How To Keep January’s Lead Momentum Rolling Through the Year

Good or bad, the holidays are a distraction for us all. The same can be said for prospective franchise buyers, as evidenced by a lull in interest that has become customary at year’s close. Also customary, though, is a surge in leads as the new year kicks off. The key to a successful franchise development strategy is accounting for both of these extremes by launching strong campaigns that allow brands to ride the January momentum wave through the rest to the year.

“We see heightened activity at the beginning of the year, so we place a lot of emphasis on capturing as much of this attention and interest as possible to help influence our results throughout the year,” said Olivia Chiu, Franchise Marketing Manager at Batteries+Bulbs.

Brent Dowling, CEO of RainTree, a company that specializes in franchise sales solutions, shared Chiu’s sentiment. “Knowing how to prepare for the slower periods in franchise development to efficiently manage the budget, and more importantly, how to properly capitalize on the surges can be the difference between missing your development goals or exceeding them,” he said.

Dowling explained that because many potential franchise buyers don’t have the ability to fully commit to the mutual investigation process with the distraction of the holidays, his team will suspend or ramp down certain lead generation campaigns for the brands RainTree works with during this lull to ensure they maintain a strong ROI on all lead generation activities.

This flexibility in both planning and budget is important because it allows franchisors to reallocate resources to campaigns that are generating more viable leads. To achieve this, franchisors must first understand how prospective franchise buyers are weighing and evaluating the purchase in order to precisely target and engage the right candidates.

“We are constantly identifying where our qualified leads are coming from and where the best opportunities are geographically,” Chiu said. She also explained that Batteries+Bulbs’ strategy is impacted by candidates becoming more deliberate and self-guided in their research and waiting longer than ever before to contact franchise development teams due to the wealth of information at their fingertips.

“Candidates aren’t in a rush, which means we need to have content out there in multiple places for them to find,” she said. “If there is a topic that is important to them, we tailor content to meet that search. Most of our lead generation activities are digital, and we recognize that they take time to optimize and produce meaningful results,” Chiu continued.  

Reaching this new breed of prospective franchisees means harnessing new methods of lead generation. This is particularly important in 2019, as a large number of economists are forecasting a slower economy, which tends to bring about a favorable landscape for franchise growth. Capitalizing on the abundance of potential franchise buyers with multi-channel digital campaigns is poised to have the biggest impact.

“We saw steady year-over-year conversion comparisons in some of the more traditional outbound lead generation strategies like PR, portals and social media ads, all of which provided reasonable ROIs for us across the board,” Dowling said. “Additionally, we continue to see growing importance in social media lead generation, which is quickly becoming a top lead source across many of the brands we develop.”

Dowling also noted that RainTree is placing even greater emphasis on strong video content in 2019 due to the observed impact it has had on lead generation quality. “In 2018 we worked with our brands to allocate a significant amount of budget to capturing new video content throughout the year,” he said. “The return on this investment has been extremely satisfying. We believe that video will continue to take more prominence in the buyer decision making process, and so in 2019 we will likely increase our video budget yet again.”

“As we plan the next year, we use what we learned in the current year to refine our strategies,” Chiu said. “We learned that leads connect most to stories about current franchisees and stories of success. The prospects want to see themselves in the franchisees’ shoes, and feel confident that they have a successful system to support their journey. That helped us build our content strategy for 2019.”
As for best practices when it comes to lead generation, Chiu emphasized that brands should utilize every internal resource available to them and invest in a PR strategy to help with 3rd-party validation.

“Diversify your budget so that your message and content appears in multiple places,” she said. “Change is constant, and we have to listen to the market and evolve to move forward.”