3 Ways to Heat Up Your Growth Strategy
June 20, 2019
3 Ways to Heat Up Your Growth Strategy
By Jamie Izaks
Things are starting to heat up as we enter the summer months, and I’m not just talking about the temperature! Now is the time when interest in franchising sizzles with candidate research and due diligence as they find more time on their hands to consider their next phase in life. As a fully integrated public relations firm focused on franchise development lead generation, we keep our collective finger on the pulse of the most relevant and effective channels and newest angles to incorporate into our innovative approaches for media relations, social media, digital and content marketing. Ready to stoke the fire? Here are three tactics your brand can implement to heat up your growth strategy.
Humanize your brand
A recent survey from Label Insight reports that 73% of consumers will pay more for products when the brand is transparent. Moreover, the survey found that 39% of consumers would switch from their current preferred brand to one that offers more product transparency. The evidence for transparency is clear and we can easily apply this to franchise sales as well. Pulling back the curtains a bit on your brand offers an opportunity for your prospects to truly get a feel for the talent, processes, systems and culture that define your concept.
In franchise development, the stakes are high for brands to bridge trust between their concept and their leads. It’s easy for franchise prospects to view companies as faceless, money-hungry giants, but this doesn’t have to be the case for yours. Don’t be afraid to emphasize the human aspect of your brand – after all, we are all just people here and in the end when it comes to making a franchise investment, franchisees are investing as much in company leadership as they are in the business model.
To do this, take more opportunities to deliver compelling communications with your prospects. Press, social media platforms, interactive content and storytelling email strategies all offer peeks inside the brand that can hook your prospects. And, as we all know, nothing sells better than existing franchisee validation, so tap into the franchise system and share existing franchisee testimonials – it can even be user-generated content that you share on your social media, website and email channels. This shows your prospects that your brand has formed productive relationships with franchisees and that they enjoy the franchise model. And, put your home office team members in the spotlight on your website and other platforms to feature the brains behind the business. These are just a few of the many ways you can humanize your brand and promote growth through a more trustworthy and transparent image.
Targeted social media lead generation
According to Forbes, digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day.
As a result of this information overload, it can be easy to get lost in the flood of your audience’s packed social media feeds. Understanding the many paid targeting options available to you through social media is key to combatting the flood and ensuring your digital ads are appearing in front of the rights eyes. Through channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn, targeting can go far beyond age, location and other demographics by targeting individuals through psychographic factors that are fit for your franchisee profile.
Paid ads guarantee a place in a user’s feed and stand as an effective tool for growing your pool of franchise prospects – when done correctly. It’s important to put as much energy into your messaging as your targeting strategies so that your audience will pay attention to your ad and feel more inclined to fill out your lead collection form. Consider who you’re looking for and how these characteristics can translate into effective targeted ads.
Audio is key
Technology is growing smarter and smarter every day. Thanks to virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, voice command capabilities have completely upended how we search for and receive information on the web.
Unsurprisingly, millennials in particular are driving the growth of digital voice assistants, with 24.9 million U.S. millennials using a smart speaker in 2018. That’s more than a third of the millennial population and a 38.3% increase from 2017, according to eMarketer estimates. The study notes that older millennials specifically are the core smart speaker demographic, as they had adopted the technology early on. By the end of the forecasting period (2020), eMarketer expects that 30.5 million millennials in the U.S. will use a smart speaker at least once per month.
So, what does this all tell us? As more and more people are speaking into their devices and search engines, there’s been a shift from individual search terms to full sentences and questions. This shift creates a huge impact on SEO strategies for any digital content your brand publishes for franchise development. Keeping voice search in mind, consider conversational tones, questions and phrases that mimic natural language and syntax when refining your SEO approach to ensure your franchise development content can be found through both online and voice searches.
Jamie Izaks is the president of All Points Public Relations, a franchise-focused PR agency based in the Chicagoland area, www.allpointspr.com
