2025 Franchise Development Lead Sources Survey Highlights
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
May 13, 2025 – Business news is bustling with headlines about tariff negotiations, the disruption and opportunities presented by AI, antitrust claims and remedies potentially impacting Google, and content freedom vs. moderation on many platforms, and a pending outright ban of TikTok in the U.S. along with separate actions TikTok brought by several states. Meanwhile, franchisors must navigate these waters to successfully grow their systems.
From a January 2025 survey of franchise systems of all sizes, we get a clearer picture of how franchises have been altering their franchise lead generation strategies from paid sources, and what their plans are for 2025, summarized in 15 pages of charts and tables.
View the complete 2025 Franchise Development Lead Sources Survey online, or download the pdf here.
Buyers are out there. From our most recent survey of franchise seekers in late April 2025, 71.4% of respondents agreed that “now is a good time” to proceed with their franchise or business startups., correlating closely with a leap in business applications. This positive business startup sentiment observation correlates with the surge in business applications we noted last month.
Key Take-Away: Franchise systems are broadly diversifying their sources to adapt to the changing lead ecosystem.
Summary Observations:
- Budget Expansion to Fund Growth: In 2024, 58% of franchise development teams maintained or expanded their growth plans despite business challenges, similar to 2023. Larger franchise systems, in particular, raised their goals and budgets.
- Lead Generation Paid Sources:
- Google remains the most widely-used paid lead generation source and is expected to see increased usage expand further in 2025.
- Meta has shown the fastest adoption rate in the last four years.
- Franchise portals are still widely used and expected to grow in usage in 2025.
- LinkedIn’s growth has stalled somewhat.
- TikTok is expected to grow the most from 2024 to 2025 despite potential app store exclusions and legal actions in several states.
- 2025 Spending: 100% of franchise development teams using major lead generation sources plan to increase spending on one or more of them in 2025.
- Cost Per Lead: Increased costs per lead were reported across most major sources (Google, Meta, Brokers/Referral Networks, and Franchise Portals).
- Survey Data: The data is based on a survey conducted in January 2025 with a broad cross-section of franchise development teams.
View the complete 2025 Franchise Development Lead Sources Survey online, or download the pdf here.
The FranchiseInsights.com 2025 Franchise Development Lead Sources Survey was conducted in January 2025, with participation by franchise systems of all growth stages.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Thursday, May 15th, 2025.