While franchisors may have a general idea of their sales goals, many don’t know their ideal outcome when it comes to PR, digital marketing, creative content or social media. If you haven't accurately defined the goal of these tools, what’s the purpose of having them?

Setting goals up front will help give more purpose to what you’re trying to accomplish with creative content and storytelling to reach your projected outcomes. 

Defining the Right Franchise Development Goals

So, how do you create your goal? In the world of franchise development, the usual goal is simple: Grow the franchise. But creating strategic growth goals should be about more than just hitting a certain number of units signed.

Start with defining the growth outcome you hope to achieve. Use this framework of questions to help you create a plan:

Number of Desired Units:
Number of Franchisees (if greater than unit sales):
Projected Marketing Budget:
Marketing Budget / Number of Deals (this will give you a sense of what you can spend per deal):
Number of Existing Franchisees Who Can Expand:
Last Year’s Data:
Budget:
Number of Deals:
Cost Per Deal:
Number of Existing Franchisee Who Expanded:

The right goals should be focused on optimizing growth while keeping an eye on unit-level economics (increasing those will help drive franchise sales). To find this balance requires strategic analysis of which areas are positioned to grow and the marketing resources that will be needed to get there.

That is why franchise development marketing goals need to be more about finding the right people who will succeed in the long-term, rather than just making a quick sale. Whether it be a goal to develop the best franchise development website possible or to create localized content (written, PR, video, social) that shares their story in target markets, the projected outcome should be getting in front of ideal candidates and convincing them to join the brand.

Using Projected Outcomes to Create a Plan for Growth

At the front of any franchisor-agency relationship is the question “What is the ideal outcome or purpose?” Picture where the brand will be in a few years, and then work backward to create an outline for the tools that will be needed to get there. 

Your purpose could be anything from simply boosting your business’ visibility to finding more prospects to buy into the franchise or even building a strategy to exit the business down the road. Now that you’ve defined that, we’ll build the structure underneath it using our conveyor belt approach:

1. Strategy & Consultation: We’ll get to the bottom of Why You/Why Now. 
2. Owned: We’ll create assets to share your story. This includes things like stories on our publications (like 1851Franchise.com), videos, social posts and websites. 
3. Earned: Here’s where our media relations team secures coverage to add credibility and create a larger audience. 
4. Paid: We boost your storytelling using paid digital marketing. We’ll really dial in to your target market, audience and persona to make sure they’re seeing what we’ve created.
5. Data, Analytics & Reporting: Finally, we’ll provide comprehensive data and analytics to help you better understand what works and what didn’t. 

When this has all been put into action, you can look back to your original goal to determine whether you’ve accomplished what you set out to achieve. 

Remember, franchisors aren’t going to meet all of their goals the first time around. Setting the right growth goals takes time, communication and practice. As brands reach new milestones and learn what winning looks like for them, they will be better positioned to create the kinds of franchise development marketing tools that will help them build an achievable plan for success.

Checklist:

• Understand the tools at their disposal and use them to set goals for their ideal outcome.
• Define the financial outcome they hope to achieve. 
• Focus on optimizing growth.
• Create an outline for how they’ll use the items in their toolkit by following our conveyor belt approach, and then put it into action. 
• Look back at their original goal to analyze what worked best.

Discover more about how to win at franchise development marketing by downloading our free white paper here.