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
Coconut Creatives is the leading, award-winning, bfa-accredited franchise marketing company. This year marks the 6th anniversary of the popular Coconut Franchise Recruitment Marketing Workshops (sponsored by RBS). These workshops have been adopted by almost 200 brands since 2010 and many are now QFP accredited by the bfa.
Coconut Creatives have partnered with Venture Marketing to offer exclusive at-cost places at their ‘How to Exhibit Effectively for Franchisee Recruitment’ workshop on 10th August for any franchise brands exhibiting at the 2016 National Franchise Exhibition (NEC, Birmingham).
Many franchisors attend the same shows each year but don’t make the most of them. As a franchisor you are in a room full of franchise brands competition for the attention and contact details of the same visitors. So it is important that you are noticed as a high-quality franchise opportunity.
Helen Wood from Venture Marketing Group will also be joining the Coconut Team and will be hosting a Q&A session on how to make the most of your exhibition package and taking questions from the floor.
Want to maximise your exposure during the shows you attend? Looking to make YOUR franchise stand out from the crowd? Want to find out more about effective follow-up tools that will turn your leads into franchisees?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions then the Coconut ‘How to Exhibit Effectively Workshop’ is for you. This workshop is open to everyone, whether you are exhibiting int he Autumn, or just looking to sharpen up on how to speak about your brand effectively.
At Coconut Creatives, we’re always looking to continue developing our services and team so that our clients continue to receive the very best service and to help us stay up-to-date within our industry. This month, our Coconuts will be embarking on a spot of Public Speaking training with Celia Delaney. Celia is an expert in delivering inspirational presentations and how to conduct yourself when speaking in public so we know that we’ll be receiving the very best advice from someone with a wealth of experience in effective public speaking.
We always tell our franchisors how important public speaking is for their business and for recruitment and we even offer some seminars on this very topic so we’re making sure that we practice what we preach! Our team speak at so many events and at our own workshops so we want to make sure that our technique is perfect and gain knowledge that we can pass on to our clients.
Not only will we be attending our own training, we will also be visiting the Head Offices of various franchisors to provide them with our expert training and advice. We will be spending time with their recruitment teams to help them learn more about ‘How to Market Your Franchise and Recruit for Network Growth’. Many franchisors are unsure about marketing techniques and how to get the most from their marketing strategy in order to recruit more franchisees. We provide them with up to the minute marketing strategy and techniques to ensure that they’re getting the most from their budgets.
“We have been asked by so many franchisors if we can visit their Head Offices to train their teams that throughout July, we will be travelling around the country, sharing our expert advice and knowledge. With over a decade of experience in the franchise sector, we know what it takes to stay ahead and continue effectively growing a franchise network. Many franchisors can hit a rut when it comes to their franchise recruitment marketing, so we’re here to ease some of the pain and share practical knowledge that has been tried and tested,” explains Paul Clegg. Managing Director.
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
When used and written correctly, e-shots can be an extremely effective marketing tool for your franchise recruitment. Prospects spend a huge amount of time trying to find the right franchise for them so they may have been to a franchise exhibition, trawled countless franchise listing websites and picked up various magazines but still haven’t found what they’re looking for. That is, until your expertly written e-shot lands in their inbox!
E-shots are a great way to communicate with prospective franchisees and let them know who you are and what you do. By creating an informative and inspiring e-shot, you want to spark their interest and lead them to find out more information about you either by clicking through to your website or picking up the phone to call you.
Who are you targeting?
Before embarking on any e-shot or marketing campaign, it is important to begin by profiling your target franchisees. Who are your top performing or perfect franchisees? What kind of backgrounds do they have? Is your franchise a lifestyle choice or a serious business suitable for a serial entrepreneur? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you to set the tone of the e-shot and decide on what kind of information you want to send.
Capture prospect’s interest
Once you have established your target audience and tone of voice, you will need a short, catchy subject line to capture prospect’s interest so that they will open your e-shot to read it. Without this, your e-shot is likely to get lost in your prospect’s inbox and will not be read. Is there something unique about your franchise that you can use to draw people in? A recent e-shot for one of our clients with the subject line ‘Take Your Slice of £500m’ got 76 enquiries over just a few days and a franchisee sign up within just 3 weeks. Take time to really think about the subject line because it will determine whether or not your e-shot is read or deleted straight away.
What are the benefits of your franchise?
What is unique about your franchise? You can mention the training that you offer but we don’t recommend you have this as the sole topic of your e-shot as many franchisors do this and yours needs to stand out from the competition. Is your business model thriving? Let your prospects know how joining your network could benefit them and how it fits with their goals and lifestyle wants and needs.
Follow up
The follow up you do after sending out an e-shot is the most important part of the process. We often find that far too many good leads are wasted due to poor follow up techniques. Make sure you have a dedicated team member who has the time and training to qualify and follow up on every lead that comes through. By sending further information through promptly you ensure that prospects keep your brand in mind and you don’t lose them to your competitors.
Although e-shots are a great way to target prospective franchisees, don’t rely on just one form of marketing communication for your franchise recruitment. Research has shown that the most successful marketing campaigns use a mix of communication channels. E-shots should form part of a researched and balanced franchise marketing recruitment campaign.
To find out more about how we could help you write e-shots or provide advice for your franchise recruitment marketing, please contact us!
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.
