Franchise Lead Generation Posted by Matthew

Franchise Lead Generation

Posted by Matthew in Articles on 28.08.2008 9:52:58 am | 155 views

Over the past few years there has been an explosion of lead generation/advertising websites for franchisors, all costing large sums of money to advertise with and all promising to help sell your franchise opportunity. So how do you know which ones to advertise with?

There are several factors to consider:

Cost:  You should have a marketing budget in place; this will partly determine which and how many franchise advertising sites you wish to list your opportunity with. Ask for the rate cards of all the lead generation websites and compare prices.

Package:  What are they offering?  Cross reference this with cost.  Do you get a full page listing with some front page exposure?  Are their packages graded?  If so which package offers the best exposure and is it really worthwhile being in the “featured” section and other sections for an extra few hundred pounds? What sections of the site will you be added into?  Do you get newsletter exposure to their subscribers?  Will they publish PR material for you?  Are their packages inclusive – or do they charge extra for every little thing? Really look into what the packages contain and whether it is worthwhile going gold or if being bronze is fine and well enough. 

Site traffic:  An easy way to check this is to look at their Alexa ranking or ask for a stats package.  Alexa will quickly let you know whether they get virtually no website visitors or if they get a few hundred or more per day.  No traffic = no leads. The lower the Alexa ranking the better.  If it’s a few million then they are getting a few hits per day only.

Search Engine Rankings:  Do some online searches for popular franchise related phrases, can you see the sites you are looking for listed?  If not then how are people going to find them and in turn your listing?  Don’t waste money on a site which is going to have no page views of your advert.

PPC (Pay Per Click):  Do they use PPC advertising? If so then you will be virtually guaranteed some leads but at what cost?  A website may have terrible search engine rankings but could be getting a decent amount of targeted traffic via pay per click advertising.  Pay per click is costly; remember that this cost will be included in their package.

Pagerank: Check the Google PR of the site – this is a simple check to see if the site has been marketing itself properly and is trusted by the search engines. Low Page Rank = they probably can’t market themselves never mind your franchise.  You ideally want a to advertise with companies who have a minimum of page rank 2.  Use this simple page rank checking tool to find out.

The above are a few factors to look into, individually they may not represent much about the site you are looking at but combined they can really show you a sites worth and whether it is worth YOUR while advertising with them.