchise thoroughly and compared you to your competitors. If they can’t find anything, they will swiftly cross you off their list and move on to the next franchise. Produce regular PR pieces to shout about your achievements and the benefits of your franchise. Case studies and videos are also great ways to showcase your successful franchisees and ensure that when prospects search for you online, they have plenty of information to back up their decision to call you.
Next time you sit down to start any marketing activity, think about the above factors and make sure you’re not making the same mistakes. If you need help with your marketing strategy, please contact us on 01725 511 673 or info@coconutcreatives.co.uk