Organizations that are franchising their business have several challenges, especially at the early stages of franchising. Typically the franchisor is relied upon to provide at least some initial marketing to help the new franchisee establish a foothold in the market they are intended to serve. It obviously helps if the franchisor already has an established and recognizable brand. Other challenges include making sure the franchisees adhere to the established business practices that are proven to work in that business, make sure the quality and consistency of fulfillment is there and that the franchisee doesn't stray off course. Online marketing can help a franchisor solve many of these challenges.

Recommendations for franchisors - Internet marketing for your franchisees

1. The franchisee should have its own website!
   
1. Many franchisors, in an effort to control the quality of information, the branding message etc, will not allow the franchise organization to operate their own website. In our opinion, this is a huge mistake. Typically the message of the franchisor and that of the franchisee are uniquely different. There are also geographic and local challenges that must be addressed by the franchisee.
   
2. The franchisee’s website is focused on the products and the services delivered by the franchise. Each product and service should be represented by its own page and not all lumped under one page called services.
   The franchisee’s website links back to the franchisor’s website, and more specifically to the page in the franchisor’s website discussing the origins of the business, some history, awards and press releases. (A good name for such a section is “media relations”. It’s important to do this to establish the credibility of the franchisee.
   
3. The franchisee website should include analytics.
   
4. The text and descriptions on the website NEED TO BE UNIQUE. Franchisee sites typically don’t rank well because the search engines find text copied from other sites. This immediately demotes the site rank (the search engines don’t want duplicate results in the search results pages). Get a copy writer if you need to.
   
5. For a good example of a franchisee website: see www.relayexpressatlanta.com
   
   
2. Promote the new franchisee business with sponsored search engine marketing solutions that allow you to track all aspects of the marketing campaign. Here’s what we track:
   

1. Impressions (represents the total number of relevant searches that were done in that market.
   Visits to the website. We track both organic traffic and sponsored search engine traffic.
2. PHONE CALLS! We track all phone calls that we made by prospects who clicked on the ads we placed.
3. RECORDING CALLS – We have the ability to also record the phone call. This offers a tremendous advantage to the franchisor trying to determine if the franchisee is answering the phone properly and closing leads. We don’t use this feature if there is sensitive information (law and medical).
4. Emails and forms filled out. – We track also the emails that were submitted as either general inquiries or requests for quotes.
5. Costs. We also keep track of cost of marketing. Unlike any other form of marketing, sponsored search engine marketing is performance based. Impressions are free on Google and other search engines. You pay for clicks.

We don't recommend that the franchisee remain on a pay-per-click program indefinitely unless it can be demonstrated that there is an effective return on investment. Over time, as with any site, the marketing should migrate to the organic search results. Our programs are designed to help clients get here. And along the way, we are watching and helping you achieve better conversions. A mature website should be attracting a lot of traffic and should be optimized to convert as much of that traffic as possible to become clients. How's your website doing?