The Franchise Industry Blog

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Trust is the back bone of any business relationship. Trust is particularly important in the decision stage for the prospective franchisee. A well-thought out and well executed social media strategy can foster and further trust in both the franchise’s brand and its management. This will, in turn, greatly increase the likelihood of a successful franchise unit sale. Chances are, prospective franchisees are already engaging in conversations about your offering. Joining and proactively leading those conversations helps build prospects’ trust and confidence, thus gently influencing sales. It’s estimated that only about 20% of prospects actively engage in online discussions. The majority are influenced by the comments and reviews of others.

• Identify and enter into social conversations.
• Address questions and concerns.
• Share relevant content.
• Engage with key influencers.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Since the content aimed at prospective franchisees is unique from that of your brand’s customers, create unique social media channels with content specifically aimed at this audience.

• Create branded social media properties specific to franchise development.
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blog.
• Integrate social media icons into your franchise development specific website and cross-link to social properties.
• Post pictures and videos specific to your franchise offering.
• Develop creative Facebook promotions that entice visitors with special content, which becomes available to them after they “Like” or become a “Fan” your page. Be certain to have these promotions integrated with any franchise portal advertising you may be doing.
• Promote special events such as webinars, discovery days, trade shows and conferences. While at the shows and conferences, be prepared to interact with the attendees using social media. Develop your trade show and conference “presence” with social media in mind.
• Integrate social sharing functionality to display user generated content and encourage visitors to share brand franchising information with friends and colleagues.
• Aggregate socially created content oriented from your brand’s franchise community.
• Cross-promote social media channels and content; integrate YouTube videos, your blog, and your tweets into your Facebook page.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

A frequently updated blog with relevant articles can significantly increase a website’s search engine rankings.

More importantly, it can be a very effective marketing medium in which to set your franchise offering apart.

Integrating social media sharing features are a simple and time efficient way to help increase readership, engage audiences, and boost brand awareness.

• Design a blog that accurately reflects the brand image.
• Consider having a blog that is solely dedicated to franchise development. This blog can be post franchisee success stories, financing options available to the prospective franchisee, newest franchise unit opening, etc.
• Optimize your blog content with key words relevant to your industry and opportunity.
• Add social media sharing and Facebook “Like” buttons to each blog post.
• Encourage readers to share articles with their friends and peers.
• Invite readers to comment and be prepared to reply.

No successful business venture can long survive without strong, thoughtful leadership.  When franchisees make the decision to enter into a franchise system they do so because they have confidence in the leadership.  Whether that initial confidence is sustained over the life of the franchisee/franchisor relationship is often times in the  hands of the franchisor.  Where does that initial vote of confidence derive? Many times it is the product of other franchisees’ testimonies as to the positive nature of the franchisor’s leadership.

Because of the challenging economic times in which we live the prospective franchisee is much more thoughtful in his/her decision on whether to become a franchisee.  More than ever, the franchisee wants to see and/or hear evidence that the franchisor is going to live up to its word.  The franchisee wants to have confidence that when the bullets are flying the franchisor will not leave them behind on the battlefield.

What exactly does displaying this type of leadership look like?  History is replete with examples of superior leadership and examples of poor leadership.  An example of both bad and good can be drawn from the American Civil War. [Read more →]

–It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality.   John Galt.

What do the franchise portals owe to the prospective franchisee?   Perhaps the more important question is the corollary to this query and that is: what do the franchise portals owe to the franchise industry in general. Are the portals merely an conduit of information?   It is difficult to fashion a legal argument that the portals have any obligation to investigate which franchises are sound.  It is even more difficult to make and ethics based argument that somehow the portals have an obligation to weed out the bad franchises from the good ones.  But what about from a moral perspective?   And by moral perspective I mean the objective good in the striving for and ascending to one’s full potential in business.

Trust is the hallmark of our capitalist system.   What we have today with the collapse of the financial markets is a flatlining of trust in our system.   Expand that notion to franchise lead generation portals.   Do the portals have an obligation to protect the franchise industry’s perception of trustworthiness?    Trust is lacking today in our market place.   The portals have been the conduit through which all manner of poorly thought out franchise have been advertised.  With that said, one can easily make the argument that the portals are no different than any other form of advertisement like a magazine or newspaper.   And such an argument would be right on the observation of the superficial facts but miss entirely the ultimate reality that lies just under the surface.

The portals are the partners of the franchise industry.  There exists a symbiotic relationship between the portals and the franchise industry–even if the industry (as embodied by the IFA) are loathe to recognize it.  As such the franchise portals must do more in screening out the franchises that will do nothing but harm the industry as a whole.   A teleological perspective needs to be the driving force behind the portals long range strategic planing.  The portals must resist the myopia of looking only to the short-term goals of next month revenues.

Without reason a code of morals becomes diaphanous.  No business can long succeed without a code of morals–morality from the traditional religious sense, as well as objectivist sense posited above.  The portals must actively practice the morality of self-preservation precisely becasue it is the only reasonable thing to do.  The portals must take the long view because so few in the industry currently do.  Irrationality held sway over the franchise industry and, by extension, the franchise portals for the last 3-4 years.   It is time for reason and good judgement to become preeminent in the franchise lead generation industry again.  It is good business, and it is moral.

The shibboleth that the franchise industry is recession-proof has been torn asunder.   Very well.  It was an unreasonable and untenable belief to begin with.   And this belief compelled many in the industry to go against their morality of self-preservation.  The portals now have in their power the ability to assure the continued growth of franchising into the 21st century.    Will they rise to the occasion?  Will they do that which advances the morality of self-preservation?   Or will they unreasonably look only to next month’s revenue?   The choice is theirs.  The choice is ours.

W.C. Garth Snider

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Integrating social media into both your digital and traditional advertising can increase overall response rates and yield a higher return on investment (ROI) from your advertising.

Specifically, integrating a social media strategy into your franchise portal advertising is important to fully optimize and take advantage of social media. The most reputable franchise lead generation portals (of which Franchise Opportunities Network is one such company) are constantly searching for ways to generate more value for their franchise clients.

Collaborating with the portals on a social media strategy is where much of the “low hanging fruit” in online lead generation resides.

• Add social media calls-to-action (CTAs) into your traditional advertising to encourage readers to engage with your franchise offering online outside of the traditional website. As to your franchise portal advertising, make certain that your brochure on the website is replete with CTA’s.
• Publish the number of Facebook Fans, Facebook Likes, and/or Twitter followers to help enhance your brand’s credibility and provide third party endorsements.
• Again, integrate social media into other online marketing efforts such as email marketing campaigns and develop dedicated landing pages to help increase search engine rankings and automate word-of-mouth marketing.
• Create advertising campaigns that encourage content sharing.
• Direct readers to an offer-specific web page (landing page) or a franchise development website instead of the franchise’s website home page. Doing so will improve your ability to track and optimize the performance of the advertisement.

The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Properly integrating social media into a website enables users to distribute website content to their friends and colleagues across the internet. Franchisors should strongly consider creating either a separate website or a sub-domain off of the main website that is dedicated solely to franchise development.

• Integrate Facebook Stories: display success stories from existing franchisees on the website — testimonials are your greatest asset. Integrate social media icons into your website and cross-link to social properties.
• Encourage website visitors to become Facebook Fans and distribute your content to their Facebook Friends through the use of Facebook Widgets and sharing tools.
• Publishing to Facebook: This enables Facebook members to publish Status Updates directly from your site, notifying their Facebook Friends of your content.
• Live Stream: Facebook Friends can view live video on your website while chatting in real time about what they are watching. This can be useful for tradeshows, special events, and conferences.
• Publish your live Twitter feeds in a section directly on your website. For B2B franchises, promote your LinkedIn profile by adding LinkedIn badges to the website.

Monday, January 17th, 2011 was the day we as Americans were called upon to remember the life and times of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some Americans had the day off. Others did not. It is likely that some Americans gave not much more than a passing thought to Dr. King on his holiday. Of the multitudes in America who did give at least some thought as to why we celebrate Dr. King’s life, most probably just simply recalled with nostalgia Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech and then moved on with their day.

Probably few in America recognized, however, that Dr. King was instrumental (perhaps, theologically speaking, he was the instrument) in laying the ground work for America’s economic success over the past 40 years. Granted, there are many in America who are still struggling to find their piece of the American Dream. But for all that has gone awry over the last three years it is useful to consider—if just for a couple of minutes—what our country might have looked like economically in 2010 had Dr. King never been born. As Clarence so effectively demonstrated to George Bailey in the film It’s a Wonderful Life regarding what life would have been like for the people of Bedford Falls had George Bailey never been born, so to shall this brief essay explore what our country might have looked like had Martin Luther King, Jr. never been born. [Read more →]

There has been a lot of ink spilled recently about the plight of the small businessman in the recession.  In particular, there has been a great deal of discussion as to whether franchising as a business model has done relatively better or relatively worse than non-franchised businesses.  There is no definitive answer.  If the answer is that franchises have done relatively worse why might that be the case?  There are myriad answers – from excess liquidity in the capital markets to the simple fact that franchising did so well over the past two decades that it was only natural that it would experience a temporary set-back.

Another possible reason, and the subject of this essay, may be that by its very nature franchising has a greater inherent risk profile due to the fact that franchising necessarily entails the transmission and transference of trade secrets and confidential.  Consequently, the more popular a franchise becomes the more difficult it is to maintain its trade secrets and confidential information.  This, in turn, impacts the long term economic health of the franchise. A franchisor therefore makes a bet that it can parlay its franchise system into a profitable venture without losing the value it already has staked in its trade secrets.

So to the extent that the growth of a franchise system impacts the ability of the franchisor to carefully monitor its trade secrets, the financial health of the franchise will be affected.  The growth of franchising has not been driven by thousands of uniquely derived and/or recently invented products.  The growth of franchising, and the ensuing fragmentation of many markets within franchising, is a direct result of former trade secrets and confidential information being disseminated in the market place.  Unlike patents, which carry a protectable interest of 20 years, trade secrets are protectable for an  indefinite period of time.  Realistically speaking, however, trade secrets do not usually provide indefinite value to the franchisor.  The more popular the franchise becomes the more likely it is that someone in the future will either receive trade secret information or will reverse engineer the trade secret.  Thus the problem obtains in the ability of the franchisor to protect the trade secret long enough such that the franchise itself has enough brand loyalty to compensate for any dissemination of information that may have formerly been classified as trade secrets. [Read more →]

The 7th chord in music is sometimes referred to as an unresolved chord.  Meaning that when you hear it you sort of ask yourself €œwhat is next? “are we done yet?” Western music is largely built out of the  interplay between tension and release. Chords are related to each other according to how much tension or release they create towards the next chord.  A 7th chord tends to point the ear to another chord that will resolve the melody/song/music. Thus often times the 7th chord builds the tension as the dominant chord in the song and then resolves to the root chord to release the tension.

When the 7th chord does not resolve back to the root chord i.e., when a song ends on a 7th chord, we somehow feel incomplete.   We feel that the song is unfinished and as a result we are not sure what to do with the song or melody.   For whatever reason, our bi-chemical construction simply does not seem to readily appreciate a chord progression that ends with a 7th chord.  There is dissonance to an unresolved melody.

That is precisely where we are today in the relationship between our elected officials and our economy. If you think of our current economic plight as a song (or melody or chord progression) and our politicians as at least a contributor to the construction of the song, then what we have is our elected officials being content with having our national economic song end on a 7th chord at least until after the November elections. [Read more →]