How to Make the Best Use of Franchise Portals

The franchise portal: Love them, hate them, love to hate them, hate to love them. Regardless, they are still a big part of the general franchise industry’s digital marketing strategy.

Why?

“We all know it’s a numbers game,” said Steve Beagelman, CEO of SMB Franchise Advisors*. “If you are doing the portals, you have to do them in a committed way, and spend the amount of money it takes to generate the number of leads to get to the few owners. Plus, your message on the portals needs to be in line with your development site and all other points of contact with a candidate.”

Stan Friedman, President of FRM Solutions, said that if you set your expectations for using portals correctly, you can find value.

“Understand that those looking to portals for franchise information are usually in the very early stages and often do not have any idea what kinds of concepts they should be looking at,” he said. “It’s also a lot like day trading on the stock market. You must monitor your results diligently, change them up appropriately, and keep a close eye on their results. On the flip side, what worked last time may look much different the next time, so you must also give any and all that you try a fair shake in terms of time to deliver and perform for you.”

FranConnect, the franchise industry’s largest technology and CRM solution has regularly evaluated the highest performing franchise portals as a part of its ongoing franchise index.

“In the FranConnect/IFA Franchise Sales Index, it rates lead portals in several different ways, including which portals have the highest lead to sales ratio,” said Keith Gerson, President of FranConnect. “Portals are great at filling up pipelines, but average 0.6 percent lead to closing ratios. Utilization of portals is great for building brand awareness, but if your challenge isn’t the number of leads, but rather ineffectual closing rates, financially feed those that are running at/above 2 percent and starve those that are less than 1 percent.”

Among the portals noted as delivering leads in order of highest ratio of lead to deals within are:

1. Franchise Direct | http://www.franchisedirect.com/ 
2. Executive Franchises | www.executivefranchises.com
3. Franchise Gator | https://www.franchisegator.com
4. Franchise Help | https://www.franchisehelp.com
5. Franchise Opportunities | https://www.franchiseopportunities.com