We all have a story to tell that defines who we are and what we care most about, and the same rings true for brands – the only difference is, some are better at telling their story than others.
Effective brand storytelling clearly communicates to customers your brand’s history, what you stand for, and what you hope to offer that is of value to the communities you serve. More than anything, brand storytelling puts a personal face on a company, the team that makes your brand unique, and the customers who are at the heart of what you do.
It’s a truth as old as time: stories resonate with people and capture their attention, which is why your brand story must be meaningful, personal, and authentic. In this new digital age, it no longer pays to be a company quietly operating behind the scenes. More than ever, companies need to connect with customers, and brand storytelling is the means in which to establish your identity.
To be sure, there are several reasons why effective brand storytelling is so important. With a constant barrage of marketing and competitors vying for an audience’s attention, it’s increasingly difficult to stand out – products and services are simply not enough. Instead, communicating your brand’s story, simplifying information, and evoking emotions is far and away your best chance to be seen. In fact, one source states messages delivered as stories are up to 22 times more memorable than just stating the facts. Once you’ve built trust and relationships, you are more likely to win loyal customers who will advocate for your brand. “In a crowded marketplace where everyone is focused on doing things faster, more efficiently, and automated, be the brand who dares to be human,” Forbes magazine wrote.
Why Brand Storytelling Makes A Difference
Stop for a minute, and think about all the ads that have attempted to grab your attention today. Then, try to recall how many you actually remember. The honest truth is probably not a lot, if any. Turns out, the average American is exposed to anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 ads every day, and we’ve become incredibly adept at ignoring all those attempts to catch our eyes. Which poses a huge challenge for businesses: How do you actually attract an audience? Our answer: brand storytelling.
People buy franchises because of the stories they’re told. They want to imagine a better life for themselves and their families, they want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, and they want to design the life they want.
And the best way for prospective buyers to get the story they need is to create emotionally compelling content that speaks directly to them.
A great example is in real estate. Expert realtors know they can’t push a prospective homebuyer into buying any old house. Instead, they must build a narrative in which the potential buyers see themselves living in the home – hosting family gatherings in the dining room and raising children who can play in the yard. Even better realtors will go the extra mile and outfit the empty homes with furniture to make these visions a little more real.
These efforts work: according to franchise home stager Showhomes, buyers spend more than 45 minutes in a staged home, which is proven to sell quicker and for more money. These very principals have the same successful outcome in brand storytelling. Potential franchisees want a glimpse of what their life will be with your brand.
How Brand Journalists Tackle Brand Storytelling
Brand Journalists are the experts in helping franchise systems tell their stories across multiple platforms and media. Our services are no easy task – it takes a special skill set rarely found in franchise marketing departments. We recognize the importance of speaking the same language as potential franchisees. Right now, there could be any number of people considering investing in your franchise system. Brand storytelling is the best chance of generating franchise leads and recruiting quality candidates.
So how do we do it? It used to be that display ads, banner ads, email campaigns, and franchise portal ads were the industry standard, but not so anymore. Prospective investors want to know the culture of a company, the people who make it up, what it’s like to be a franchisee, and what their lives will look like. At Brand Journalists, we use all platforms and media to generate franchise leads from the right audience, through methods such as SEO, social media, franchise portal strategy, paid search, and email campaigns. We also have a seasoned team of graphic designers to assist with web development and video producers on-hand to create quality and engaging content.
At its core, Brand Journalists tell the story of your brand and the people who make up your team and culture. Through the use of journalism-style storytelling, we craft brand stories that are engaging, transparent, informative, and helpful to candidates researching your company. Brand Journalists take an integrated approach to your marketing strategy. The results speak for themselves: Entrepreneur magazine recently recognized Brand Journalists as one of the hottest marketing trends in the industry, and brand storytelling has been shown to substantially generate more leads than traditional methods.
Franchise Development Websites
Brand Journalists’ bread and butter is creating award-winning franchise recruitment websites designed to convert franchise leads. Franchise development websites include written and visual content that tells your brand story. Through our own industry research, we know prospective franchisees typically spend 50-60 minutes researching a brand. Given the short amount of time to win people over, Brand Journalists creates quality, in-depth and structured content to effectively reach a target audience.
But first things first: when you enlist Brand Journalists on your side, we immediately send out a team to your company headquarters to spend quality time with your staff to truly understand your brand’s culture and your business as a whole. At the end of this process, our Brand Journalists team will be able to speak about your brand as if we’re actually stakeholders, thereby creating a stronger and more authentic brand story.
Start A Conversation With Us Today!
If you’re struggling to attract potential franchise leads, it may be time to get your story right. Brand Journalists is a one-stop-shop for franchise development breakthroughs. To start a conversation with our team, fill out our form here.
Franchise Marketing Review: David Sparks Talks PPC Trends to Watch in 2021 and Beyond
Paid online advertising is changing, and Brand Journalists can lead you through it
At Brand Journalists, we spend a lot of time following the trends and changes in pay-per-click technology and practices, or PPC as it’s called, and I have to tell you, it’s been a year. Paid online advertising is changing rapidly, and the changes we’re seeing aren’t necessarily the best news for an industry already reeling from the pandemic.
After the year franchising had in responding to, coping to, adjusting to, and recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, it almost seems like things are getting back to normal. The challenges our industry faced were staggering on multiple fronts.
Not only did franchisors have to radically transform the manner in which their franchisees delivered goods or services, but they also had to bear tremendous expenses associated with internal responses to the pandemic, and they did this while suffering staggering shortfalls in royalty revenue in almost every franchising sector. All the while, franchising itself became a lynchpin of the economy.
So at a time when PPC advertising is more vital than ever, it’s important that you understand the changes that are happening in it and how you can maximize the impact of the dollars you invest, one mouse click at a time. Here are the big trends I’m seeing in PPC and how they’ll impact your sales.
Google is changing the kinds of data you can get
It used to be that you’d go to Google or Facebook, input some demographic goals and run your campaign. You knew who you were targeting down to their age, their gender, their street address, their income level.
We’ll call those “the good ol’ days” from now on.
That’s because Google made a major change in its privacy and security policies that will tremendously restrict the kind of information you can access from search queries. At the same time, the power of tracking cookies has been nearly wiped out.
That’s the bad news.
The good news, though, is Google has greatly expanded access to data in the Google Ad Hub, and it will still be possible to create targeted ads. But the strategies will have to change, as it will become increasingly difficult to know the browsing habits of the individuals moving from site to site to site.
Diversification will expand your reach – and maybe save you some money
With the changes over at Google, other advertising platforms and the web sites that rely on the revenues they receive from those platforms are trying to fill the gap. Put simply, I think Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook are all about to have a field day.
That means you’ll need to diversify where you’re spending your PPC budget. The changes at Google will mean big opportunities for competing platforms to lower prices, improve engagement and conversions, and place a lot more ads.
Over the coming months, I anticipate we’ll see a lot of discussions about conversion rates and which platform performs the best. And, I expect we’ll notice some significant cost savings in the price per click, too.
A renewed focus on mobile advertising will drive strategy
Don’t get me wrong. Mobile browsing is already the “where it’s at” of online marketing. But in the past, it’s been mostly driven by two PPC channels: Google and Facebook. We’ve already talked about Google and how changes there will mean developing new strategies. But what about Facebook?
You probably read earlier this year about the court case Facebook fought (and lost) against Apple over the proposed “opt out” feature to be built into iOS. Well, that feature went live and is now the standard on more than half of all smart phones in the world, which means Facebook ads won’t generate the targeted, intensely personalized placement of the past.
That’s where audience targets will become a critical component. Previously, PPC ads on social media relied on cross-browser tracking to provide “people interested in hamburger joints” with that hot new ad from the burger franchise. A new focus on developing tightly honed persona marketing identities will be necessary if you want to keep prospects clicking away on those banner ads, especially considering our final big trend of 2021.
Automation strategy is more important than ever before
Remember those “good ol’ days?” The ones with a bunch of data and the ability to build ads for “people interested in hamburger joints?”
When that was the norm, we were able to build a campaign based solely on a few key words and the demographics we hoped to target. We were able to rely on Facebook or the other cross-platform tracking systems to say, “Hey, this person searched for how to start a burger joint. They may like this ad from your franchise. Here it is!”
That’s not going to be the case anymore. The tracking pixel is pretty much dead, thanks in part to Apple and Google. Facebook can’t rely on its app on every mobile phone to track the users, either. This means you’ll need a new PPC strategy that focuses more on bidding strategy and persona marketing than in previous years.
The brave new world is exciting, but it’s not scary
There’s always going to be a give and take between privacy of users and the value of advertising data in the online advertising space. Having a PPC strategy that addresses this flow is vital to saving you time, money, and missed opportunities.
At Brand Journalists, we’re innovating every day to make sure we’re delivering quality leads from ads that work. Whether it’s Facebook, Google, or some other platform that hasn’t been invented yet, we’re on the forefront.
And if all the privacy changes mean our news feed won’t get cluttered with ads for Alpo the next time we say to a friend that food truck taco we just ate tasted like dog food, then the extra time it takes to get the ads right will have been worth it.
Power of the Podcast
How podcasting can grow your franchise sales
When podcasting first started in 2006, it wasn’t clear exactly how this new medium might become popular, much less useful. Few people knew what podcasts were, and even fewer had the technical skill or the interest to listen.
My what a difference just 15 years makes! Today, podcasting is one of the top forms of media driving consumer engagement and entertainment. The transformation has been nothing short of revolutionary, as Brand Journalists president David M. Sparks explains.
“Everywhere you go, you hear people talking about this podcast or that one, asking if you caught the latest episode of a mystery or the interview with your favorite celebrity,” David says. “Advertising is focusing on podcasting, and so are a lot of businesses, and with good reason.”
That reason: more than 48% of individuals aged 25-54 listen to podcasts regularly. That includes entrepreneurs and business owners, who turn to podcasts for research and information. So what is podcasting? And how can you unlock the power of the podcast in your franchise?
Podcasting 101: What a podcast is and isn’t
Understanding a podcast’s power starts with understanding what a podcast isn’t. Podcasts are not just long infomercials for your brand. They’re informative, engaging conversations that invite listeners to learn more, as David explains.
“At Brand Journalists, our goal in everything we do is to get entrepreneurs to engage with your brand’s story on an emotional, gut level, and there’s no better tool for that than a podcast,” David says. “Podcasts allow subject matter experts, brand presidents, or even enthusiastic franchisees to share their experiences in a personal, relatable manner.”
Audiences connect with the stories they hear, whether it’s about someone wrongfully convicted of a crime or the next big thing in franchising.
Podcasting is big…really big
It’s hard to imagine how big podcasting became in such a short period of time. But by the numbers, there are more than two million podcasts produced worldwide with 48 million individual episodes available. At the same time, more than half the individuals in America have listened to a podcast!1
“The numbers are just staggering,” David says. “And they’re climbing. We constantly hear from people about the things they’ve heard on the Brand Journalists podcasts, and when we look at the data, at the statistics, it’s easy to see why.”
Perhaps the most important aspect of podcasting for franchise owners are the demographics of the audience. Listeners are evenly divided between men and women, and they’re distributed widely across all age brackets. Perhaps most importantly, for individuals in the ages “sweet spot” of 25 to 54, almost half listen to podcasts weekly.
The most impressive demographic of podcasting is the affluence of the audience. More than 75% of listeners live in homes with an annual income of more than $75,000. Combine this income level with the age range of podcast listeners and an audience penetration pushing 50% and the picture is clear: you want your brand in front of podcast audiences, because that’s where the audiences and the money are.
How can podcasting help your franchise system?
Podcasts can connect you to potential franchise owners in a powerful manner unlike virtually any other form of engagement available. That connection is important for two reasons.
First, a brand’s story connects to potential franchise owners on a gut level, and the more compelling that story is, the stronger the connection they’ll feel to your brand, the products and services you provide, and the culture you’ve created, as David explains it.
“While online advertising is important, with a web site, a Facebook ad, or a Google search, your brand is competing with a flood of other brands for their attention,” David says. “The fight to stand out can be challenging, especially when you’re trying to connect with that prospect on an almost instinctual level.”
But with podcasts? David notes a podcast enjoys a specific advantage that no other form of media has – how the consumer consumes them.
“Most listeners tune into podcasts through headphones or earbuds, directly into their brains while they’re shopping, working out, or cleaning the house,” David says. “No other medium offers you this much power to share your story. You’re literally the voice in their head.”
Interested in learning how Brand Journalists can help you with podcasting?
Brand Journalists is the premier franchise marketing and lead generation agency. If you’d like to learn more about how Brand Journalists can assist you in growing your brand through podcasting, reach out to one of our team today. We look forward to helping you share your brand’s story.
The Conversational Marketing Revolution
How conversational marketing is transforming the sales automation process – one customer at a time
As franchise sites increase information density to previously unimaginable levels, it’s now more important than ever to help potential leads to find the information they need quickly. Enter Conversational Marketing, that helpful little chat window that pops up to offer assistance to visitors.
Whether it’s a live chat agent or an AI-driven chatbot on the other side of that pop-up, this interaction marks the first “real time” experience your customer will have with your brand. It’s also a moment that can make or break their experience.
To understand why conversational marketing is so important to both the sales automation process and to franchise lead generation, you have to first think about the sales process and how technology is changing the way buyers make decisions.
Traditional sales funnels are still important, but so is how customers find information
Sometimes, it’s hard for me to avoid falling into an “old way/new way” mode of thinking. The old way of franchise sales was finding a prospect through a web form, sending them a barrage of information, and then scheduling a phone call to walk them through the information you just sent them.
That information – the sales funnel – provided them with an overview of the franchise concept, a breakdown of basic costs, what resources the franchisor made available to franchisees, franchise support options, and so on. During that initial phone call, it was easy for a good salesperson to hone in on the prospect’s most pertinent questions and to craft answers that overcame any objections.
To be clear, all of the information included in a typical sales funnel is still vital to the sales automation process. However, as any seasoned sales pro will tell you, not every lead has the same questions. What’s important to one individual may well be irrelevant to the next.
Unfortunately, too many franchise concepts still rely on a rigid sales funnel with very little interaction other than to lead a potential buyer through every step, whether that step is relevant or not. Ask yourself how many irrelevant steps you’re willing to go through to get to the information you need to decide you want to pursue a purchase. Two? Three? Five?
Conversational marketing is changing the traditional sales funnel by blowing it up completely. Here’s how it works.
Conversational Marketing can transform the sales funnel into a sales driver
In the traditional franchise sales process, it was the sales associate’s job to divine a potential lead’s questions and then provide answers. This interaction took place on trade show floors and over the phone. Today, that initial job falls almost wholly to the brand’s web site through sales automation.
But franchise sites are information-dense, and not all potential buyers want to wade through every detail. They want immediate access to the answers they need to assess their decision.
For some sites, a simple search suffices. However, the cold, impersonal search box doesn’t necessarily provide your visitor with the personal touch they are looking for. Conversational marketing tools like live chat can deliver precisely the information they want when they want it.
Think of conversational marketing like a well-organized card catalog of answers to questions, and your friendly chat representative is the knowledgeable reference librarian, ready to pluck the answer out of the ether. Here’s an example of a conversational marketing exchange on a franchise web site:
Chat Agent: Hello! Welcome to our web site. How can I help you find what you’re looking for?
User: I am wondering how much it costs to open a franchise.
Chat Agent: Great. Happy to help. Here is a breakdown of franchise costs. (LINK)
When the user clicks the link, they’re taken to the appropriate page in the research funnel. Here is where the process gets very interesting: they’re not visiting that page alone. The moment it loads, their friendly chat agent is still there to answer any questions.
Chat Agent: Is this the information you’re looking for?
User: Could you tell me the franchise fee?
Chat Agent: Yes. As you can see, the franchise fee is $49,995
Now that your visitor has the specific answer they’re looking for, they’ll move on to their next question. And then the next, and the next. They’re navigating the research funnel, but they’re doing so on their own terms, with a handy guide down there in the bottom of their browser window.
Conversational marketing means constant access, but it doesn’t mean constant staffing
Few franchises (if any!) could afford to staff a chat function on a web site 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fortunately, they don’t have to do so thanks to incredible advancements in artificial intelligence systems.
When you hear “chat bot,” you probably think of an anthropomorphized paperclip harping at you to “Click if this is what you’re looking for.” That’s hardly what I’m speaking of today when I say conversational marketing.
With recent technological developments, “chat bots” are almost indistinguishable from an actual person sitting on the other side of the computer. From the user’s perspective, they’re interacting with a person and personality. The best systems even have senses of humor and empathy and can respond to users’ jokes or comments appropriately.
User: I’m having a really hard time finding out how many franchise locations you have.
Chat Agent: I’m so sorry. Let me help you out.
Chat Agent: Here is a list of current locations from our FDD. (LINK)
User: Thanks!
An interaction as simple as offering an apology and then assistance can transform the potential lead’s experience. Even better, if the chat agent cannot adequately address their question, the agent is prepared to convert them into a sales lead on the spot.
Chat Agent: You know, it might be better if I have one of my sales team reach out to you. Can you give me an email address or phone number where you can be reached?
User: Sure. dsparks@brandj.com
Chat Agent: Great! I’ll have someone get in touch with you soon. Is there anything else I can do to help?
And just like that, you’re on the phone or emailing with a new lead for your franchise company, all thanks to conversational marketing.
Transform your sales into a buying process
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of conversational marketing and sales automation is that it transforms your company’s marketing experience from a sales process into a buying process. By shifting focus from your franchise opportunity and to your buyer, you’re meeting them where they are, placing them in the driver’s seat of the process, and guiding them to the information they need.
For something as transformative as this technology can be, it’s remarkably affordable, as well. There is a conversational marketing and sales automation process suitable for franchise concepts of any size.
At Brand Journalists, we’ve employed conversational marketing tools for international franchise brands and new startups alike. In each case, these systems have produced remarkable results.
So whether you’re a small, scrappy upstart with a core team bootstrapping the next big thing in franchising or a household name, transform your sales process into a buying process with conversational marketing. You’ll be surprised at the results.
Want to talk about how to incorporate conversational marketing into your franchise development strategy?
If your franchise opportunity is ready to employ conversational marketing tactics on your development site, Brand Journalists can help. Contact us today to see how we can help you employ quality video production to tell your brand story.
Thomas Scott and Brett Larrabee Share the Top 5 Qualities to Expect in a Franchise Recruiter
Check out the full transcript here:
CEO and Founder of Brand Journalists is joined by franchise recruitment expert, Brett Larrabee, on the What The Franchise Podcast to share the top 5 qualities all franchise sales professionals must possess.
Scott and Larrabee share laughs, wisdom and personal experiences explaining why successful franchise recruiters are curious, enthusiastic, positive, urgent, disciplined and natural-born storytellers.
Check out their full conversation below:
Thomas Scott: Brett, thanks for joining us today, it is really good to have you on the call. I enjoy talking to you on a regular basis and I think other people really enjoy listening to you as well.
What is the core problem with recruiters today? Why in our industry is there such a dilemma around finding good recruiters, and why do so many recruiters and so many owners of franchise systems, and CEOs struggle to get recruitment results?
Brett Larrabee: Well, look, there’s a lot of great salespeople out there. But, selling a franchise is not only a high ticket investment, but it’s a lifestyle investment. It’s something that is turning the ship not only for the person who is buying it, but typically their entire family. So, the decision process is one that people are challenged with.
They’re coming to franchise salespeople for a solution in their life, and the franchise salesperson is somehow looking at this as them going through the franchisor’s process or their sales process. Increasingly with COVID and everything that’s gone on over the past, even two years, people are resistant to working within the lines of a brand’s process. The pushback of that would be that this is franchising and there are rules. If somebody’s not willing to work within the lines, maybe they wouldn’t be a great franchisee.
I would argue that buying a franchise has a lot of resistant currents to it. There’s a lot of things that are pushing against people to in fact, not buy. Not just fear of failure, but fear of change. Other voices coming at them for different reasons, and you need to be able to really understand that person’s buying dilemma. Their challenges and what’s in their head. Because at the end of the day, there really isn’t franchise selling. There’s only franchise buying. That’s the only way anything happens in this business.
Somebody that buys may in fact be a great franchisee and will work within your system and work within your lines. But, getting them to the point of buying is a bit of an art and science that’s learned over a period of years. The challenge is that a lot of these sales people come in and force people into a rigid process, or they force them into their sales mantra, giving them their information and really talking over or through the franchise prospect in a way that they lose interest. The franchise prospect is looking to solve an individual problem, and if you’re not willing to get to know that person on the individual basis, and understanding what their needs are and how to solve those needs, you’re never going to be a great franchise development person. In fact, you’re going to burn a lot of money in lead generation, in time, in payroll, and the frustrating thing for franchisors is that they see people following the supposed rules of the franchise sales process, but they are not getting the results that they demand to move their business forward. That just costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of time that you can’t get back.
The best part about this is that there’s a solve for all of this. You can actually do better if you choose to do better. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of legacy people in this business that are resistant to change, and to looking at the franchise development process in a pragmatic way in order to move their business forward.
Thomas Scott: Yeah I would agree. You know if you had 100 qualified candidates come through any kind of franchise recruitment website or through any lead source, we would generally say that 5% or 6% of the 100, are probably closable people. People that could, with the right skill, management and attention to detail, could actually buy the franchise, and buy it for the right reasons. It’s a good fit for them and what their goals are. What we see is that most franchise recruiters kill 90% of their closable deals. Even a good one chews through.
Brett you and I were talking a year or two back, and I needed to make a change in my internal franchise sales staff, and I made a change. Through a lot of conversation we came up with a list of the five really important qualities that really make a difference for franchise recruiters. And we’re going to go through this list one-by-one here. But, I think this is an important list to have if you’re trying to evaluate where you have a breakdown with the person at point on your franchise recruitment. Whether it’s you or somebody that works for you, or you’re trying to recruit somebody new – hire for these five things. These five things are what are an essential piece of what it takes to get a positive result today. If you’re missing any or all of these, that person is going to underperform and you’ll spend $200,000 on advertising and wonder why you don’t have much to show for it. It’s almost never a lead issue. It’s almost always the person on point. Their skills, attitude or their whole orientation to how to recruit somebody and help them make a good decision.
So let’s start with number one. This was just one of your issues, and I want to hear you explain this. The person has to have an innate sense of curiosity. What does that mean when you say that?
Brett Larrabee: Well, if you’ve ever been in a conversation with somebody that knows everything and talks over every piece of the puzzle back and forth, and doesn’t let you add your two cents and, and really is trying to solve for x without any input from you.
Sales is about listening. Oftentimes the less you talk as a salesperson, the more you win. Being able to understand other people is really based in this idea of curiosity. If I’m curious, and I really want to understand why did you come up with the idea of calling me, or coming to our franchise organization as a possibility for changing your business life, that’s a big question. It’s a big question to know, what is it that you enjoy? What is your family into? What do you do? What is it that you’ve done in the past that brings you to this place? Really asked questions not just to build a relationship, but to really understand the prospect. This idea of curiosity is not something everybody’s born with, and I don’t think it’s something that everybody has.
A lot of people are great at talking. But they’re not great at listening, because everybody actually just loves to hear their own voice. The truth is that the more you can get the franchise prospect to talk about themself, the more they’re going to talk themselves into this idea that you have as a franchisor. I find that ultimately nobody wants to be sold. They just don’t. It’s a repugnant idea.
So, you really want this idea to become their idea. That’s your job. Your job as a salesperson is to understand them, and give them the roadmap, so that they can make this their idea and find the finish line for themselves. It’s a much more successful process.
Thomas Scott: I went to school for journalism and was a newspaper person in my early adult career. Curiosity is really important. If you’re going to be a journalist, you have to have an innate sense of curiosity to learn about the world around you.
When it comes to the relationship with a prospect who you’re just meeting for the first time, and you have a franchise recruiter who walks away from an hour long call, and they really don’t know much about the person, it’s probably because they lack curiosity.
Somebody with innate curiosity wants to know the story behind somebody. They’re like “Tell me how did you get here? What do you do for a living? Do you have kids? Where do you live? Where’d you go to school? What’s your career? Walk me through your career.” Then you start talking and you find common ground. You’re not asking those questions, because you have to if you have innate curiosity. It’s a reflexive, innate quality that just happens. You can’t connect with somebody in a real, meaningful and authentic way if you don’t have a sense of curiosity. That just means simply asking questions. You can teach yourself to be more curious by training yourself to ask better questions in a certain sequence in order to really probe and uncover. You know, in journalism, they say you have to ask the same question five different ways to get to the root answer, because people will often tell you a surface answer. Then you ask it again and it gets deeper and deeper, until you get down to the real kind of core of the issue when you ask it.
A franchise recruiter, somebody who’s selling, it’s a very difficult thing to recruit for. It takes years to master. It’s a very long sales cycle. There are 10,000 things that can go wrong to keep a deal from happening, but curiosity is where the real relationship starts.
Brett Larrabee: Absolutely. When you think about the most important people in your life, they’re the ones that are concerned about YOU. They’re the ones that listen to YOU. They’re not the ones that preach at you. They’re the ones that actually help you think through your life strategy by asking you questions, by compelling you to think for yourself, not telling you how to think, but giving you the opportunity to empower yourself to move forward.
Thomas Scott: I mean, yeah. This is a good example, every time I see you, or we talk, I ask how Ulga, your Ukrainian wife is doing, and whether or not you have any plates in your kitchen, because she’s famous for breaking all the plates in your kitchen then she gets mad at you. Which is a fascinating story. I know that because I’ve asked you questions about it. I’m really innately curious about how much chinaware you have in the cabinets at your house, because I find it really entertaining to hear that story.
Brett Larrabee: We’re not quite down to paper plates yet, but we’re getting there.
Thomas Scott: But that’s a good example. If you get that kind of real, meaningful connection with somebody, that’s the basis of a relationship, and that comes from curiosity. What we really mean is that if you have a salesperson who naturally asks a lot of questions, they’re going to be more successful than somebody who doesn’t.
A person who doesn’t innately want to learn more about a person, ask questions, and that is reserved and doesn’t like people asking them questions, that person is not going to be as successful as the person that asks questions. It’s just a fact.
So when you’re looking for someone count the number of questions they asked you in the interview. That is a great place to start and gauge: is this person curious or not. Another is what would they have learned? You can ask them “what did you learn from our meeting? Tell me three things you’ve learned, like unique things about me, my background and my company.
Number two is, (and we’ve worked with so many recruiters who are not good at this), but is positive energy. Like somebody who has a high level of enthusiasm. You have to, have to, have to be a highly enthusiastic person to be successful. For any length of time in franchise recruitment.
Brett Larrabee: Oh, absolutely. Here’s the reality. We all have people in our life that bring energy to our everyday experience. Then we have those people that drain us. And some of those people that drain us, they don’t even need to say a word. Their negativity just just zaps our energy and doesn’t allow us to move forward.
Thomas Scott: Like Eeyore on Winnie the Pooh.
Brett Larrabee: Kind of like Eeyore. But Eeyore is the most positive example of a negative person. There’s much worse than even Eeyore.
Thomas Scott: And the franchise industry is full of them.
Brett Larrabee: Yeah. And I think the reality is that some people are just not into what they do. It’s not their wheelhouse. They’re doing it because it’s a job, or they want to make that next commission. And that is all the wrong reason. A sense of enthusiasm has less to do with an artificial peppiness and more to do with this desire to help people. To actually provide something beneficial to another person, and there’s a lot of books written on this.
One I think is called the “Go Give”, I can’t remember if it is “Go Give” or “Go Getter,” but the reality is you have to give more than you get. In order to build a life and a business successfully, you have to be able to provide other people some benefit. Even if you just give some information, some enthusiasm, a relationship, or a sense of friendship. The way I look at this is over the 35 years I’ve done this, a lot of people communicate with me on an ongoing basis decades later. Not because they have to, but because they want to. There’s something about our relationship that is positively influenced. We’ve positively influenced each other. Maybe that’s the true currency of what we do in franchise development – is that sense of relationship and that sense of community that we build over time.
Thomas Scott: You know, it’s interesting, because the genesis of this list was me trying to add a new salesperson to my staff of outsourced sales people. I ended up hiring a hockey coach. He is a young, 30 year old who coach’s travel hockey. He was very interested in having a career in recruiting and sales, but was really a hockey player. So, he brought this like super high positive enthusiasm to his work, because that’s what a lot of athletes do. They can’t really be a competitive athlete without a high sense of positive outlook. People with negative outlooks lose. People with more positive outlooks have the mental fortitude to win most of the time, and they win because they’re positive. People are attracted to that and it’s a really strong quality. I think I’m just going to hire hockey people from now on, it’s been the best move I’ve ever made from a recruitment standpoint.
You know, the next thing on our list, which also kind of fits in with hockey is a high sense of urgency. You have to have somebody who is moving faster. At a very early point in my career, I was at an IFA super session where I listened to the head of franchise development for Hilton Hotels give a speech. Somebody stood up and said, “What are the qualities you look for when you hire a franchise recruiter or a salesperson?” He goes, “Well, I only asked one question.” Everyone was like “One question? That sounds ridiculous.” He says, “I ask if they have speeding tickets. I won’t hire someone if they don’t have speeding tickets.” People started laughing and he said “No, I’m really serious. Like, if you ask all the top performing salespeople in this room, if they have tickets, they’ll almost all have tickets. Those people are going a little faster than everybody else, and they’re so focused on the end result. They’re more results oriented. They get there quicker. They do more. They have a higher sense of urgency to accomplish the mission, whatever it is. I think that’s been true. I’ve seen salespeople that have no sense of urgency allow candidates to drift, and drift kills deals.
What do you think about that quality?
Brett Larrabee: Well, this is something interesting because a sense of urgency is not the negative connotation of “aggressive behavior.” It’s “assertive behavior.” It’s allowing yourself to move with a sense of purpose. To a certain extent, a lot of great salespeople aren’t even aware of this, because that’s just who they are as human beings. The difference between those that are great, and those that are maybe not as great, is the fact that they don’t understand that today is the day to move things forward, and tomorrow almost never comes.
So, when you have somebody in front of you that allows you to communicate with them, who allows you to enter their life and present a positive change, now is the time to create the roadmap to move forward. Now is the time to create the agenda. Not tomorrow. You may not be able to get back on the phone with this client tomorrow.
You know, hockey is a really good parallel for this. You have to move quickly in hockey in order to be where the puck is. The puck is not gonna come to you. I think this is something that is innate in sales, right? You kind of have to know where this conversation or this franchise development process is going. You need to move the client there. They’re not going to move there by themselves. They don’t know how to move there by themselves. A lot of these people haven’t bought a franchise before. They’re not sure how to navigate a FDD, or, navigate the process of going through the financing or the validation phase of your sales process. You really need to help them manifest that and move that forward. Some people need you to walk them through it step-by-step and side-by-side, and that is done with a sense of urgency. It is not done with a sense “Oh, here’s the process. If you’re willing to take the energy to do it yourself, then that will make you a great franchisee.” This idea of self selection is important, but you also need to be the teacher. The person who is providing that context for them to succeed. I think some of the best relationships I’ve had in life, are those people that reach out and say, “Hey Brett. I’m going to show you how to succeed at that.” I may think arrogantly, “I don’t really need that help.” But, I did and I appreciated it.
Thomas Scott: You know, in terms of a sense of urgency and when we tend to think about systems today, and in the work we do here at Brand Journalist, some systems have a culture of development. Some don’t.
When we say a system has a “culture of a development”, then that system, the whole system, all of the leadership oppositely from Ops, everybody, is committed to grow through development. It’s not an either or. It’s not like we’re going to choose development over driving same store sales and increasing positive franchise relationships. These systems are just committed to growing the brand through adding new units, training and supporting new owners and making them successful.
We’ll see systems, and we have seen this with our brands in Home Based Franchise Group, Dryer Vent Squad and Frost Shades, we have deals that close sometimes in three or four weeks from the point of new lead to closed deal. Sometimes it is three or four weeks, sometimes five weeks. I’ve heard you talk about some of the deals you do that are five week deals, even with Little Caesars sometimes. Big, expensive things. It’s the sense of urgency. You really can see, through enough franchise recruitment and enough brands, that there are people who close deals that have very short sales processes. Taheir sales processes are not shoddy. They’re really well thought out. They move people through. They answer questions. People make good decisions. It’s not that the prospects are slow.
Then there are systems where it takes six or nine months. Maybe they will close them, maybe they won’t. They make people hang around on the sidelines for months at a time for no particularly good reason. In that case, everybody lacks that sense of urgency. However, the recruiter is the principal person that drives that.
Brett Larrabee: Right! They are the driver of the bus. So many times the recruiter is placed in a predicament where they have to find, internal alignment, which is elusive, and they need to
get support from different departments, which doesn’t come quickly. Quite honestly, we’ve heard this time and again, that time kills deals. It really does.
Thomas Scott: It does.
Brett Larrabee: Those people that are willing to buy, are really willing to buy now.
Thomas Scott: Now, not tomorrow.
Brett Larrabee: Not later. I’m not saying that you should hurry somebody through the process, or push them through this process. But, you should definitely assertively work to move things forward. Because without that sense of urgency the process lacks energy and it dies on the vine. There’s a lot of competing ideas during a franchise sales process. There’s a lot of personal things that happen in people’s lives that are good, bad and indifferent. You compete with that. Plus, the person that’s looking at your franchise is also looking at a number of other ideas. Your idea has to have the most energy. It has to have the most enthusiasm. It needs to be compelling. It needs to be a life choice of positive association. That is the best way I can explain it. Where you actually want to hang out with these people, because these people are the ones that are most interested in you. That is how you believe in something.
Thomas Scott: You know, you’ll hear people talk about dating and marriage analogies when they’re talking about franchise recruitment to underscore for people to understand the types of relationships that we have.
If you were dating someone, when you were younger, you got excited over the enthusiasm and the positivity of it. You wouldn’t just have one conversation or text a week. You would probably have a couple of conversations the first day, one or two the next day, there would be text messages as it gets its footing. With a franchise it’s not like: Hey, we’re gonna have our first call on this date and I’m going to send you my LinkedIn profile so you could maybe look over it, before we talk next week sometime. That’s ridiculous. Nobody would do that. But that’s the way we handle these people. The truth is, when someone is starting a business, the relationship with their recruiter, if that person is doing a good job, and I see this in my own staff when they get a really good prospect and they get footing, meaning that they’re aligned, and there’s transparency, authenticity, energy and optimism, they’re having four, five or six calls in that week and then another four, five or six and it just moves really fast. It’s not moving fast to your point because they’re pushing them, it is moving fast because it’s a natural progression of human nature. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. Then the next person in the queue, the second salesperson comes along and they’ll have one conversation and I’ll ask them three days later, “what happened with Joe Smith?” And they will say, “Yeah, I need to call him back.” That’s a deal that the salesperson killed.
Brett Larrabee: Yeah. I think there’s this battle between courteous professionalism and those development people who understand the need to get from like, to love quickly.
Thomas Scott: Right!
Brett Larrabee: Those may be corny words to a lot of people. But…
Thomas Scott: You look like the kind of guy that would get to love pretty quickly.
Brett Larrabee: Hahaha. You only want to do business, or you only want to hang out in life with people that you love. You know? Maybe that’s corny, but that’s real.
Thomas Scott: It’s real.
Brett Larrabee: I’m not gonna write a check for $40,000, $50,000 or $100,000 to somebody that I’m not even sure I like. You know, maybe they’re professional. Maybe they have all the great details. But how many times have you gotten all of the facts or the instruction book, but you can’t read it because it’s boring, or it’s not interesting. It doesn’t compel you to comply with its messaging.
Thomas Scott: Right, so messaging is a good segue into the number four kind of thing that we think is mission critical for a recruiter. I would call that storytelling. It is the next thing you would say to somebody to help articulate their future. But the ability of a franchise recruiter to leverage stories and to talk in the form of story format, again coming from a journalism background, stories are the way humans communicate. The stories are the way we make sense of the world around us. They’re how we relate to one another. They’re how you make decisions in life. Stories have a way of helping us orient to ideas. Just like when somebody meets you, and they learn that your wife likes to break all the plates in the kitchen and she yells at you, which is a really humorous story that I can’t really unhear. Now that’s forever part of my whole relationship with you as a person. So, when we see really good recruiters, they’re not selling stuff. They’re just telling enthusiastic stories.
It is like “Let me tell you about our Frost Shades, the window tinting franchise that we’re growing, how it is having a great year.” Let me tell you about “How many windows there are on a typical Street.” Let me tell you about “this franchisee in DC who on their first day went out and did a $20,000 job from the Washington Redskins, just out of the blue.” Then let me share how it happened. You just tell the story. Nothing other than a real, factual story of a day in the life of this business. Tell a story about the founder. Tell a story about franchisees that are similar to the particular person you’re talking with. Stories are what help people see the future and see themselves in that future.
If you listen to a lot of calls, storytelling is not very common. In a lot of sales calls for they’re just reading bullet points and bombarding people with the story in the way that they think it needs to go out.
So, what do you mean by storytelling?
Brett Larrabee: Look, I think people don’t want to be told anything. I think they want something compelling and interesting that creates the context for them to make a great decision. One of the ways that we do this now in the current reality is: we get on our iPhone and we look at the news. The great journalists of today know how to bring people into a story. They know how to create interest. They know how to create an opportunity for somebody to learn perspective.
Regardless of what that story is about, they pull you into another world for a few minutes. Then you see yourself in that context. Great franchise sales people learn how to tell a story that involves the prospect in a way that they could see themself in the context of that business. They might not say that implicitly, but they know how to talk to people in a way that’s genuine and honest, which gives them an idea in their head that says, “Hey! I could do that. I could see myself being a part of this. This makes sense.” It’s always that aha moment that we all have as kids on the beach when we find a treasure, or crab under a rock, or whatever it is that makes us go, “Oh! Well, that’s where it is. That’s, that’s where the fun lies in all this.” Storytelling gets you to that place where you have that aha moment and where you can connect your reality with the franchise development person’s business mindset. You create those connections. That’s what stories do. They take other contexts in life and they give you an opportunity to build a bridge to other people.
Thomas Scott: That’s really all franchise recruitment is. It is a series of conversations full of stories. But a good one. A good, solid, tactical and efficient story. You don’t move people along by pushing them, you pull them along by giving them stories that help them understand what it looks like, what it feels like, and it answers their questions without you selling them as much. To your point, nobody wants to be sold. Nobody wants to talk to a mattress salesperson, or car salesman. When you’re a storyteller, you take yourself out of the equation. It’s not about you. It’s about the story which is about another person. It becomes “Let me share with you. Let me explain kind of how it works.” Then it is “What do you think about that?” And they say “That’s kind of cool. “I was really amazed when that happened.” Then you can say “Here’s something that happened last week.”
Walls come down when you storytell. It’s the basis of all the lead generation we do with content marketing, conversational marketing and conversational lead generation for Brand Journalist. It is absolutely the way that you should focus on this type of business.
Brett Larrabee: One way I like to explain this to other franchise development people is that: objections are either intentional, or are kind of couched in conversation. Instead of creating a context of arguing why those objections are right or wrong, stories allow you an emotionally intelligent way to connect with people without creating conflict. You’re allowing them to win. What they’re telling you is their reality, and you need to connect with their reality.This is why the Curiosity thing is so important. If you don’t fully understand their reality, how are you going to connect with them? How are you going to tell them the right stories? How are you going to give them the context, the bridge if you will, to move to your position.
Thomas Scott: Yeah, and if you’re curious, and you ask the right questions, they’ll tell you exactly what stories they’re looking for. So, it makes a franchise recruitment process much simpler if you follow these guidelines.
This brings us to our last kind of key quality of a franchise recruiter that you have to have to be successful. It is just the sense of being disciplined. You have to be able to help somebody move through the process. You need the discipline to make the calls. You need the discipline to be there and be fully present for the person.
What do you mean when you say you have to be disciplined?
Brett Larrabee: You know, a lot of franchise development people are great at getting on the phone, setting up the next call and moving through the process. But they’re not great at being directional. There’s a time that we all have in every franchise development process where we know it’s time to ask the prospect to move forward, and to do it now. Often people don’t pull that trigger. They don’t tell people it’s time to move forward. The prospect is looking for that direction. They’re looking for you to take the wheel and to move this process forward. When you don’t, they will simply wait for that to happen. Oftentimes, it never happens. Because the assumption is that the prospect is going to make that decision.
Maybe that’s the case, but often not often. Often the prospect is buying a franchise because they want people to help them through this process. Your job is to be directional. To have the discipline to create that opportunity to close. Time and again I’ve watched franchise development people just talk right past that opportunity.
Thomas Scott: Oh yeah. They just get in their own mind and they have an agenda, and they don’t realize they totally missed the hook they needed to move someone through.
Discipline also means just being disciplined to make calls. It means to have the structure that it takes to connect with people. It means being able to sift through the leads. We get really frustrated. If you’re a lead generator like we are, we see really good quality deals fall through the cracks because salespeople don’t want to make the calls or they don’t want to be bothered sometimes with the hard work. Some of this business is just plain and simple: hard work.
What do you think about discipline on the front end of the pipeline?
Brett Larrabee: Well, discipline on the front end has a lot to do with the conversation you have as a franchise development person in your head. If you’re telling yourself that the next call you’re going to make is just another waste of time…it’s just another
Thomas Scott: portal lead or Facebook lead
Brett Larrabee: whatever, you know, you’re telling yourself “it’s rainy today,” “it’s too close to Christmas,” “it’s Easter,” “it’s New Year’s,” “it’s Valentine’s Day,” you make the excuse. There’s 1000 reasons not to pick up the phone or communicate with the next prospect. But, some of the best franchise development people just have their time that they are going to make calls. They get in their head that this is what they’re going to do, and they’re going to do it now. They don’t find 1000 reasons to make it not work.
Thomas Scott: No, they’re not listening to records in their head. The stories that franchise recruiters make up about… it’s as if there are 100 people in a room and they all get together and say, “Okay, we’re all going to be franchise portal leads today.” 76 of us are going to go into the witness protection program and never answer the phone or talk to the person, so, we’re going to go to this side of the room. 10 of us are going to say we have a lot of money, but we really don’t.
If you talk to franchise recruiters, that’s the way they view large numbers of leads. It’s like there’s some connection between each person and they have a conspiracy to doom this franchise sales effort. The truth is every single person is a unique person. When you talk to a really fabulous person like yourself, or Lori Osley at Sonic who does an amazing job. She gets 300 or 400 leads a month and she calls every single lead herself. She doesn’t use a lead screener. She does amazing work at that brand because she puts in the effort to see every person. She has amazing results over long periods of time where people that she talks to two years prior come back after they’re financially qualified and end up becoming owners.
That willingness to see each person as a unique person, and the discipline to reach out to them even when you do run into runs where nobody has money or it’s Christmas, or Easter, or New Year’s or whatever, who cares. This is the business we’re in. We are reaching out and talking to people and getting traction with the ones we can, and not really worrying too much about the ones we can’t. Just always having the discipline to stay focused and positive. You just have that kind of sense that the one person you’re talking to is the one person that could buy a franchise and is trying to change their life through business ownership.
Brett Larrabee: Absolutely. Many times, it’s timing. Maybe, you call that person at the wrong time of day. Or it could be the wrong whatever. But having the discipline to go back and give people a second chance, to think through why people may not be reacting positively to you all of the time, in an objective way, allows you as a franchise development person to just kind of be a kinder soul and give people a chance to buy.
Again, I would say most people that are looking to buy a franchise need somebody to be directional and help them through the process. They don’t know what the process is or what it looks like. They’re not sure if you’re a good person or a bad person. They’re looking for you to show them the way, and that only happens through some level of a disciplined approach. Add some curiosity, some positivity and a real sense of allowing people to win. I think that’s really the sum of this.
Thomas Scott: That’s good, because it’s been a great conversation. Just to summarize, we discussed the five qualities we think are essential for someone today and it’s worth evaluating your current recruiters or anybody you would interview for a job. Number one was curiosity with a high sense of enthusiasm, number two was someone with a high level of positivity, someone with a high sense of urgency was number three. Number four is someone who is a form of a natural storyteller, who has the ability to leverage stories to help people understand abstract concepts. Lastly, discipline. Someone who just has the discipline to do this job without excuses or without negative narratives.
Brett, thank you so much for joining us today. Hopefully someone can get some value out of this. This is a core topic that I think anybody in franchise development needs to ponder on and think about because it’s the key to creating a performance breakthrough.
Brett Larrabee: No, thank you.
Thomas Scott: Good deal.
Is Your Visual Storytelling Effective?
Video is an integral part of sales automation
When I first started out in franchising, websites were the hot, new thing and video was not on anyone’s radar. But over the last few years, a titanic shift has moved vast amounts of information and customer engagement to video.
We can thank sites like YouTube and Vimeo for this shift. Web surfers today are simply accustomed to seeing and watching videos. In fact, 85% of internet users report watching informational videos while researching products or services.
Franchising is anything but immune from the video phenomenon. Potential franchisees are serious consumers of video content on franchise websites, and they’re viewing increasingly polished, professional, and often award-winning productions.
But when it comes to producing video content, where should you take your company? Brand Journalists knows where franchisors can get the most bang for their video production dollars. Here are three rules to consider when exploring your company’s video options.
Rule #1: Content Quality Matters
When it comes to online video production, the first and most important consideration is quality. That means quality of content as well as production.
When you’re producing videos to represent your brand, it’s vital that you have people who present your brand’s story, your mission, and your culture well. People should look and sound professional, while embodying a more casual tone.
While it’s vital that the content in your videos is delivered professionally, we also tell clients to avoid a tightly scripted video. Instead, your videos should be much more conversational and must fit the culture of your brand.
If you’re a business-to-business services company and your videos feature a lot of informal banter, balloons, or other light-hearted content, they won’t sound authentics. But, if the business is a trampoline park and everyone in the videos are in suits and ties, that’s just as disconcerting for viewers.
So when you’re planning out your videos with a video production company, make sure you are accurately representing your brand and your culture.
Rule #2: Quality video production does not have to break the bank
Think about your most recent foray into internet video. Which ones did you watch through to the end? Chances are you were most engaged with conversational videos that had the same polish and quality of a well-produced documentary or news broadcast.
Video production quality matters to your brand as much as the quality of the content the videos contain. So, as you work to share your brand story through video, provide viewers with professionally produced content.
Be cautions against “video bling.” Just because the production company has the coolest toys, doesn’t mean they produce the best videos.
Yes, quality production requires the right equipment – cameras, lights, microphones, and more, but that’s not where good video stops. The real quality of video content happens in the editing process, where skilled craftsmen take the raw video and make it tell the story you want in a way that connects visually with the audience.
For our clients, the results speak for themselves. Each video our clients receive incorporates best practices from both advertising and filmmaking to create a rich, viewer-centered visual experience that engages potential customers and keeps them engaged.
Rule #3: Your videos should tell your story
The final major rule for online videos is that they need to tell a story – your brand’s story, to be specific. Often, brand videos get bogged down in details about technological innovations, financial benefits, or the sales pitch. That’s the wrong approach.
The videos that connect most, that impact most, that convert to leads, they tell a story that is personal and connects with the viewer. Yes, we’ll include details about support, technology, market size, customer acquisition and CRMs, but we position all of that as tools in the brand’s story. This methodology allows the individual on the other side of the screen to connect with all of those details in a way that putting them in a high pressure sales pitch wouldn’t.
As you begin to consider the impact quality video production could have on your sales automation process, ask yourself what your brand story is and how you could use that to help guide potential leads to become your next franchise owner.
See How We Convert Viewers Into Buyers Through Storytelling
Ready to explore video production on your franchise site?
If your franchise opportunity is ready to kick your video up to the next level, Brand Journalists can help. Contact us today to see how we can help you employ quality video production to tell your brand story.
Why Women are Rocking Franchise Sales
What This is About – Read This:
According to Forbes magazine, more women are buying franchises than ever before and at the same time, women are making huge inroads into franchise development and company leadership.
Many of our role models in the franchise space are women and we see increasing numbers of younger women turning to entrepreneurship and franchising in particular. To discuss this topic, we invited two recruiters we admire to join us: Jennifer Benjamin, VP of Development for Lennys Grill and Subs and Kim Robinson, VP of Development for Aamco Transmissions and Hybrid Repair. We’ve worked with both of these top performers at several brands and have a lot of respect for the way they approach their work.
David Sparks, our CDO, is fond of saying ‘The best way to sell is simply not to sell’ to explain why so many, mostly male, salespeople oversell and push too hard. As franchise buyers have changed dramatically, getting younger and bringing with them new expectations of the sales process and the salespeople, we believe these two guests have some valuable insight into what drives franchise sales results.
Listen in!
How Content Marketing is Changing for Franchise Development
Content marketing is not just writing, it is a lot more complex than ever before and it is changing rapidly
Creating a real, contextual connection with your franchise buyer prospect requires more content and different styles of content than ever before. Listen in as we discuss the challenges and talk about strategies for winning at franchise development today:
Read the Transcript:
Welcome to what the FRANCHISE, the regular podcast about franchise development, tips and best practices and strategies for growth. My name is Thomas Scott. I’m the CEO and founder of Brand Journalists, and today I’ve got a really interesting topic that I’m very passionate about.
I want to talk about the changing nature of content marketing for franchise development, and what I really, specifically mean is buyer acquisition. How do you reach out with your brand and connect meaningfully with relevant content that’s contextual and creative and interesting with the people that are most likely to buy your franchise?
Content marketing’s not new
The name of our brand, Brand Journalists, we started content marketing for franchise development more than a decade ago, and I’ve been doing it with a lot of really great success for lots and lots of clients. But it has really evolved, and that was one of my big takeaways from this year’s IFA Conference, was that the scope of content that you need to produce to really engage the people who have your brand in their wheelhouse already, the people that are most likely to be good buyers, to have the passions and skills and where with all to do well in your franchise has really changed.
What I mean is, when we started content marketing it was an offshoot of social media where you were really blogging and writing articles. Content really meant words on webpages, for the most part, longer webpages, article format content based on Google’s original Panda update in 2010 which basically said, “People want when they want and they go to a search engine to ask questions.” What they’re asking of the search engine is for a detailed answer. And the answer most often preferred by people is simply an article that’s in the format of a journalism article like something you would read in a magazine or a newspaper, so 1500 word article that explains in detail the answer to whatever the search query is. That’s what most people want when they’re doing research on the internet.
So that gave birth to this idea of content marketing using brand storytelling and it makes a lot of sense. Right? The story as we understand it is the essence of human communication, and the story always stands out. The people we use, stories as humans to make sense of the world around us, to relate to one another and to make decisions in our lives. And everything that we do is boiled down to a story.
When you’re looking on Yelp for a restaurant review to go have dinner with your spouse or some friends, what you’re reading were in reviews and pictures or stories that people have told about their experience at a restaurant. So if you buy into this idea, the power of a well-told story is that you don’t realize you’re being sold to because it’s interesting, and then if you understand storytelling and sales and how they go together, meaning simply that sales is a really a series of conversations that take a story format.
A good franchise prospect wants you to tell them an enthusiastic and positive reinforcing story. So the story is the essence of content marketing. From it’s beginning content marketing was writing, was writing a lot, hiring journalists and former newspaper people to write articles, to blog, to write press releases, to write long format websites that could stop somebody and keep them engaged for 45 minutes.
So they were so excited about the life they could see themselves living as a franchise owner in your system that you would beat out your competition, and that’s been highly effective … It remains a very successful strategy for franchise lead generation and buyer acquisition and development marketing within a franchise system.
But here’s what’s changed. Today we would look at content … If I had to explain it to a client, I would say, “Look, content really is broken into three distinct buckets.” So the traditional form of content marketing which hasn’t decreased in volume, so we still have to produce the same amount of content in written form, on websites and press releases and in blogs and articles because people are still going to the search engine. And they still have an appetite for information. They still are able to be influenced by press releases and things they find on the internet. It’s still written form, so a third of the content that you have to produce now is traditional written content, written in a journalistic format. Not written in a series of bullet points, and not necessarily short.
The goal of content marketing is not to create content you can consume in 30 seconds or less, it’s really to get somebody to slow down and think thoughtfully about what this choice is that they want to make as a franchise owner.
So the next third big chunk of content which has evolved over the last five years is primarily video and increasingly audio. And I think audio, this is where conversing in this format, in the podcast format now which is audio based, is the most underutilized form of franchise development marketing. We just don’t understand the power of audio, and one of the reasons that podcasting and audio format marketing, which would translate into podcasts, also things like XM Radio and remnant marketing on local radio stations. Audio is very powerful. It’s very easy to communicate with. It’s very easy to share.
We do a ton of podcasts for clients where we interview franchisees and create really slick interfaces tied into the CRM so that somebody can be on the website or have already opted in on the website. Then when you’re talking to the salesperson you say, “I’m going to send you a set of links to podcasts with franchisee interviews, and you can listen to them on your way home on your commute.”
So a third of the content today is video and by video I mean not the type of video where you bring a video photographer to your conference and you line all your franchisees up against the wall in logo shirts with a logo background and you make them say nice things about you. That’s very aggressive, kind of forced, artificial video.
What I really mean is a video that is cinematic and documentary style and storytelling in its nature with lots of movement. If you’re trying to communicate with younger buyers and you look on YouTube and see the movie making skills that even the average YouTuber has today, your video has to emulate aesthetically some of that both in LinkedIn format and scale and storytelling. Things like music and stop action and motion within the video itself, it’s people’s expectations for quality of video has changed. It’s not necessarily slick, high-end production value, but cinematic and storytelling that is common to what people use.
So a third of the content you produce is written, blogs, press releases, website content, articles on LinkedIn, all of those things. The next third is a mix of documentary and longer form video and testimonial video and podcasts, audio of various natures whether that’s podcasting in a traditional sense or is it … And then the third, that’s an industry we don’t do well at all. Like most franchise systems haven’t even gotten the first two covered, and they don’t even understand this third bucket.
But it’s really clear to us in our work that this is the next frontier of lead generation is what I would call visual content marketing. And if you spend any time on Facebook and the franchise industry, they’ll run … A majority of people do spend time on Facebook or LinkedIn … You know that what stops people is not written content. It’s not necessarily video content. It’s captivating images and graphics and infographics.
So a lot of the next third of content is how do you tell your brand’s story in a visual story based format that takes the form of pictures, infographics, carousel slide images, videos with text overlay, videos that you can watch without listening to the sound, but hear an interview? Now how do you communicate all of this kind of visual content? So it might be something as simple as a pullout quote. You might have a quote from your founder that you really think is powerful, that you create an infographic on, and that’s what drives a LinkedIn post for one of the weeks you’re doing content marketing that might be a picture of a franchisee doing something fun.
I have three daughters in college and they’re like a lot of kids in that Generation C bucket, very entrepreneurial and very communicative. They will spend of time on their phones. And if I look at what they’re social media feeds look like, if I look at what their Snapchat looks like, if I look at what they’re Instagram look like, more importantly, what are the Instagram accounts that they gravitate towards, there’s a certain style and aesthetic and method of marketing in that type of imagery that’s very common and uniform for that generation. That is when I look at the typical visual marketing for a franchise system, we use stock pictures. We’re just pretty lame to put it bluntly. We do a really awful job of content marketing to start with, and we get into the really relevant stuff that’s catchy. So if you know what Boomerang is, is an app, or Memento is another really good app, they can use our Smartphone.
We’re sending young photographers out on our team, Generation C of millennial photographers on field visits with us when we go to clients, and we’re producing a lot of content just using a Smartphone for that matter which is an unheard of thing. And we’re doing Boomerang loop videos and Memento time lapse images and live image gifts, you might not even know what that is. A live image gift is my little Smartphones today make a series of pictures so you can see the moment around the time when you took the picture. It’s a really short slice, like a second or less. But you can actually create a gift that some movement in it.
So maybe you’re walking up to the front of your store, and the outside store instead of being a static image, has some animation and comes to life in text overlay and things like [inaudible 00:10:20]. But you can make a brand pop in a way that is really full of life. It doesn’t have to be a fun food brand. It can be something as mundane as a carpet cleaning franchise or a commercial cleaning franchise or even an IT business. There’s all types of ways to think about content today.
And the content takes the form, all three of these buckets, go in several places. Obviously your recruiting website is the home base for your brand story. So if you buy into content marketing you also have to buy into, at the same time, that you need to have a home base where you’re living, breathing brand story lives, and that’s typically your recruiting website. And on the website you have a core content, things like a research funnel with all the kind of traditional content that somebody needs to wrap their mind around your business, understand the culture and value proposition, build a proforma, and really visualize themselves as a franchisee. Because that’s what you need to get somebody educated and engaged and teed up for a conversation with a recruiter.
But you also need to have blog content on your website, some way to publish articles whether that’s landing pages, anchor pages, traditional blog articles, just ongoing content. Google expects you to publish new content on a regular basis. That could be something as simple as a series of press releases. It could be the kind of stuff, the content marketing we do for clients where we’re producing written content. It could be pages driven to dominate on SEO searches, but whatever it is, it’s on your website.
Beyond your website you’ll have forms like LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook are really critical. It’s not today as simple as a LinkedIn, putting a post in your newsfeed. Maybe you have a separate editorial calendar where you’re posting articles on the LinkedIn blog platform itself which is very powerful. Like when I can get a recruiter that works with us to post content we create for them on their personal LinkedIn, it’s shocking how much visibility that person gets from that exposure. And if you do it on a regular basis, people begin to become much more aware of your brand, and you built brand at a very inexpensive rate. So using the blog function on LinkedIn to post an actual article on LinkedIn’s blog and platform which is something very few people do, posting stuff in your newsfeed is very important.
I would tend to link articles and produce some of the visual content. Perhaps you have, and it’s the nature of the newsfeed on LinkedIn, an article that has an entry to stack. I could put an infographic up that says, “Look I’m podcasting in audio format. Content marketing has increased 200% in the last two years, and here’s why.” And have an infographic in the post and then link to a piece of information that backs up the claim. That’s an interesting thing to read.
So if you’re thinking about your concept, if you’re in a frozen dessert brand and there’s been a trend that affects your brand, or if you’re a specialty coffee shop, or you want to talk about the number of square feet that an office cleaning business has potential to do, there’s a lot of ways to use numbers and stats to create something interesting and visual that will stop people and get them to pay attention to you.
Same with podcasts. On Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram where we spend a lot less time thinking about traditional engagement, things like likes and comments and posts and members and shares on Facebook, and we think of more of those platforms as an advertising channel, so we do a lot of marketing around using things as ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, email ads, Instagram ads. And we create visual content that would stand on its own and be interesting to look at, but also is tied more towards the type of targeting that we’re running, and we use the creative to really target people and get them to concentrate on a specific franchise opportunity.
Here’s the deal after all that. So there’s three buckets of content we’ve talked a little bit about wherein this is Gary Vaynerchuk talked to the IFA, the keynote speaker. This is a very complex demographic and psychographic world we’re in, and success in advertising on these networks often that are really inexpensive to advertising on which reach millions of people revolves around your ability to, one, target very effectively. So no matter who you’re writing content for, creating content for, creating design for, you have to be really clear on who you’re trying to recruit, and be super specific. Because the more relative you can make it and the more contextual you can make your marketing, the more successful it will be.
And when people get frustrated with Facebook marketing which is ridiculous because that’s one of the best things going in the franchise we’re creating today, it’s often because they don’t stick with it long enough, they don’t understand how to work the leads, or they just don’t understand how to target it effectively. And very few people do in our industry so relatively new frontier for us to go on.
But we really believe that pushing through content and thinking about the demographics and the psychographics and the interesting behaviors and the persona marketing, and other programmatic pieces to content marketing, and tying all that back to your website, is the key to growing in the next five years in franchise development. And companies that understand these concepts and either use vendors like us or figure out how to do some of this on their own, and orchestrate it in a graded approach to, “How do I create visibility for this franchisee that I want to recruit?” are going to be much more successful.
We’re certainly seeing a lot of success with the clients we work with, and that we believe that it’s the future, and we got a lot of reinforcement this year from the IFA on that. So I think the challenge is the targeting, and second challenge is going to be simply that you have to create a just ton of content, like way, way more than we’re traditionally used to marketing.
These are not the kind of … The days are gone where you can put a small amount of content up and let it sit for months or years. You really have to have an editorial calendar for content, and you have to produce hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content over a time, and be able to roll them out much more aggressively. So that’s the other piece, I think, that dooms a lot of content marketers is they underestimate the sheer volume it takes to get pieces going and to avoid ad fatigue and to be relevant.
Gary Vaynerchuk talked about if he had a retail store, say it was a coffee shop, that he would advertise in one mile radius just on Facebook and Instagram, and he would be really aggressive and spend a lot of money on that. But he would have hundreds of pieces of content and they would be very short run and they would overlap. And he’d have a strategy where every time somebody looked in their feed and they lived in that one mile radius, they would see a different picture, video, image, infographic podcast, whatever it was. But it was a constant stream of new content. It wasn’t the same thing over and over and over and over and over.
So I think that’s the challenge today with content marketing is there’s an opportunity to generate a lot more and a lot less. We certainly saw that with Code Ninjas, the keynote speaker for the marketing session at the IFA who added over 200 units in 2-1/2 years, the majority of through Facebook marketing and generating hundreds of leads a week off of Facebook. It works. It’s not for the faint of heart. It requires different skills on our salespeople and recruiters and thinking about marketing budgets, but we believe it’s worth the effort.
So those are our thoughts on the changing nature of content before our franchise development, and it’s a brave new world, and we’re full of excitement for what’s ahead. And if you’re curious about how any of this works, feel free to reach out and start a conversation with us, and please subscribe to our podcast. It’s available on iTunes, on our website, brandj.com, or on our Buzzsprout page.
Thomas Scott Named to Titus Board
Scott Named to Titus Center Board of Advisors
Brand Journalists’ CEO Thomas Scott has been appointed to the board of advisors of the Titus Center for Franchising, a center of excellence based at Palm Beach Atlantic University.
The Titus Center provides franchise-oriented academic coursework leading to a bachelor’s degree with a concentration in franchising. The center is housed in the university’s Rinker School for Business, and also offers certificate programs in many areas, including:
How to buy a franchise
How to franchise a business
Franchise marketing and sales
Franchise operations
Franchise field support
International franchise expansion
Master franchisee development
The center also offers a franchise internship program, as well as shadowing opportunities at the franchise world headquarters of United Franchise Group. Since its first semester of operation in fall 2017, it has attracted more than 40 students, several of whom have said they plan to become franchise owners and even franchisors.
As part of his board duties, Scott will be contributing content and other resources to help drive the center’s mission, as well as mentoring students and working with faculty to help strengthen and expand the center’s goal of becoming a leading choice for franchise education in the United States and internationally.
“Thomas is one of the leading practitioners in franchising today,” says Dr. John Hayes, Titus Chair for Franchise Leadership and the center’s director. “His insights about the motivation of prospective franchisees, and the tools that franchisors can use to develop relationships with both prospective and existing franchisees, is unparalleled in our profession. For those reasons, along with the quality of his character and his desire to network with professionals, I asked him to join the Titus Center for Franchising Advisory Board. All of our advisory board members, including franchisors, franchisees and suppliers, and students of the Titus Center, will benefit from Thomas’s knowledge and gifts as a thought leader in our profession.
“The Titus Center’s mission of integrating the world of franchising into a business-school setting is an excellent way of creating tomorrow’s franchise leaders, and I am very happy to be a part of that vision,” Scott says. “The advisory board and faculty are an outstanding and very learned group, and I look forward to engaging with them, and the students, and digging into the smart business practices it takes to make a franchisee or franchisor successful.”
Why Franchise Salespeople Miss the Mark with Younger Buyers
As the number of younger franchise buyers surges, franchise salespeople still don’t know how to connect with them
Younger franchise buyers are flooding the market these days, and the franchising conferences – from Franchise Leadership and Development Conference (FLDC) to FranTech — spent some focused time exploring that reality. Smart franchisors see the benefits of recruiting millennial entrepreneurs. They appreciate the statistics — ubiquitous at the FLDC — which say that buyers in their 20s and 30s are on a steep increase and will bring creativity, energy and enthusiasm to their franchise systems.
Franchisors’ efforts to recruit millennials, however, are all wrong. As evidenced by companies’ (like BuzzFeed, Facebook, Google and Amazon) investment into video, we millennials have a preference on how to communicate, and we gobble up video. Even though video on franchise development websites has risen 20% — up to 60% this year — that’s still an extremely low percentage (it’s 2016 people; what are the rest of you doing out there?). Sadly, the way presenters described the video on their sites reeked of corporate misunderstanding.
Authenticity is the key
Authenticity has not only been the catchy phrase of the election cycle; it also represents an idea and skill that we millennials have been prepped to sniff out in an instance. Your corporate videos of half-enthused franchisees make us feel entirely disconnected from your brand. We simply won’t watch those videos and will be ready to move on to the next idea. We want to have a connection with our work. Study after study has shown that millennials want to BELIEVE in what they’re doing and make sure that their life work has meaning and purpose. We’ve been blasted with advertising and constant media since we could understand language, so we don’t want to be sold something; we want to identify with it.
The constant theme when discussing video on websites was “testimonial videos.” Creating these videos usually happens like this: wait for your annual convention, set up a camera and a backdrop with your logo on it, shove as many of your franchisees in front of the camera as possible and force them to say nice things about your brand. If you go to a conference like the FLDC and hear that you need more video to attract more millennial buyers, and you force this type of video onto your website, then you’re actually TURNING AWAY those buyers.
This is why “testimonial” videos will always come up short. We seek out pieces that we can connect with. Empathy drives action, and when you’re communicating with millennials, this needs to be at the forefront of your thinking. Produce videos that are meaningful and allow for actual connections with the video subject’s life. These deeper connections are necessary to franchise buyers, and if you think you’re establishing connections through mere testimonials, you’re fooling yourself.
How do you get video right?
The value of emotionally-relevant video is really starting to bubble to the surface in franchise development. Smart, forward-thinking brands like ChemDry are stuffing their YouTube pages full of relatable, authentic documentaries. We get to know real people (who happen to be franchisees) and the way the brand, to which they’ve dedicated their lives, has shaped who they are. When a company as storied as AAMCO, or a company as new and fresh as Class 101 create videos like this, viewers can picture themselves as franchisees because they empathize with the human qualities of a Lou Fizzarotti or a Karen Feamster. I’m excited that brands like PostNet are not only making quality video the lifeblood of their franchise development web site, but they’re also producing videos that speak to people in a real way.
When you watch these sorts of videos, think about how much more emotionally engaging they are compared to typical content marketing. At the end of the day, emotion triggers action and pieces like these documentaries can be the glue your campaign needs to hold all the numbers together.
There’s an obvious reason the vast majority of franchise development sites lack this kind of video: it’s really hard to produce. But the best franchise developers are already thinking about their candidates in the right way – they get to really know them, make sure the right fit is there, and hold their hand through a massive life decision.
Now, think about that in terms of video. Real franchisee profile videos and documentaries take that kind of dedication – it means getting to know a franchisee, spending TIME with that franchisee and really digging in to see what motivates and inspires them. It’s storytelling on an empathetic level, and it really takes actual filmmakers to pull off such a project.
We love interesting franchisees who are doing amazing things within their franchise system. It’s so inspiring to run into franchisees – from boomers to millennials – and to hear their stories, see their environment and experience the businesses they’ve built. It’s these stories that we 20- and 30-somethings crave when making such an emotional decision like buying a franchise. If you’re looking to improve the way you speak to this exploding group of new franchisees, we’d love to discuss it with you.
Why Brand Storytelling Makes A Difference
Authenticity has not only been the catchy phrase of the election cycle; it also represents an idea and skill that we millennials have been prepped to sniff out in an instance. Your corporate videos of half-enthused franchisees make us feel entirely disconnected from your brand. We simply won’t watch those videos and will be ready to move on to the next idea. We want to have a connection with our work.