Top Ten Franchise Lead Generation Insights
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
January 18, 2023 – Analyzing our content viewed over the past year, we developed a “Top Ten” list of the most popular topics among our insights in 2022 based on the readership of articles in topic categories. Along with each topic, ranked in descending popularity, are a few key and most recent articles that address each particular subject.
1. Impact of Privacy Initiatives
By far, the most read articles in recent months concerned how privacy changes at Apple and Google are impacting franchise lead generation. These included the impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection and “app tracking transparency” on Facebook lead generation, and Google’s removal of visibility into search keywords from analytics, among others.
2. Small Business Startup Sentiment
The second most popular topic was Small Business Startup Sentiment. Our monthly prospect surveys kept a finger on the pulse of prospect flow, with insights into startup timeframes, perceptions of current and future business conditions, and views on how macroeconomic factors impact startup readiness.On the FranchiseVentures platform, we poll prospects about their motivations for wanting to own a franchise business, and get thousands of respondents each month. The most important drivers varied seasonally during the course of the pandemic, but remain somewhat consistent over time. These are helpful to discover during the franchise awarding process, as candidates will prioritize them differently.
3. Motivations for Business Ownership
On the FranchiseVentures platform, we poll prospects about their motivations for wanting to own a franchise business, and get thousands of respondents each month. The most important drivers varied seasonally during the course of the pandemic, but remain somewhat consistent over time. These are helpful to discover during the franchise awarding process, as candidates will prioritize them differently.
4. Desirable Franchise Characteristics
With a large data set, we were able to look beyond buyers’ perceptions of the rankings of desirable franchise characteristics, and endeavor to identify some distinct franchise buyer “personas” which gave us an excuse to do cluster analysis and produce our first four-dimensional chart. These two articles comprised our fourth most-read topic.
5. Key Drivers of Referrals and LTV
Our data on the quantification of referral value of franchise directory sites (portals) led to further discovery about just why lead submitters tend to visit franchise development sites after requesting information. In a follow up, we quantified the potential lifetime value of franchise leads. These concepts, as indicated by their readership, are essential to understanding the value and ROI of third party sites.
6. Best Channels for Initial Prospect Contact
The most read of our best practices articles concerns the best channels for initial sales contact. There has been ebb and flow during the pandemic, but initial contact by email is the prospects’ universal favorite, though skillful use of texting and info in the email to set up the subsequent phone call will increase contact rates by getting past Apple’s “silence unknown callers” feature. Not on the “top ten” list were our articles pointing out the shocking percentage of leads who report no follow up by the franchises they inquired to, a great opportunity for those who use best practices.
7. Future Franchisee Demographics
Insights from our prospect demographic data by age cohort can help to arm franchise marketing teams with information about their targets, and how they are expected to change as the leading edge of Gen-Z becomes more common among prospects, and within another decade Gen-Y and Millennials enter their prime ages for entrepreneurship.
8. Discovery and Consideration of Your Franchise Brand
With all the social media clutter and increasing time spent on streaming, it is evermore important to be where folks with the specific intent to research franchises are, as evidenced by the popularity of our articles on how your franchise gets discovered and considered.
9. Geographic Migration of Franchise Interest
The pandemic began significant out-migration from cities and was compounded by migration between states. While the media ponder political and regulatory reasons for migration among states, we saw it as a shift in the states’ relative share of franchise inquires. It is clear from our data that migration direction and speed were volatile over the last three years. We look forward to an updated view of this trend in April 2023.
10. Sources of Investment Funding
Rounding out our most visited topics was franchise funding. Survey respondents shared their top expected sources of funding, which shifted as the pandemic ended and interest rates rose significantly. In 2022, personal savings became the top source for franchise funding among respondents.
FranchiseInsights.com conducts a monthly “mystery shopping survey” as well as the Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ (SSI) of individuals who have recently inquired about businesses for sale. In their fourth year running, these surveys provide insights into prospect behaviors, psychographics and demographics, as well as best practices and benchmarking to help franchisors match them with opportunities where all they will succeed.
FranchiseVentures 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 Wednesday, January 18th, 2023.