Optimize your website for conversions.
Your website is the principal tool in your toolbox of turning more leads into new franchisees. This is true even if the website is not your primary sales channel; in other words, even if the final conversion happens offline, your website will still play a pivotal role in getting the potential franchisee to that point.
That’s because your website is where your potential franchisee comes to get more information.
Before they can make a final decision whether to enter into a business relationship, they need to know more about the opportunity, about the franchise operators, and what exactly they’ll be getting themselves into. To that end, it’s important that the website be designed to maximize the number of leads in your sales funnel that will continue to the next step. The good news is that
there’s many different tactics you can use on your website to do just that.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
A mobile optimized website is critical to getting people onto the site in the first place; mobile friendliness is a factor that Google considers in its search ranking algorithm.
Then, because over half of people today use mobile devices to go online, just having a mobile optimized site can increase conversion rates by 5% or more.1 Making your site mobile friendly is a must-do in today’s competitive market.
Make Your Site Fast
People are not patient, and it shows in web usage statistics. A single one-second delay in page loading can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions.2 In turn, speeding up page load time increases conversions by between 7% and 15.4%.3 Think of it this way: yours is probably not the only franchise opportunity your leads are exploring, and even minor friction in interacting with your franchise can make your competitors stand out in comparison.
Optimize Your Calls-To-Action
First, have a call to action. It’s frankly shocking how many websites and emails do not explicitly ask visitors and recipients to take a desired action. A single call-to-action embedded into an email, for example, can increase sales by 1,617%, according to Wordstream.4 Then, give them everything they need to take that action, e.g., information like where to go and what to do. Finally, test variations in the call-to- action to see which variations perform better (see Section #5 below for more about testing).
Make it Easy to Take the Next Step.
If you want your website to transform visitors from tire-kickers into interested parties, you must make it easy for them. Simplify forms, provide them all the information they need to make an action decision, and make the action easy.
And here’s a surprising tip: employ pop-ups. They are a surprisingly effective technique to get sign-ups and other actions because they make it so easy: the request simply appears, and all the visitor has to do is fill out a few fields and click a button.
Populate your website with powerful, compelling content.
“CONTENT HELPS ESTABLISH YOUR BUSINESS AS AN AUTHORITY IN THE MIND OF YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS AND WHEN ACCOMPANIED WITH ENTICING GATED CONTENT, IT BECOMES AN EFFECTIVE LEAD MAGNET. 93% OF B2B BUYING PROCESSES START WITH AN ONLINE SEARCH SO CREATING CONTENT TO EDUCATE AND INFORM YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE IS KEY IF YOU WANT TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF YOUR LEADS.”
Uku Inbound
“Great leads start with great content,” says Nathan van Zyl of content marketing firm Uku Inbound, a firm that specializes in inbound marketing techniques using content.5
Indeed, content is pivotal to turning leads into new franchisees. Content is your salesperson in the absence of an in-person pitch. You use your content to educate, persuade, and compel your desired action. That’s why conversion rates are almost six times greater for those who use content marketing initiatives than those who don’t.6
Potential franchisees rely on content in order to make a business decision. They need to understand if your offering is a good fit for them; and if so, if it is a better fit than other franchise opportunities. It’s content that’s the lever that pushes prospective franchisees towards you and away from your competitors. “Content” can come in many different forms, however, and it’s worth taking some time to ensure your content strategy incorporates all of the most impactful kinds.
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Blog Posts |
B2B companies that regularly publish content like blogs generate 67% more leads per month than others.7 |
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Video Content |
Video plays well with both web visitors and the search engines that rank your website. Having videos on a landing page can increase the conversion rate by 80%.8 |
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Interactive Content |
Interactive forms of content like quizzes, calculators, assessments, etc. facilitate active involvement with the content. That, in turn, promotes greater engagement. That may be why interactive content shows twice as many conversions as static content.9 |
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User- Generated |
As the name implies, user-generated content (UGC) is produced by customers, users, franchisees, and peers. UGC is often overlooked in content marketing strategies, but it carries so much credibility – in fact, consumers are approximately 12 times more likely to trust user generated content than corporate content – it should not be ignored.10 UGC includes content like social media posts, photos, articles that reference your franchise, user reviews, and other write-ups. UGC is very impactful; conversions among consumers who see UGC are 161% higher than those who don’t.11 Reviews are worth a special mention: one study found that improving your review rating by 1.5 stars could lead to 13,000 more leads.12 Another found that having 50 or more reviews can then increase conversions by 4.6%. That adds up to whole lot more closed leads.13 |
Improve lead quality and sourcing to boost conversion rates.
The sales funnel – the process of carrying a prospective franchisee from the point of initial interest through the final agreement – is often an area of struggle. In particular, the leads gathered in Stages 1 and 2 of typical sales funnels are often of poor quality; they represent people and organizations who are not a good fit for the opportunity or aren’t truly interested.
Let’s say you represent a food franchise. There’s quite a bit of variability within this space! Coffee shops are very different from restaurants, and both are very different from health food stores. It’s very likely that a franchisee interested in one may not be interested in the others.
An unqualified lead is someone who’s investigating the franchise opportunity you represent but is not a good fit. For example, they might want to sell health supplements rather than open a café. A qualified lead, by contrast, is a potential franchisee who is a good fit for your franchise opportunity – they’re looking for exactly what you’re offering.
Unqualified leads burn time and resources. You don’t necessarily know they’re a poor fit until after you’ve wasted energy and money pursuing a lead that was never going to go anywhere. Unfortunately, unqualified leads are the most common type. One study found that, of the leads marketing teams send to sales, an average of only 27% are qualified leads.14
You can increase both efficiency and conversions by minimizing unqualified leads in favor those that are a good fit, are genuinely interested, and have the means and the willingness to sign on the dotted line.
Back to our food franchise example. If you can refine and better target your lead generation – e.g., make sure you’re reaching people interested specifically in vitamin and nutrition franchise opportunities, if that’s what you offer – a greater percentage of the initial set of leads will move down the sales funnel. That, in turn, will increase the final conversion rate.
This requires strategy. You have to make sure that your web content is optimized and clearly targeted to your ideal franchisee. You need to do the same with any advertising; if you’re not careful, you’ll end up paying to show up for keyword searches that aren’t well-matched to your target client.
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Tactics To Improve Lead Quality |
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Improve Your Targeting |
Improve Your Lead Sourcing |
Improve Lead Nurturing |
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Develop a clear understanding of your target audience and write content to them. Capture intent in keywords and key spots (like headlines or subject lines) in all marketing initiatives, including SEO, pay per click advertising, email campaigns, etc. The idea is to use highly targeted keywords and key phrases to winnow out leads that are a bad fit. To target, avoid generic keywords, even if they’re high traffic. Instead, focus on phrases that signal intent. They might include “buy,” “sign up,” or “join.” Similarly, you can target key phrases that indicate the person is doing serious research, like “cost” or “contract.” However, a word of warning: better targeting often means reduced volume. The ROI will be higher in the end, but it can be disconcerting to find yourself with fewer leads than normal. |
Leads can come from a variety of sources, both online and off. Inbound marketing can pull leads directly to your site through search engine discovery. Offsite campaigns – advertising, email, etc. – can also generate leads. So too can third-party directory and review sites. Target your lead generation channels just as you target to your customer. Make sure you focus your efforts on the channels that your ideal customers actually use. For example, advertising with trade publications could be more effective than advertising in mainstream publications. Or, it may be that advertising per se is not the right channel at all; inbound marketing might be more effective. Finding the right channels might require a bit of experimentation. |
Very often, leads have to be nurtured and cultivated before they turn into business deals. That’s especially true in sales cycles with long lead times, which is very common among franchise operators. However, you’d be surprised how many businesses make only a token effort to nurture leads. It makes a difference. According to automated marketing platform Marketo, one study “found that companies that excelled at lead nurturing were able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost per lead than other companies.”15 Lead nurturing is essentially a form of relationship building, and it’s a very powerful tactic for businesses with long sales cycles to improve their long-term success in turning leads into new franchisees. |
Deploy as many trust factors and social proofs as you can.
Asking a person or business to become a franchisee is a big request. It means entering into a risky, likely expensive partnership on the hope of generating mutually beneficial business outcomes. But this is one of the biggest sticking points in actually closing leads: how do they know they can trust you to help them be successful?
To satisfy concerns like these, incorporate “trust factors” into your sales and marketing processes. Trust factors are a signal to the potential franchisee that they can have confidence in both you and in the opportunity. In turn, by reducing the perceived risk of the franchise opportunity, these trust factors boost conversions. For example, incorporating testimonials into your website can potentially increase conversions by 34%.16
Reviews are another powerful way to present “social proof,” a specialized kind of trust factor where other franchisees and people who have worked with you do your selling for you. Having reviews can boost sales by 18%.17 The higher the review score, the stronger the effect: for every 0.1-star rating increase, conversion rates rise by
an average of 25%. But here’s the catch with reviews: review sites are like mini-Googles, and your listing is not guaranteed to appear at the top of the list. And as with Google, if it’s not prominent, it might as well be invisible. It’s worth spending time collecting reviews, boosting your review score, and potentially promoting your listing.
Ongoing A/B testing is the only way to drive continuous improvement.
Always be testing! A/B testing is a simple way to experimentally determine which tactics and elements drive more conversions. Specifically, in an A/B test, two versions of a single factor will be incorporated into a campaign. Whichever factor performs better (results in more leads or more conversions) wins. That winning factor is then tested against a new variation. That process continues indefinitely, strengthening performance continuously over time.
Virtually any element of a sales process can be tested. For example, content marketing platform HubSpot tested and found that a red call-to-action produced 21% more page visits than a green one.18
Over time, these improvements can add up to enormous differences. In 2012, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign tested various email call-to-actions. As
a result of the testing, they were able to increase conversion rates by 40.6%, leading to 2.9 million more additional signups, 288,000 more volunteers, and $60 million more in donations in his campaign.19
In the end, franchisors have manifold tools and tactics at their disposal to close more leads. It’s just a matter of putting them into practice.
What can you test?
Headlines & subject lines Content
Calls to action Visuals: colors, images, video
Audio elements Formatting & layout Trust factors
Source: CrazyEgg.com
References
1 https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-mobile-landing-page-that-converts-like-crazy/
2 https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-time/?wide=1
3 http://searchengineland.com/googles-push-to-speed-up-your-web-site-42177
4 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/10/digital-marketing-stats
5 https://databox.com/how-to-improve-lead-quality
6 http://resources.kapost.com/aberdeen-content-chaos.html?id=701E0000000AGpy&source=marketeer#_ ts=1405356124683
7 https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/blog/docs/ebooks/120-marketing-stats-charts-and-graphs.pdf
8 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/03/30/video-for-conversion-rate-optimization
9 https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-buyers-journey-benchmark-report
10 https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Role-of-Customer-Product-Reviews/1008019
11 https://transaction.agency/ecommerce-statistics/the-average-conversion-rate-of-visitors-who-saw-user- generated-content-ugc-is-161-higher-than-those-who-didnt/
12 https://www.location3.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Location3-case-study_PPC-Reviews- Correlation-2018.pdf
13 https://econsultancy.com/ecommerce-consumer-reviews-why-you-need-them-and-how-to-use-them/
14 https://www.fulcrumforge.com/blog/beyond-cro-4-strategies-to-improve-lead-quality-and-boost-sales
15 https://blog.marketo.com/2011/05/3-ways-to-improve-the-quality-of-your-sales-leads.html
16 https://vwo.com/blog/customer-testimonials-increase-sales/
17 https://econsultancy.com/ecommerce-consumer-reviews-why-you-need-them-and-how-to-use-them/
18 https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/20566/The-Button-Color-A-B-Test-Red-Beats-Green.aspx
19 https://www.quicksprout.com/beginners-guide-conversion-optimization/
