Lead generation of franchisees
Recruitment
To work efficiently and effectively, the choices you make during the recruitment phase are crucial. After all, you want to reach and excite the best talents for your formula, right? You achieve this by using the right recruitment channels and consistently and thoroughly engaging, informing, and onboarding candidates.
Employer Branding & Storytelling
Recruitment is more than just getting in touch with potential entrepreneurs for your franchise formula. Recruitment has a marketing function as well, which we refer to as Employer Branding. You market your franchise brand through all (external) communications. It's essential to articulate your formula (offer) in the right way. Here, it's important to highlight what truly distinguishes your formula and what makes it unique.
A proven method is 'Storytelling.' Describe the essence of your formula through its inception, values, norms, motivations, and culture of your organization. Your (specific franchise) website, in particular, lends itself well to this purpose.
Recruiting franchisees requires a continuous approach. It is advisable to dedicate at least one landing page on your website to recruiting franchisees. To generate leads thereafter, you can employ various recruitment techniques and instruments. Below are the 12 recruitment channels, techniques, and instruments that, in our experience, can work well:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The right texts, specific keywords, and the use of bullet points make your franchise website easily discoverable via different search engines.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEA)
To further highlight your franchise website, you can use enhanced sitelinks from Google Adwords, for example.
- Retargeting
This technique draws additional attention to your website after visitors have left. For instance, when your visitor checks out now.nl, your advertisement also appears there. These campaigns are generally charged per 1,000 displayed ads (CPM).
- Social Media
It’s wise to gain as many followers as possible on social media. You can regularly share franchise opportunities on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and/or YouTube (video vacancies). Your followers are encouraged to express their interest online and ask questions. Your recruitment team or staff needs to respond appropriately to avoid negative publicity. Additionally, you can advertise on Social Media targeting the profile of your ideal franchisee.
- Email Marketing
While the response rate is relatively low in email marketing, it is indeed an interesting way of recruiting. Almost all recruitment software can send messages to large groups at once. If you don’t use recruitment software, there are various cheap or free email programs available for addressing large groups. The most common forms of email marketing are direct-mails and newsletters.
- Mobile Marketing
Similar to email marketing, large groups can be approached at once via SMS. Since almost everyone owns a mobile phone nowadays and very few companies use this recruitment technique, it has a high attention value.
- Content Marketing
To excite and retain franchisees, it's advisable to have your content marketing in order. As a franchisor, write a monthly blog yourself, regularly publish whitepapers, and consider writing an e-book. This enables potential entrepreneurs to gain more insight into the operations and franchise opportunities. Your website and platforms like SlideShare are excellent recruitment channels for this purpose.
- Gamification
Gamification is a recruitment technique that uses game elements to determine whether someone is suitable as a franchisee. Consider this as an initial selection test. You can develop and design this game element yourself. The content can cover entrepreneurship, the tasks for the franchisee, or it can be tailored to the person's intelligence, for example.
- Offline
Don't underestimate the power of offline recruitment. Of course, it’s vital to identify which media your target audience reads, but the local/regional newspaper and specific industry journals typically yield many leads. However, don't expect to be done with just one ad. The strength of repetition is key here.
- Online
Apart from the online recruitment channels mentioned above, you can also consider job boards, (local) interesting websites, or special interest websites.
- Intermediary
Outsourcing your recruitment activities to an intermediary is a popular option. The expertise of a recruitment & selection agency often saves money and time for your organization. Additionally, intermediaries usually have their own database of interesting leads for your formula.
- Referral Marketing
Also known as word-of-mouth advertising. You can manage this by, for instance, awarding a prize to someone who puts you in contact with the right person (read: new franchisee). Especially your staff and existing franchisees are ideal candidates to connect you with good leads.
Mistakes in daily practice
In practice, we frequently see franchisors making the same mistakes. Therefore, we advise the following:
- Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Consistency
Funnel all leads to one contact person or department for adequate but mainly consistent follow-up of the leads. This also applies (perhaps even more) to leads from your own network.
- Transparency
We observe that franchisees are critical of their investments. They want clarity and openness about the results of the franchise organization and the results achieved by other branches. Are you prepared for this?
- Building a Database
It is wise to record the information of all potential franchisees who express interest. Besides serving as good KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your recruitment, you might need this information in the future for email marketing or other purposes.
- Franchisees are Ambassadors
The importance of positive franchisees is underestimated. Potential candidate franchisees will always interact with your existing franchisees (announced or not). So, consider not only acquiring more franchisees but also maintaining your existing franchise network.
- Analyze the Origin of Leads: By setting this up correctly in advance, you can save a lot of money and time in the future. You can then invest in the recruitment channels that yield the best (not the most) leads.
Start with a plan
The aforementioned 12 recruitment channels, techniques, and instruments can work. However, the best approach differs per formula. Therefore, our recruitment consultants always start by creating a solid plan, focused on the entrepreneurial profile of the formulas we work for. Only based on a good plan can you determine where to best invest your time, money, and energy to achieve maximum returns.
