Planet Beach Spa Franchise Case Study

How Brand Journalism Style Storytelling Transformed a Spa Franchise

Steven Smith, CEO and founder of Planet Beach, a popular spa franchise with 300 locations, sagged in his chair when he read the January, 2010 edition of Entrepreneur Magazine. The magazine, which publishes an annual list of the top franchise systems and reports on trends in the franchise industry, listed ‘tanning franchises’ in its list of what’s not hot for 2010.

The problem?

Planet Beach started out as a tanning franchise and quickly grew into a vibrant and prosperous franchise system. In 2004, Smith had the vision and foresight to change the business model and switch the system from a focus on tanning to automated day spa services – push-button spa treatments performed in private rooms.

The new model, which he calls the Contempo Spa, started a movement in the day spa industry. Automated day spas, which customers pay monthly memberships to join much like a health club, became popular. Customers loved that they could visit the spa for one low monthly fee as often as they wanted. The model took off and the franchise grew while the tanning industry began to diminish.

Entrepreneur Magazine is considered the bible for most business owners and it carries and amazing amount of influence for franchise systems. In the world of franchising, public perception of a brand does more to determine what brands grow and which ones struggle. The January 2010 trends article proclaimed that tanning franchises were out and listed Planet Beach as a tanning franchise.

For Smith, this was problematic. Franchise leads for new locations dropped way off and customer perception of the brand focused more on the tanning heritage of the brand vs the innovative day spa franchise it had become.

The solution?

Planet Beach engaged Brand Journalists to redesign its franchise development website, launch an aggressive business blogging effort, launch social media for franchise development and begin national PR to create buzz and build brand awareness.

The goal: change public perception of Planet Beach from a tanning franchise to a growing and popular day spa franchise and begin generating higher quality engaged leads for franchise development.

Results: In January 2011, one year later, Entrepreneur Magazine listed as What’s Hot in Franchising for 2011: Day Spa Franchises. The magazine listed Planet Beach as a best bet in this growing segment. INC magazine followed suit shortly thereafter. Ask people who work in the franchise industry, and they’ll tell you that Planet Beach is a forward thinking franchise system with good numbers that caters to a really attractive niche.

Throughout 2010, Planet Beach’s new franchise development website, www.myplanetbeachfranchise.com, gained larger and larger numbers of visitors. Pulled from aggressive blogging and organic SEO monitoring with social media mentions, leads began coming in again and sales began to take off.

In 2012, Brand Journalists added a downloadable brand story document that potential franchise candidates could download in return for filling out a lead form. The document, called a franchise report, was a success and lead flow doubled from 2011 to 2012.

Throughout 2011 and 2012, company website leads made up almost 70% of closed franchises, out performing all other advertising sources. Leads were better educated, more engaged and willing to respond to recruiter phone calls and emails. The number of closed franchise sales increased sharply from 2010 to 2011, despite the difficult economy and scarcity of business lending.

Want to learn if this approach will work for your franchise brand? Start a conversation with us to see if we can make things happen for your franchise system.

Entrepreneur Magazine Features Brand Journalists

Brand Storytelling Becomes a Booming Business

Entrepreneur Magazine featured Nashville’s Brand Journalists in its March, 2012 issue and singled out Thomas Scott as one of the leading corporate storytellers in the US:

Whether they realize it or not, many companies don’t have an accurate sense of how they are presenting themselves to the public. To help make the message clear, sometimes an outside perspective is in order.

Telling a Story

When former journalist Thomas Scott started blogging about his home-staging business in 2007, he discovered that his industry-related content radically improved how business prospects perceived his company’s brand. Scott realized there was an untapped market for providing other businesses with content that’s well-written and entertaining, while helping consumers relate to them on a personal level.

Soon after, he launched Brand Journalists, a Nashville, Tenn.-based firm that specializes in corporate storytelling. Scott says that because today’s consumers don’t like being “sold” with heavy-handed marketing messages, successful branding is more about crafting interesting and consumer-relevant narratives. “The marketing materials and the logo don’t become the brand,” he says. “It’s the company’s story and how it’s expressed.”

Brand Journalists offers blog and web content, ghostwriting services and reporting on the human stories that make companies relatable for consumers. For example, for an insurance broker, Scott’s team blogs about issues related to city life, such as what to do if the tub in the apartment upstairs overflows through your ceiling. “If you try to sell renter’s insurance as an agent, people tune out,” he says. “But when you talk about the coffee they drink and neighborhoods they like, and how important it is to have renter’s insurance as part of that story, it connects with people.”

Brand Journalists saw its income double in 2011, an achievement Scott expects to repeat in 2012.

Here’s the full story: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223127

How Brand Journalism Created a Breakthrough for Chem-Dry Carpet Cleaning

How Chem-Dry Carpet Cleaning used brand storytelling and organic search to generate more than six times the leads, triple close rates.

Bill Knight, formerly of Lenny’s Subs, TCBY and Ruby Tuesday’s, joined Chem-Dry Carpet Cleaning as vice president of franchise development in 2009, in the depths of the recession.

Franchise growth had stalled in 2008, and the company hired Bill to kick it back to life. He immediately took the established steps franchise pros use to boost lead generation: He redesigned the company’s franchise website, launched portal advertising, networked with brokers and took out full-page ads inEntrepreneur magazine — steps straight from the roundtables of the IFA conference.

Leads and sales increased incrementally, but nowhere near as much as Bill had wanted. By 2011, Chem-Dry — with almost 3,500 units worldwide — was generating only about 350 leads per month. The system’s close rates were typical of franchise systems: 0.7 percent overall, 0.4 percent for portal leads. Bill wanted much more.

“We were doing everything the best franchise companies were doing,” Knight said. “Problem was, it wasn’t enough to hit our growth numbers. With close rates at or below 1 percent, our franchise recruiters were swamped with calls and sales activity but were not able to focus on getting quality people across the finish line.”

Today? Different story.

Chem-Dry’s franchise development website generated only 25 a month in 2011. In 2012, it generated an average of 159 leads per month. The close rate on those leads tripled, from 1 to 3 percent. Chem-Dry expects to close 70-100 deals this year, generating more than $1 Million in franchise fees. The vast majority of closes this year are coming from the company website.

So how did Bill turn things around?

He read Game-Changing Trends for Franchise Sales by Joe Mathews and Thomas Scott of Franchise Performance Group, who wrote that the economic collapse and Internet have led franchise candidates to demand more information about franchise brands before they are ready to speak with a franchise representative.

The article argues franchise systems that don’t tell robust stories about themselves were losing qualified franchise candidates to brands that used compelling narratives, franchisee and customer interviews and data about investment costs and returns to lure more engaged franchise leads. The old way of selling — give potential franchisees snippets of information to whet their appetites and—hoping they will answer the phone was obsolete.  Franchise candidates now researched franchises on their own via the Internet, and the absence of information compelled them not to learn more about the “stingy with information” franchisors but to look elsewhere.

In 2012, Bill hired Franchise Performance Group to develop a new, content-heavy, story-rich franchise development site, chemdry franchise, which includes a blog with detailed customer interviews, franchisee Q&As and stories about Chem-Dry’s successes. The content is written by FPG’s team of veteran journalists, who are skilled at crafting narratives, answering important questions, ferreting out compelling details and getting to the heart of a story. By filling out a franchise form, candidates can download a detailed franchise report. Chem-Dry publishes weekly blog and PR content specifically designed to drive lead generation.

We asked Bill to share his thoughts on the new strategy.

What were you doing before to generate leads? What was and wasn’t working?

We had this well-rounded, multi-channel approach to lead generation, and we did all the things that you’ve heard are bestpractices by attending IFA and Franchise Update conferences.

We did advertisements in Entrepreneur magazine, which works well but is expensive. We used franchise portals, which I see as a billboard and an opportunity to use good SEO to match up with the franchise site. We have been part of broker networks, which has worked pretty well in the past. We wanted to leave no stone uncovered.

One thing I’d always been disappointed in is the organic leads that came from our franchise development website. When I started with Chem-Dry three years ago, the franchise opportunity was advertised through a single page at chemdry.com. I bought chemdryfranchise.com, and we moved that page to a website that was created to generate conversions for people interested in starting a business.

Our previous franchise website was typical of ‘industry standard’ franchise websites. It looked great and had typical pages with lots of bullets and some videos. We had great traffic — about 2,400 visitors a month — but it never converted the way we thought it should. Less than 1 percent of the visitors converted to sales leads and we only closed 1% of those.

Why did you decide to change lead generation strategies?

I read what Joe Mathews and Thomas Scott wrote about lead generation in today’s world and the way that well-written content can engage people though brand storytelling. The website that FPG created for us is well laid out. There’s a research funnel that is pretty linear and tells the story of what Chem-Dry is, how it’s different, the value proposition, how the investment fits together, and includes franchise testimonials and customer testimonials that allow candidates to gather info — and when they’re ready to engage, they can engage.

It has a lot more pages than a typical franchise website and each one answers a common question someone doing self-directed research would typically have.

One of most brilliant things we do is give people a way to opt into our process by downloading a franchise information report. Rather than fill out a ‘request for information’ form, we ask them if they want to download our full report, something similar to an executive summary. The price for the report is your contact information and I think it’s a great way to ask people to raise their hands and opt-in to our sales process.

I believe that FPG’s strategy of earning opt-ins by giving a candidate something really helpful and valuable is the right way to go. We are transparent with out information and we are clear on the site what you get in return for giving us your information.

Providing rich content through brand storytelling, social media, franchise blogs and online PR perfectly dovetails with Google’s new algorithm that ranks pages according to whether they offer engaging content and whether the site publishes new content on a regular basis. Getting good organic search results isn’t as much about link building or link sharing — it’s about having good content that people search for. We do a great job of building in keywords that people are using to get to our site and our organic traffic has grown month over month since we launched.

A franchise website isn’t something you build and walk away from – it’s our “daily newspaper” and it takes real work to keep it fresh and engaging on a regular basis. This is a new area of lead generation for franchise companies and it really pays off.

How has the new website and content strategy performed?

The most overwhelming performance measure that we’ve seen is that our content strategy works. We went from 25 leads a month before the site launched in March to 159 leads in June and will have a larger number in July, despite it being the slow time of the year. It isn’t just that the lead count is higher; it is that we have much higher quality and engaged leads coming from our website. Many come via organic searches to both our consumer and franchise websites. People that fill out forms and download our report are spending a ton of time on the website and coming back multiple times.

We see a big difference in contact rates, too. For portal leads, we only get 11% on the phone and into a first call. For website leads, the number is much higher – 30% get to the first call and we communicate via email and text with a larger number. The trust level from our internal leads is just much higher and there is a huge difference in engagement.

We’ve also had a big change in our lead pipeline. The majority of the active candidates in our pipeline now come from our website. Before, we would have 15-20% of our pipeline from our company website. Now we have as much as 70%. It’s starting to change the complexion of the deals we close. We’ve always had good referrals, but our out-of-network new franchisee leads have lagged in the past, but we’re starting to see our pipeline be filled with these leads. And we’re seeing that leads from the website are outperforming anything else that we’re doing in terms of closing deals.

Now chemdryfranchise.com is converting 5 percent of visitors into leads and our close rate for the website is almost 3%. We expect to close up to 70-100 deals this year and most are a direct result of the website and brand storytelling — that’s over $1 Million worth of franchise fees. It’s been a good marketing investment.

How would you explain the value of brand storytelling?

Most franchise pros are still stuck with this idea: I’m going to tease people into engaging our brand, give them just enough information to pick up the phone or fill out a form or accept a call from us.

That old model of throwing out a little bit of cheese and waiting for a nibble has completely changed through the recession and increased the demand for information. I think brand storytelling fills the void between what a brand typically provides in terms of research material and what they need to provide.

It’s a good chance to provide a clear, concise value proposition about the brand, and it can make the job of researching easier for a person who is trying to get into business with us. If we don’t give them the information they want, chances are they’ll go to someone else who gives them what they need.

Are you ahead of the curve on franchise sales lead generation?

Without a doubt. We made a big investment in this strategy, and I think we’ve made this investment before a lot of other organizations. Lead generation is the number one topic that always comes up at Franchise Update and IFA conferences — “What are you doing to get more leads? Better leads?” We have a great brand and a great story to tell. It’s emotionally engaging. Certainly from a financial standpoint it’s engaging. It’s a 35-year-old story of a great brand with amazing growth potential, the largest in its industry. Why not tell that story? We definitely feel we’re out in front of the curve. So many franchisors are fishing from the same pond — you have to be doing something that others aren’t doing.

What should you be doing, and in what order?

Bring someone in from the outside to develop your story: What is your story? What is your value proposition? I find it odd that a lot of times when you talk to people and start digging into their brand, a lot of folks can’t articulate their story and what the value proposition is. Designing your franchise website should start with the content and story before the design starts. We fit our design around the scope of content we needed, not the other way around.

You’re asking people to make one of the top three decisions in life — buying a house; having a child; starting a business. What is it that makes this brand special, and why would someone want to engage it? Having a skilled storyteller with fresh eyes is critical. A franchise candidate has fresh eyes and the longer you work within a brand, the harder it becomes to step into their shoes.

I’d start with your core brand story, then reevaluate your website. Move on to a detailed and interesting to read report and follow up with a journalistic-style blogging, online PR and social media strategy, all grounded in SEO.

Here’s the important thing: you should do these before launching other forms of lead generation, such as portals, emails and advertising. If you focus on your home base and get it working, your conversion and close rates jump from all lead sources since so many people do self-directed research. It isn’t an either/or. You need multiple forms of lead generation but you’ll strike out if you don’t pay attention to the quality and scope of your home base first.

How important do you think brand storytelling will be for successful franchise sales lead generation?

Thinking about it from a strategy perspective, having well-written content and a very engaging storytelling website is going to be the ante to being in the game. Without it, you are less effective in the rest of your effort — from the engagement level, to catching someone when they are ready to move forward, to your ability to close. I think being out in front of this is important and I can’t imagine that other franchise companies won’t adopt this in the year ahead.

A lot of times in franchise sales and development, the people who don’t get this tend to be the ones who objectify people and don’t ask the questions, “How would I shop for a business?” and “How would I want to be interacted with?” “I don’t want to be pestered by some slick salesman who’s not asking questions about me.” They’re not asking the questions about why people are eager to get into business for themselves, where the pain is in their lives, and where we can help find the solution to that pain. They take out the human element and want to play the sales game on their own terms, and that’s not how it works. If you treat people like people and understand how they buy and how they research, this is a no-brainer.

Curious to learn more about how changing your franchise sales lead generation strategy can create a breakthrough in your business? Contact us to start a conversation.

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.

University of Alabama’s Platform Magazine Features Brand Journalists

by Rachel Childers, Platform Magazine, University of Alabama

Thanks to search engines and social media there has been a shift in the way people find and receive information. People actively seek what they want. Since media is saturated with advertising and marketing copy, many people no longer respond to messages that scream “I’m selling you something.”

Instead, consumers want authenticity and transparency. People want to feel like they identify with a brand. They want to know about the sheep that were sheered for their sweater. They desire to know how the inventor of the product they love dreamed it up. They yearn for details in the company’s story. This is where brand journalism comes in.

“It’s all about the stories we tell people. Stories allow us to relate to each other,” said Thomas Scott, CEO of Brand Journalists. “A company’s story is its brand.”

Scott, who describes himself as a corporate storyteller, does just that every day. He is the CEO of a hybrid PR firm that focuses on producing content in the form of stories for franchises all over the U.S.

“Brand journalism is a strategic way of producing content,” Scott said.

It goes beyond just putting content out there. It allows a company to tell what is special and unique about it, and it effectively uses search engine optimization.

“A company needs positive reinforcement online,” Scott said. He said it’s human nature for a person to assume a company is bad when a search yields little to no content. Even if the company is the best in the world, the public will have a negative perspective if its online content is lacking.

“With brand journalism, companies have the opportunity to be their own publisher,” Scott said.

Boeing took advantage of this opportunity in April 2010. Communications Director Todd Blecher said that Boeing’s move toward brand journalism was the result of wanting to improve its website.

“We realized we had the opportunity to put content out there,” Blecher said.

By using the skills of the former journalists on staff, Boeing added brand journalism to its overall communication plan.

Just as Scott’s firm does for franchises, Boeing was able to produce content that would drive people to its website. This made it easier for journalists, potential customers and potential investors to find it.

However, Boeing had to learn which stories their audience wanted, and which ones they didn’t.

Blecher said that stories about aerospace and aviation, what he calls the “hardware,” tend to be more successful on the Boeing website due to audience expectation. For example, the story of a K-9 bomb team member didn’t work well on the website. Blecher said that it would have been better accepted on Facebook because that is what the social media audience desires.

“You have to know your audience and know your tools,” Blecher said.

In this case, Boeing’s tool was brand journalism. It was a successful addition to the other tools that Blecher uses every day; however, Blecher said that brand journalism might not be able to be effectively used by every company. Companies need to evaluate whether or not they can culturally incorporate brand journalism in their communication plan, and they need to determine who will produce the content.

He said that culturally, companies need to be attuned to discovering stories that interest their audience and finding out how this content can be interesting.

“They need to get beyond buying language,” Blecher said. “If you can’t have subtlety of application, then you probably shouldn’t do it.”

He also suggested using current employees to produce the content.

“You want people wearing the same badge,” Blecher said. He noted that the product produced by someone already invested in your company versus the product produced by a freelance writer will be very different.

Scott said that any company can benefit from brand journalism. He mentioned that somewhere there is someone looking for your product, and brand journalism makes it easier for them to find it.

Brand journalism offers a way for companies to produce their story. It uses journalism skills mixed with a dash of creativity and imagination to go beyond selling and into storytelling. Brand journalism can be used among a variety of industries from airplanes to fast food and more. This tool is changing how companies communicate and places the power into the companies’ hand when it comes to their brands.

Advice for Students

For students interested in brand journalism, both Blecher and Scott have some advice. First and foremost, they agreed that journalism skills are a must.

“Learn the journalism side before you learn the brand side,” Blecher said.

He said that a student interested in brand journalism should not only learn how to write, but they should learn how to shoot video, as well. They also need do both from the audience’s perspective. Lastly, students need to consistently practice these skills.

Scott recommended that along with journalism classes students should take Southern literature classes. Scott suggested students read authors like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

“Southern literature has the best storytelling tradition,” he said.

He also mentioned it would be beneficial for students to take feature writing classes and become accustomed to writing descriptively. He said that one employee at his company writes descriptively on a fourth or fifth grade level using very basic words and no jargon, which is a very difficult task.

Another thing he suggested was having a personal blog. He said that when a student has a blog where they write about something they are passionate about, it really sets them apart. He said one of the firm’s employees, who started as an intern, had a blog about food that led to a full-time position writing for a smoothie franchise.

Finally he said having a professional Twitter account and internships at firms who focus on content writing were important.

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