Franchise Development Website Guide: School of Rock

School of Rock* takes a unique approach to music education. Their performance-based music model has been praised by students, parents, teachers and musicians across the world. With 200 units open across 10 countries, it’s clear that franchisees are taking notice.

The brand’s franchise development website is a robust portal that outlines the outstanding opportunity, the brand’s differentiators and more. 1851 Franchise caught up with School of Rock’s Senior Vice President of Marketing Elliot Baldini and he shared his tips for creating a visually engaging content platform to entice new franchisees to reach out and learn more.

1851: What makes your franchise development site great?

EB: We combined impactful brand imagery with the right content and information that our franchise buyers need when evaluating whether a School of Rock is the right franchise for them.  

1851: What do you want franchise prospects to know about your brand when researching it?

EB: School of Rock is now ranked as the #1 Child Enrichment Franchise by Entrepreneur and the #2 overall best franchise in our investment tier by Forbes. We have these accolades because we provide passionate owners a great opportunity to run a successful business AND enrich students’ lives in the process.  Everyone at School of Rock—owners, school staff, corporate team members—are committed to this mission of enriching lives through performance-based music education.  

1851: How should franchise sales professionals and executives evaluate their development site?

EB: Always have a strategy when going into a site build. What are the goals of the site, and how do they tie into your overall sales process? Once established, you can objectively measure how the site is performing against your strategy. The key to this approach is to have the data and measurement architecture established at the beginning.

1851: What are the most important KPIs around a development site?

EB: It depends on your development sales process and your site strategy.  As an example, we see that our franchise candidates engage in self-guided research as their first step in the buying process. Thus, this insight led us to create KPIs around engaging franchise candidates on our site by providing the content and information they need to aid in their self-guided research. This is why it’s important to understand your customer and outline your sales strategy holistically. The specific site KPIs will naturally come as a byproduct.

1851: What should brands budget for a franchise development site?

EB: I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all budget for every site. Develop your strategy and work to implement in the most cost-appropriate way.