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.
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 Journalism is the New Key to Franchise Lead Generation
Professional Storytelling provides content that potential franchise leads crave
Quick, close your eyes and try to recall a business mailing, magazine advertisement or online banner ad that you’ve seen in the last week.
It should be easy — the average person is exposed to several thousand display ads a day. But are you able to recall a single one? It’s hard, isn’t it.
Now, think of the last article you read online.
If you are like most people, it is easy to recall a number of online articles. That’s because a good article uses vivid storytelling that appeals to both emotion and logic. A story about how a business responded to a tornado, and revealed the character of its leadership team, is much more powerful than any banner ad.
Gilad de Vries, a marketing professional, used a similar exercise to make his point in a recent Forbes.com article: It is almost impossible to tell a story in a display ad — and customers have become completely impervious to them. He said that much of the $620 billion a year that corporations spend on online advertising goes into the “brand awareness black hole.”
And he’s right. People have become expert at ignoring traditional display advertising.
That’s why it’s so important for companies to tell honest, factual stories that people will seek out rather than ignore.
How brand storytelling makes a difference
In today’s franchise lead generation market, if you can’t emotionally engage a potential candidate, you can’t get them to opt into the sales process and seriously consider what you have to offer.
Buying a business is a big decision, and to earn the consideration of potential franchise partners, you need to be able to appeal to their heart and mind.
There is a parallel in real estate. Good real estate agents will tell you that you can’t really ‘sell’ a house — the house has to sell itself. What they mean is that you can’t push someone into purchasing a home; the home buyers have to be able to envision themselves living there and the connection buyers make with the house is what drives the decision to buy.
Every time a home buyer walks into a house, they are telling themselves stories: This comfy room is where we’ll play games together as a family; this is where I’ll set hor d’oeuvres when we have house parties; I will put the Christmas tree in front of that window and its lovely drapes. People are buying the next chapter of their lives.
When buyers preview a vacant house, there is nothing to look at except the floor, ceilings and walls. There’s not much of a story to tell. As a result, buyers spend very little time inside the home — as little as 5-10 minutes. Savvy real estate agents hire staging companies to fill these empty shells with stories — comfy couches, stylish furniture and color-coordinated accesories. According to franchise home stager Showhomes, buyers spend upwards of 45 minutes in staged homes, which sell more quickly and for more money.
That’s the power of a story.
Recruiting franchisees is identical to selling homes. Both involve highly emotional decisions and large commitments of time and money.
How Brand Journalism attracts franchise leads
Display ads, banner ads, franchise portal ads and most email campaigns don’t work as well as they once did because today’s potential franchise buyers demand more information than ever before. They want to know who is in charge of your company, what it’s like to be a franchisee, and how it will affect their lives. We’ve essentially lost the first conversation a sales person has with a lead to the internet, and we’re not going to get it back.
Brand journalism gives companies a way to tell their stories across multiple platforms and media. And it’s not just about telling stories well — it’s also about telling stories while using the same language as a potential franchisee. Brand journalism is all about providing the content that the audience is already looking for.
Brand Journalism has been a hot marketing topic in 2012, and companies outside of franchising are rushing to adopt some form of brand storytelling. At the popular SXSW conference in Austin, several sessions focused on the new form of marketing. TED talks have mentioned it and just about every PR school in the country is struggling to incorporate it into existing curriculum. Entrepreneur magazine spotlighted Brand Journalism in its 2012 branding issue as the hottest trend in marketing this year.
For franchise systems that are adopting it, the results are breathtaking: enormous spikes in lead volume and even bigger gains in lead quality. They are getting more engaged leads who are easier to catch on the phone, more people opting into the sales process with a lot less selling on the recruiter’s part, and — most importantly — more sales to more candidates who understand the business and are a good fit.
Ten years ago, internet search, PPC and SEO were the big trends in franchise lead generation. Five years ago it was social media. In 2012 and 2013 we are entering into the brand storytelling and content marketing era.
The engaging stories unearthed through brand journalism overlaps PR, SEO, social media, blogging, website content, franchise portal strategy, paid search and even email campaigns. It’s an all-encompassing way to generate leads.
The stories are engaging because they use journalism-style storytelling. Stories are written to be engaging, transparent, informative and helpful. It doesn’t focus on sales pitches that make people skeptical. Instead, stories stand on their own and give people doing self-directed research about a franchise brand exactly what they are looking for — which isn’t always what your marketing department has been serving up.
Why companies should hire corporate storytellers to focus on franchise lead generation
How well is your brand doing telling its story to your audience of potential franchise candidates? Is your pipeline full of leads, and are you attracting people who really get your brand? Are you able to talk to the majority of leads that fill out your forms?
If not, it’s time to take another look at your overall lead generation strategy. Right now, there are people who are already interested in your brand. Use brand storytelling and you’ll have a better chance of recruiting them.
Brand Journalism is not easy to execute; it takes a special skill set rarely found in franchise marketing departments and almost never seen in development staffs. It takes trained journalists who have the know how to discover and tell stories. It takes outside help from people who know franchising and understand your audience. It also takes expertise in PR and SEO along with social media and web development. It is a lot more than just writing and blogging; it is an integrated approach. Think of it as adding a team member to your development staff whose job is to think from the outside in about how all of your marketing is working and make sure that the content stays current and relative.
Today, companies are embracing the chance to be their own publisher. Rather than rely on others to shape how the public perceives your brand, smart companies are using media they own and control — websites, blogs, social media, PR — to begin publishing stories about themselves that shape public perception. Becoming a publisher is far beyond the traditional role of a PR firm. When done well, it’s a new form of franchise lead generation that works.
Curious to learn more about using brand journalism for franchise lead generation? Start a conversation with us and see if it is a fit.
What is Google Penguin and How Does it Affect Your Franchise Opportunity Website?
Google wants you to publish more content about your franchise opportunity if you want to rank highly for key terms
Everyone hates spam.
Spam doesn’t just clog your inbox; it clutters up your Google search results.
Google has declared war on what it calls “webspam” — websites that rank highly for specific terms but don’t have the content people are really looking for. Think of the Internet as a river, and webspam as the tires and discarded refrigerator blocking the flow and ruining your view. It’s annoying, even dishonest.
Last year, Google began the attack on webspam with its Panda algorithm update, which removed content farms and rewarded sites that published well-written, original content. This year, Google rolled out its latest spam-killer: Google Penguin, which further penalizes sites that manipulate search methods solely to rank higher in search results.
Penguin penalizes websites that use extensive link building as the primary source of SEO by lowering how they rank. Companies traditionally have hired SEO firms specifically to build links. But users have said that much of the content that ranks highly is not what they are looking for and is poor quality, and Google has responded by dramatically altering the search algorithms.
Google is hammering webspam because it undermines the company’s mission: to deliver relevant results. Google determines a site’s relevance by monitoring the billions of daily searches by millions of users and registering what sites they visit, how many pages they view, how long they stay and what content users share on social networks; until recently, it also tracked how many other sites linked to each site. The longer users stay, and the more pages they view, the more engaged they are.
In short, Google doesn’t want you to hire a SEO company to manipulate the search engine; it wants you to redesign the scope of your website and publish better written and more relevant content for readers.
How does this affect my franchise opportunity website?
1. Quality content matters. In the post-Penguin landscape, franchisors should think hard about the universe of questions franchisee candidates are most likely to ask when researching a brand. If you’re a barbecue franchisor, you might ask, “How do I start a barbecue (or BBQ) business?,” “How much does a BBQ franchise cost?” or “What are the most popular BBQ menu items?”
Google rewards companies that publish rich, informative content — pages and blog articles — that answers pertinent questions, keeps users engaged and prompts them to share it on social networks.
If you’ve invested in link building, black hat SEO tactics and encourage content providers to generate content that matches what users are looking for. To rank, franchise opportunity sites need original, well-written, meaty content for Google to crawl and index.
If you are still thinking of your franchise opportunity website as an online brochure with a handful of pages and just a few paragraphs and bullets on each page, expect your ability to earn organic search leads to diminish over the next year. More detailed and expansive content written specifically for people searching for subjects related to your opportunity is no the ante into the lead generation game.
2. Engagement matters. It’s not enough just to rank. To win and keep a top spot, sites have to be “sticky” — visitors have to want to stay there. Users remain on typical websites for an average of 33 seconds. The average for most franchise opportunity sites is 90 seconds to two minutes. Induce users to “stick” for more than two minutes, and your ranking will rise.
You can get people to stay through pages with content written in article formats, as in newspapers and magazines, with embedded photos and videos. Navigation should be simple and logical; visitors should be able to get to any page with, at most, two or three clicks. You should include clear calls to action to navigate to a new page. Interested users — and if they weren’t interested, they wouldn’t be on your site, would they? — will stay and read. Web pages don’t have to be short and consist of text in bullets. Pages with detailed, relevant content will draw more viewers and keep them there for longer.
3. Your home page doesn’t matter like it used to. Google users are typically looking for the answer to specific questions. If you’re frequently publishing content on your franchise site, you’ll see that a large percentage of traffic enters through internal pages, not the home page. That’s a sign that the content matches what people are searching for. Optimizing your homepage for large numbers of individual terms isn’t a good practice anymore – at most a website’s home can be a relevant result for 4-5 terms. Real estate on your website is inexpensive so it pays to add more pages and optimize each for specific terms.
That’s why the most important lesson from Penguin is: Hire writers to help you tell your story and design your franchise opportunity website so you can publish many more pages. It’s critical now to create content Google recognizes and rewards because Google is where the franchise leads are going to research franchise opportunities. That trend is only going to grow in 2013.
Rethink the design and site structure of your website, too. Do you have a blog? A funnel of pages that help an interested candidate do research? How about organic landing pages targeting keywords that people interested in your business might search for?
Implication: Google’s Penguin update is the latest in a series of updates that will continue to change the way franchise systems can generate internet leads. They key tool a franchise system has is its website and for the foreseeable future, the quality and scope of content is more important than the design of your site. If you haven’t reworked your franchise opportunity website – or if you still lack one altogether – this is a good time to take a new look.
Someone right now is searching for something you sell. Does your franchise site have what they are searching for?
Want feedback on your current website? Start a conversation with us about what lead generation opportunities you might be missing.
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. 