“As a franchisor with a network of 65 franchised outlets I attended my first ever EC event as I wanted to find a way of keeping our franchisees ahead of the game and adopting the very latest smart thinking to give us an edge in a competitive market. I also wanted to understand what we could do better in the field of franchise recruitment and when it comes to franchising there is no-one better to learn from than Nigel and the EC team.
Marketer of my business…
“I remember squirming in my seat when Nigel was asking about how we recruited and how we marketed ourselves.
Up until that day we had followed the fairly conventional path of franchise recruitment; spending shed loads on adverts in franchise magazines and hoping for enquiries to roll in as a result. We had a consumer website and a page of the site was dedicated to franchise recruitment. Following that day with Nigel I went away and starting focusing on being a marketer of my business – every day. I implemented loads:
Email promotion…
“We built a dedicated franchise recruitment website. We ditched our paper-based prospectus and poured everything into our site that a prospective franchisee would want to know. We ring fenced the sections on costs and earnings and made sure that to access this area we captured contact details to enable us to carry out our own email promotion blasts on an ongoing basis. Following the tutorials on social media and Google AdWords I set up an AdWords campaign in every area in the UK where we were seeking a franchisee. This drove traffic to our website as Nigel said it would. This subsequently helped us build our database as the more visitors we got the more contact details we captured.
Social media network…
“As the email database grew we would send out incentivised promotions to attend our Discovery Days.
We also built Facebook sites and began tweeting and encouraged our franchisees to do the same. We have developed quite a social media network as a result.
Change in approach…
“As a result of this new learning, the recruitment website went live and since then we have recruited seven new franchisees which is a company record.
They are great people and we would never have found them without this change in approach.We have developed a quite sophisticated pipeline process from enquiry through to Discovery Day that is all based on my day with the guys at EC – I’m so grateful to them for sharing their knowledge. It’s made a massive difference…”
