I have 13 years experience generating franchise recruitment leads via social media, SEO & PPC and I am amazed at some of the stories I hear from franchisors spending thousands each month on PPC and how expensive each lead is, one advertiser I spoke to last week each franchise lead was costing them over £250!

Last month I generated 3,000 leads for our advertisers at an average Cost Per Lead ( CPL ) of £6. Yes that’s not a typo just £6 per lead!

How can I do that? Here’s how;

• Square peg through a round hole? – Franchisors are probably bidding for terms like “franchise”, “franchises“, “franchise opportunities” right? You are growing your business by franchising, franchising is not your business. Google knows this which is why you are probably paying 10 times more per click than I do because where you rank in paid search is not just want you bid it’s how relevant your site is to the search term. i.e the less relevant the site is to the search term, the more you are going to have to bid to rank higher.
• Stretch your budget – You want to be at the top of the searches right to beat your competitors to the lead? Ouch, another bad decision because unless you have an unlimited budget you will run out of budget, paying far too much for each click and increasing your CPL
• Multiple lead channels – Paid search is quick, easy and everyone is doing it pushing up the cost per click & CPL. I use multiple channels including SEO, targeted e-shots to subscribers built up over 13 years, referral traffic from thousands of quality links with credible & relevant sites I have built over many years, social media marketing and even running stands at business & franchise shows.

So am I saying to franchisors don’t use PPC to generate franchise leads? No, PPC can be very successful BUT needs to be set-up properly. For example we have a state of the art lead conversion platform that’s available for all Franchise UK advertisers. This platform not only shows what has created the lead, i.e PPC, referral, social media etc but when we run PPC for franchisors it shows the search term that TRIGGERED the lead conversion! Yes not the click but the search term typed by the user that actually got you the lead so you can see what search terms trigger the leads and what search terms deliver the best leads. Common sense and what every PPC agency provides anywhere right? WRONG!

PPC agencies work on a % of your spend, you spend more, they earn more. Sure you will get a report on what keywords ( not the actual search terms, i.e what someone typed into the search engine ) triggered a click but do they give you what triggered a lead? For example let’s say you have an oven cleaning franchise and one of your hundreds of target search terms was “van based franchises” and this represented 50% of your total monthly spend. If you were to see a report that these searches either gave you no leads or poor quality leads you would want to remove them right? Ouch the PPC agency just lost 50% of their commission!

When I run PPC campaigns for our Franchise UK advertisers we use 3 main strategies;

• Geographic targeting – Where do you have existing franchisees and where do I need to drive leads?
• Long tail keywords only – I spend thousands each month on PPC for the popular search terms to drive quality traffic to Franchise UK so rather than waste my franchisors money I target long tail search terms specific to their business. Using the above example one maybe “oven cleaning franchise”
• Monitor & Optimize – Our platform allows us to see the search term typed by the user to trigger the lead, anything that does not trigger a lead is a potential waste, lowering lead costs over time. We can also use the platform to even see what search terms trigger franchise sales, a one click process for our franchisors!

The end result? Much smaller PPC budgets required, lower CPL & much higher quality leads and conversion rate.

The cost? I want to work with Franchise UK advertisers long term and we always look at ways to add value to our offering so currently provide this service for just 10%! Yes a campaign of £100 per month will cost you just £10 per month including the platform and campaign set-up and management!

To find out more about Franchise UK’s cost effective franchise lead generation services call me on 01323 332838 or visit https://www.franchise-uk.co.uk/franchise-advertising/