Hints & Tips: Perfecting your marketing collateral
Our Founding Partner, Sarah Carlile, has been sharing her advice on how to perfect your marketing collateral for franchise recruitment.
How can a Perfect Pitch Assist Franchise Recruitment?
We recommend that every franchisor we work with develops a perfect pitch (or your elevator pitch) to let prospects know who they are and what they do. A perfect pitch will help you to quickly and efficiently tell prospects what’s involved with your franchise opportunity and how it could benefit them. The idea being that if you were stuck in a lift with someone for 30 seconds, how do you convey your most important messages in that time? It should act as the foundation for any copy that you write about your business. It includes your key messages that should be contained within all communications, whether it be in sales, through your website, networking, video, phone calls and any other introductory communications.
By developing a perfect pitch, you ensure that your whole team has a base to start from when trying to communicate about your franchise opportunity. It also means that they’re all on the same page and providing your prospects with exactly the same message.
The work we undertake in creating a perfect pitch for our clients is based on our own extensive work, NLP techniques, and the psychology of the UK franchisee decision making process. The vital factors are the four stages of engagement:
- Clarity
- Credibility
- Relevance
- Believability
The creation of a perfect pitch will allow you to ensure that all of the communications used throughout your recruitment process and marketing are consistent. ‘Create once use many times!’; your perfect pitch can be used in all of the communications you have with prospects, from press releases, newsletters and editorial to emails and phone calls. It helps to give you, your team and your prospects clarity around what you do.
As you liaise more and more with you prospects, you will identify which key messages are important to them and you should use this first-hand information to tweak your current messaging or incorporate new messages. We also highly recommend that you research your existing network and find out more about what motivated them to join your franchise and try to incorporate these messages into your perfect pitch in order to attract more of the same people to your network.
Contact us to find out more about how to create a perfect pitch for your business.
Coconut Sponsors Industry Event
This month, Coconut Creatives is the Silver Sponsor of the bfa Annual Conference. As one of the biggest events in the franchise recruitment calendar, we’re so pleased to be involved and sponsoring for the second year in a row. We’re looking forward to seeing our clients, affiliates and new faces in the industry.
Not only are we sponsoring the event, our very own Adam Lovelock, Head of Online Marketing, will be joining the likes of Baroness Karren Brady and Iwan Thomas MBE by sharing his expertise and knowledge with attendees of the conference. As one of our technology geeks, Adam will be sharing his knowledge on ‘How to Transform your Business Through Technology’ at 3pm on the first day of the conference.
The conference is the centrepiece networking and knowledge sharing event on the bfa calendar and offers unrivalled opportunities for franchisors and professionals from the sector to make new connections, share invaluable advice and insight and be inspired.
“As our second year as Silver sponsors of the Conference, we’re looking forward to seeing new and old faces. The Conference is a great opportunity for everyone in the franchise industry to network and share their knowledge and advice with fellow franchisors and service providers. We always learn something new that we can take home and implement in our business to help us grow and develop. Coconut will also be sharing our own knowledge at the event to help others take away more information to continue building their businesses,” explains Paul Clegg, Managing Director at Coconut Creatives.
We will also be there to support our clients at the Franchisor of the Year awards. We’ve got a few in the running so we’re looking forward to hearing all about the winners and congratulating them on the evening!
To find out more about working with Coconut Creatives or attending one of our workshops in 2016, please contact us on 01725 511 673 or info@coconutcreatives.co.uk
INFORMATION OVERLOAD: Breaking through the noise
In an age where we are constantly bombarded by adverts asking us to buy, buy, buy, there is a fine balance between overloading your franchise prospects with too much information during the recruitment process and not providing enough. If you bombard them every day with sales messages from the day they enquire with you, you’re likely to put them off pretty quickly or end up in the junk folder!
The recruitment process is based around building trust between you and your prospects until they are ready to make a decision and pick up the phone to you. Your communication with prospects should reflect this. Let prospects know what the benefits of your franchise opportunity are to them rather than telling them what you do and for what price. Your communications should operate in line with your recruitment process to help push prospects further through the process. Structure your communications around your recruitment process and you’re likely to see more franchisees coming through.
A successful recruitment process consists of lead generation, lead management and conversion. Different types of information through different channels are required at each of these stages. Yet, you must ensure that the messages you send out are consistent and provide a clear understanding of your franchise opportunity. This will draw prospects to you naturally.
Researching your target audience before undertaking any franchisee recruitment campaign will greatly increase your chances of attracting more leads. Understanding which media channels your target audience prefer to receive information through and which social activities they engage in will ensure that you allocate your resources as effectively as possible and don’t overload your prospects with too much information.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the first step in building long-term relationships with your prospects. To achieve successful lead generation, you need to be proactive and present your company as an attractive opportunity. You can’t just sit back and hope they’ll come to you.
Lead Management
Lead management is the process of following up your leads. For prospects, this is the stage where they consider whether your franchise is an interesting opportunity or not.
Some prospects prefer to be in the driver’s seat of procuring more information about your franchise and others might want you to provide the information directly. This will often depend on their sense of urgency so you need to establish the communication channels that permit both. However, prospects are only interested for a short period of time and online-only communication channels are often slow with long response times and little consistency so it is important to bear in mind that prospects will be considering other opportunities.
At this stage, it is important to provide prospects with all the necessary information about what joining your franchise will entail. Successful lead management will lead to higher lead conversion so it is important that you get it right at this stage.
Lead conversion
Lead conversion involves transforming a lead into a franchisee. In order to achieve this, you need to provide information about anticipated timescales and support to effectively outline the course of action. This will ensure that prospects view you as a franchisor that is professional and well organised.
In order to provide the right information at the right time, you not only need to research characteristics of your perfect franchisee but also their behaviour. No prospect is exactly like another but you can identify common themes that will resonate across your target audience. It is important to bear in mind that prospects have different information needs in each stage of the recruitment process. We recommend that you create a bespoke plan outlining which information needs are to be addressed via which channels, as well as when they are to be addressed in your recruitment process.
Think you might be overloading your prospects with information? We can help you perfect your recruitment process and communications. Contact us on info@coconutcreatives.co.uk or call 01725 511 673.
Goodbye Winter, Hello Summer
As the warmer weather finally begins, Coconut Creatives have been reflecting on a successful Q1. We launched our bfa Qualified Franchise Professional approved workshops this year and we’ve had a great response so far. The franchisors in attendance have been engaged and have taken away useful information and advice to implement within their businesses. We’ve had great feedback so far and we can’t wait to see what the rest of the year brings for our workshop programme.
In other news, our Founding Director, Sarah Carlile, has finally had her baby! Baby Thea was born on 10th May and is the newest addition to the Coconut family. Sarah will be tied up for the next few months attending to the baby’s every need but, in true Sarah fashion, she’s still on call if the Coconuts need her. As Sarah unwinds and enjoys her baby’s first few months, Paul Clegg is taking the reins as Managing Director and keeping the team in order.
And we’ve got even more to look forward to over the next couple of months! The EWIF Awards 2016 will soon be upon us and we can’t wait to celebrate the achievements of so many women within our industry. There was a fantastic response this year and we’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to tell us about their achievements.
After a Coconut Wedding, our very own Helen Thresh will become Helen Mansfield, and then we’re ready to tackle the summer months before the busy Autumn period begins. We know that the summer can be a quiet time for our franchisor clients while prospects relax on holiday but we’ll be busier than ever at Coconut Creatives as we prepare our clients for the busy exhibition period by making sure stands, collateral and team members are updated and ready to tell prospects about their opportunity.
2016 is set to be an exciting year for Coconut Creatives and we’ve still got even more plans in the pipeline to make sure our services are innovative so that our clients remain at the top of their game and ahead of their competitors. The latter half of the year will also see Sarah returning to work and we’re sure the break will have given her time to think of more ways we can continue to develop our services!
To find out more about working with Coconut Creatives or attending one of our workshops in 2016, please contact us on 01725 511 673 or info@coconutcreatives.co.uk