Doc Franchise Writings and Ramblings

One of the things that often slays me about coming up on someone's freshly designed website is just how much content they attempt to jam into the homepage.

Similarly, receiving coupons, whether paper or electronic with multiple messages also leaves me and virtually every other consumer albeit household or business...they leave us flat.

Franchises and small businesses have a real challenge. Common sense dictates to us that it is important that our potential clients and customers know precisely what we do.

The problem is what seems to make sense falls flat in practice.

First, if you want your brand positioning to resonate with prospective clients and potential franchisees, it's essential that you appeal to their emotions in some way. Fail to grip them emotionally and you are simply tossing money down the tubes.

Effective positioning sells your vision, company, or services. It may not be terribly creative, but if you can package some good creative content into your message that appeals to a strong need or want within your target audience, it will certainly create awareness. Effective positioning creates brand awareness and is convincing. It engages prospects as if you were speaking to them face-to-face, and when you succeed in making this connection your prospective client's perceptions and thinking processes about you become your brand at the individual level. If you can intuitively make the transition to branding and positioning from advertising check out Advertising Basics for Small Businesses for some pointers.

Secondly, should you achieve the enviable position of having a compelling position execution within your market, a stimulating message, your work has just begun. In fact, in branding and in any market segment the work is never over.You must expose your customers, prospective customers, and suspects (those who aren't currently interested in your company or product, but who might be shortly) to the same messaging over a prolonged period of time has two effect. The first is powerful. The second a willer. The first one is long after you are bored with your message they are still wrapping their arms around it. Keep it up. Here in Phoenix, Arizona Discount Tire Company still plays an ad from the 70's they created showing an older woman tossing a tire through a window, returning her tire for a full refund or replacement for the life of the tire. That is now a 39 year old ad. People just now are "getting it."...still!!!

The second is that an ad that is much less impactful in its delivery; where the emotions are not raised to such a high level, can lead to stagnation of your brand position. Test and measure. Obviously the folks at Discount created a very cheap (it even looks cheap) but powerful ad was created four decades ago and yet it lives and still helps them to keep a market position they value. An add for buy 3 and get one free has long since died. Why? No emotional tie!

Coke, one of the world's most valuable brands, reinvents its messaging and image when it decides they have begun to lose effectiveness. We often need to re-say the same thing in a new and vitally relative way as the years change to keep up with cultural adjustments. Apparently that isn't so true of the tire industry.

Creating an Effective Market Positioning

So how do you create an effective branding strategy? I want to suggest one effective strategy. It is the single benefit methodology. It could also better be described as the singular position technique. This concept directly links your brand to a single benefit. If your product is more environmentally safe, you shout it out. This is a characterization or personification positioning. It should involve, from a marketing strategy bringing a character to life (like our dissatisfied Discount Tire Company lady). They express product benefits or intriguing (defined here as socially powerful) personality traits in living terms. They are associated with the brand positioning. They show up wherever the message is being delivered.

Create a brand position that attaches your product or service to your target markets emotional high ground.Using the Discount Tire Company model we can play off their fear of buying the tires and shifting to a scene with our character, 6 months later, having a blowout, attempting to take it back to XYZ Tires and having the guy, cigar in mouth, shrugging and laughing versus her brining it back to Discount Tire for full satisfaction.

Although a calculated and well thought out advertising campaign may do a good job of creating brand awareness, it may fall short of inducing product preference or, the end goal, purchase. For this reason, don't rely on advertising as a complete solution. Instead, support it with marketing and sales promotion to help trigger a purchase. Branding comes together when positioning, marketing strategy (high level thought processes), advertising and the sales message and method are in alignment.

Apply the following criteria to test the effectiveness of your advertising message:

1. The brand position statement intelligibly and simply states a single message.
2. The Marketing Campaign evokes a specific and consistent, acute emotion throughout all the delivery methods.
3. The advertisements themselves are presented in a space (place where your market expects to find them and/or visits) where it will likely be noticed.
4. The overriding message is clearly evident and is easily projected at the customer service and support level.

Finally, understand that even a carefully thought out, highly creative campaign with a strong, concise message will fall flat if you do not stay true to the mission of the brand alignment-marketing-advertising-sales-support process for a massively long period of time. Time is your friend. Provided you have a product or service that is desirable you owe it to yourself and your business to stay the course and ensure everything you do will get you the place in your market you desire.

I hope this message rings true with my franchiser friends who have changed up their message 10 times in 10 years. You need to settle down, settle in and get out there and drive the emotions for your products straight to the cash registers of your franchisee's.

John is a 26-year professional in the franchise industry. He has been a franchisee, a franchise executive and an advocate/consultant to the public and to dozens of franchise companies. He is the founder and managing partner of Wilson Associates and can be reached at docfranchise@gmail.com. or direct office 480.838.1641

Looking for franchise opportunities you are interested in is a bit trivial, especially if you are presented with literally thousands of franchise opportunities, online and particularly if what you "think" you are interested isn't what will meet your needs.

Nonetheless, to help you save time on searching for franchises to buy, I have 8 online resources to recommend you, along with the reasons why you should consider visiting them.

Why do I only recommend 8 online resources?

While many other resource sites can be added into the list, they are, in my opinion, offering pretty similar information with the rest of franchise resources, thus making them less useful compared to those listed in the top 8 below.

Without further ado, here is the list.

8 franchise for sale and franchise opportunities online resources

1. IFA’s Franchise Opportunities
   
   IFA (International Franchise Association) is the first place you should visit whenever you think about franchising. With 1200+ franchise opportunities, it is the most recent and comprehensive franchise resource of all. What’s more, you can access wealth of information on franchising from trusted providers, including joining as a member, accessing members-only resources.
2. Entrepreneur.com’s Franchise 500
   
   Entrepreneur.com (and the off line version, Entrepreneur Magazine) is a well-respected resource for entrepreneurs. Its coveted Franchise 500 has been around for 30 years and the list contains the top 500 franchises, categorized by industry (2009 #1: Subway.) The ranking system is very useful, indeed – It helps entrepreneurs to weigh their decision in choosing a franchise to invest in.
3. Franchise Gator
   
   Franchise Gator not only lists franchise opportunities, but also non-franchise business opportunities. It lists 1000+ businesses that you can browse by industry, investment or location. It also contains useful articles on franchising.
4. Franchise Direct
   
   Franchise Direct offers less search features (search by industry and by location.) However, it offers a useful categorisation that many don’t, such as low-cost, International, green, mobile and SBA-approved franchises. Franchise Direct’s Top 100 Global Franchises can help you learn the big picture of franchising worldwide.
5. Franchise Opportunities
   
   Franchise Opportunities, LLC is IFA’s Supplier Forum Member, so it’s pretty much credible in the information they offer. The highlight is on the International site they have, focusing on local and International franchises in respective countries, such as India, Australia and United Kingdom.
6. Bison
   
   Bison’s main features are the “My Request List” – containing a list of franchises you are interested to receive more information from, and Popular Franchise of the day list – containing the top 5 franchises which info was requested the most by site visitors.
7. BusinessForSale.com’s Buy A Franchise
   
   BusinessForSale.com is actually a business for sale marketplace that offers a category of franchise for sale. While the “real” franchise for sale (established franchise units) is actually on the business for sale section, this section contains a list of franchise opportunities, that are not only categorised by industry, but also by specific region: Global, US, UK, Canadian, Australian, Irish, and Spanish.
8. BizBuySell’s Franchise For Sale
   
   Similar to BusinessForSale.com, BizBuySell.com has a category that list franchise opportunities categorised by industry, US state and capital requirement. It also has an info request list that shows you to which franchises you are requesting more info from. Again, to find the established franchise for sale you need to go to “Buy A Biz” section.

There are others. Some with some slick tools to determine whether what you are looking for meets your criteria for investment, results, and lifestyle/workstyle experience. You can start with these and see if what you are looking for and if in fact franchising makes sense for you at all.

Be Well!

Hopefully this list can help you to pursue your dream in investing in a franchise.

John is a 26-year professional in the franchise industry. He has been a franchisee, a franchise executive and an advocate/consultant to the public and to dozens of franchise companies. He is the founder and managing partner of Wilson Associates and can be reached at docfranchise@gmail.com. or direct office 480.838.1641

Good Morning World! I’m covering some overarching advice today as I believe small business owners and marketers need to think strategically about social media use, perhaps before they ever start to discuss tactical use.

1) Integrate – Don’t treat your social media activity as something separate from your other marketing initiatives. Feature links to your social media profiles in your email signature, on your business cards, in your ads, and as a standard block of copy in your weekly HTML email newsletter. In addition, make sure that links to your educational content are featured prominently in your social media profiles and that Facebook fan page visitors and blog subscribers are offered the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter and attend your online and offline events. Make your social media profiles a part of your address copy block and you will soon see adding them to all that you do as an automatic action.

2) Amplify – Use your social media activity to create awareness for and amplify your content housed in other places. This can go for teasing some aspect of your latest blog post on twitter or in your Facebook status, creating full blown events on Eventful or MeetUP, or pointing to mentions of your firm in the media. If you publish a bi-weekly newsletter, in addition to sending it to your subscribers, archive it online and tweet it too. You can also add social features to your newsletter to make it very easy for others to retweet (tweetmeme button) and share on social bookmark sites such as delicious and digg. I would also add that filtering other people’s great content and pointing this out to your followers, fans and subscribers fits into this category as it builds your overall reputation for good content sharing and helps to buffer the notion that you are simply broadcasting your announcements. Quality over quantity always wins in social media marketing.

3) Repurpose – Taking content that appears in one form and twisting it in ways that make it more available in a another, or to another audience, is one of the secrets to success in our hyperinfo driven marketing world we find ourselves. When you hold an event to present information you can promote the event in various social media networks and then capture that event and post the audio to your podcast, slides to Slideshare, and transcript (You can use Castingwords for this) as a free report for download. You can string 5 blog posts together (like this series) and make them available as a workshop handout or a bonus for your LinkedIn group. Never look at any content as a single use, single medium, act.

4) Lead generate – So many people want to generate leads in the wide world of social media, but can’t seem to understand how or have met with downright hostile reactions when trying. Effectively generating leads from social media marketing is really no different than effectively generating leads anywhere – it’s just that the care you must take to do it right is amplified by the “no selling allowed” culture. No one like to be sold to in any environment – the trick is to let them buy – and this is even more important in social media marketing. So, what this means is that your activity, much of what I’ve mentioned above, needs to focus on creating awareness of your valuable, education based content, housed on your main hub site. You can gain permission to market to your social media network and contacts when you can build a level of trust through content sharing and engagement. It’s really the ultimate two step advertising, only perhaps now it’s three step – meet and engage in social media, lead to content elsewhere, content elsewhere presents the opportunity to buy. To generate leads through social media marketing, you need to view your activity on social sites like an effective headline for an ad – the purpose of the headline is not to sell, but to engage and build know, like and trust – it’s the ultimate permission based play when done correctly.

One glaring exception to this softer approach for some folks is twitter search. I believe you can use twitter search to locate people in your area who are asking for solutions and complaining about problems you can solve and reach out to them directly with a bit of a solution pitch. People who are talking publicly about needing something are offering a form of permission and can be approached as more of warmed lead. The same can also be said for LinkedIn Answers – if someone asks if “anyone knows a good WordPress designer”, I think you can move to convincing them that you are indeed a great WordPress designer.

5) Learn – One of the hangups I encounter frequently from people just trying to get started in social media marketing is the paralysis formed when they stare blankly at twitter wondering what in the world to say. The pressure to fill the silence can be so overwhelming that they eventually succumb and tweet what they had for lunch. If you find yourself in this camp, I’m going to let you off the hook – you don’t have to say anything to get tremendous benefit from social media participation. If I did nothing more than listen and occasionally respond when directly engaged, I would derive tremendous benefit from that level of participation. In fact, if you are just getting started this is what you should do before you ever open your 140 character mouth. Set up an RSS reader and subscribe to blogs, visit social bookmarking sites like BizSugar and delicious and read what’s popular, create custom twitter searches for your brand, you competitors, and your industry, and closely follow people on twitter who have a reputation for putting out great content. And then just listen and learn. If you do only this you will be much smarter about your business and industry than most and you may eventually gain the knowledge and confidence to tap the full range of what’s possible in the wild and wacky world of social media marketing.

John is a 26-year professional in the franchise industry. He has been a franchisee, a franchise executive and an advocate/consultant to the public and to dozens of franchise companies. He is the founder and managing partner of Wilson Associates and can be reached at docfranchise@gmail.com. or direct office 480.838.1641

What? LinkedIN as a Sales Funnel?

I know that there are many frustrated franchise sales and development types out there who use LinkedIn. After several months or a year or two on it they are wondering what all of the ruckus is about? In all their time on LinkedIn they haven't generated one lead.

What's the problem? Well, the problem is that they are not using it effectively. They haven't discovered effective lead generation techniques.

LinkedIN is not about the most connections necessarily. Contrary to many users’ beliefs, whoever has the most connections does not win (unless your only reason for being on LinkedIn is to get a lot of connections). In addition to friends, family and secondary business contacts on LinkedIN, all of whom are mirrors of you and your services. I desire several hundred targeted connections of people interested in me, my services/products, or helping promote my business. Perhaps this happen-chance method is great for Twitter but LinkedIN has much to much content about you (or potentially) for it to be a drive-by experience.

I’m going to share with you 3 lead generation techniques that I regularly recommend. However, they are not all equally effective. If you are in the position where you will only implement one technique, then focus on the first technique I discuss.

Lead Generation Technique #1 – Groups

I've helped many people with their LinkedIn profiles and one of the biggest mistakes I see is ineffective use of groups. First, people are only involved in a few groups. Secondly, the groups they’re involved with are personal professional groups filled with people who do the exact same thing they do. From experience it is good to have a few of these to refer to; to determine what the rest of the market is talking about and perhaps pick up on a new method or technology. Rarely do they provide you with potential leads or even (in all sincerity) great strategic alliances. Why? The others in those groups, regardless of how different you may be, still view you as a competitor.

Ask yourself, who is my target market? What are their interests? (Jobs, careers, professions other than yours, executive improvement and skill sets, etc.) Join those groups – LinkedIn allows you to be a part of 50 groups at the free level.

Be active within those groups - in the right way! Post content that references their interests and not your sales message. You'll be labeled a spammer and discussion board leaders dislike having them in their LinkedIn groups. So, what is active in a good way? Start by answering questions – whether they are directly or indirectly related to your business. Ask thought-provoking questions around the issues and problems addressed by your products and services. If you start a discussion, make sure you follow-up with it and respond to comments.

Become an authority within groups. Share important news articles from other sources that relate to the needs of the group. Remember, not everything has to be about you. Meet their needs. Be a good discussion group member. Having said that, if you write a blog, submit your new blog posts as news articles to your groups. NOTE: Post these in the new section of the discussion group and NOT in "New discussions" or questions. Now, if you post a discussion question relative to the blog post, you can add the link to the bottom of the post as additional information, but the discussion item should be able to stand on its own. I think it is very rude when people essentially just say, “read my blog post, here’s the link, don’t forget to comment!”

Finally, become the authority in the group. Normally you cannot do this within an existing group. Of course many groups are so universal in scope they have sub-groups. Typically this is not true. You become the expert by starting your own group. Just remember, if you start a group, make it interesting to a wider audience than just you. You come across much less salesy if you create greater scope. If your franchise is a "Fast & Fresh" Mexican Food concept then add additional restaurant territory along with it. A title like, "Future Franchise Food Concepts" might d the trick. Be creative. Ask other creative types. Often indirectly related to your business is much more appealing and still allows you control of the forum.


Do Not recreate the wheel...er...forum! You may have to research what groups are already out there in the LinkedIN world. If you find another similar group but it has very few members, I would recommend going forward with your offering as long as you have a more compelling proposition. This requires some work as you can see. The work involves promoting it in other groups where there would be potential members, pre-inviting LinkedIn connections to join, and using your email list or sales database outside LinkedIn to promote it.

Something else to consider - you want to get the group growing as quickly. No one will initially find it on their own. On LinkedIN group search results are listed in order of group size and there are a ton of tiny groups. If you prepare you won't get lost in the jumble. If you do start out slow and build more slowly just be prepared to get lost in the search results until you have enough members to move you into the higher echelons.

Lead Generation Technique #2 – Introductions

The introduction feature of LinkedIN is rarely used. This is terribly unfortunate. If you know the LinkedIN story you'd know it is one of the main reasons that LinkedIn was created.

The free level of LinkedIn allows you to have 5 Introductions active simultaneously. The introduction feature is basically traditional prospect research made easy. Most members allow their connections to see their other connections. So, spend time reviewing all of your 2nd degree connections to find people of interest and request an introduction. The advanced people search will show you people who are 3 degrees away. Again, when you find someone of interest, request an introduction!

Lead Generation Technique #3 – Become an Expert


The Answers forum in LinkedIn is not just a place for you to look for advice. You should consider it your own professional forum. It is a place where you can become an “expert” in the eyes of the entire LinkedIn Community. Further, it’s also a place where people self-identify themselves as being interested in and wanting specific products, advice, and services.

When someone asks a question in the Answers section, they can specify up to 2 categories that are related to the question. After the question has been open for 6 days, the questioner can then identify one of the answers as the “best answer”. The person whose answer is selected then gets an expert point in those categories. Pick a couple of categories to regularly monitor in order to find people asking for your business and to answer questions that could score you expert points.

So John, what's next?

Well frankly group, that's my coaching for the day. In all sincerity, the rest is up to you and your promotional, marketing and sales skills. Generate the activity above and you will interact with many people you wouldn’t have otherwise found. Those are your leads and strategic alliances. Connect with those people. Begin building relationships with those people. And, ultimately sell to those people.

I hope you find this useful -

John is a 26-year professional in the franchise industry. He has been a franchisee, a franchise executive and an advocate/consultant to the public and to dozens of franchise companies. He is the founder and managing partner of Wilson Associates and can be reached at docfranchise@gmail.com. or direct office 480.838.1641

Most likely if you are over 30 and live in the USA, you have lived a life that has been in support of franchise chain businesses.

I recall the drives between my house in the Chicago area down to my grandmothers' in St. Louis and Terre Haute, Indiana and counting all the Howard Johnson's and all the Shell Stations and all the Aamco Transmission shops in the towns as we passed through. But mostly I waited for the "big 3," McDonald's, Dairy Queen and A&W Root Beer stands! Reflecting back most of those succeeded (at least for as long as they wished); some of them failed, but all of them fought passionately for the my attention.

Today I realize there are hundreds of factors that dictate a franchise’s success. Master your franchisee training but fail to maximize the value of your territory and that franchisee is in for a world of hurt.

This leads me to my point. The branding of any franchise continues to be one of the most essential ingredients in a franchise’s profitability; from the corporation down to the single unit.

I can still remember walking into an Applebees in Long Beach for the first time. There was just something authentic about it. It "felt" like the local or neighborhood bar & grill. Clearly, someone in their corporate offices had gotten all the small details right and the result was a memorable franchise experience.

Today I realize that branding is often the difference between whether a franchise rises into the public consciousness or if that business, as good as its products and service may be, drifts away unsuccessfully into oblivion.

Janet Muhleman, the president of re:group, has gathered together her belief set on branding in the latest edition of Franchising World. Here are her seven tips to improve your franchises branding:

1. Listen to your customers

2. Tell your brand story, what you believe in, why you do what you do.

3. Create a brand personality that people relate to and want to engage with.

4. Make believers out of your franchisees and their front-line staff so they can live the brand.

5. Engage your customers consistently and openly at every possible touch point.

6. Measure your performance and be prepared to embrace change and innovate to stay current and relevant.

7. And finally, as you listen to your customers also remember to be genuine and lead with your heart.... Now, re-read - Return to No. 1!

Branding is local for most businesses in North America. You have to convince YOUR customer (and not just the universal position) of who you are and what you do...so stop the self defeating self-talk about the company and what they should do. YOU OWN YOUR MARKET.

I welcome your thoughts on this topic - Do you have anything else to add?

John is a 26-year professional in the franchise industry. He has been a franchisee, a franchise executive and an advocate/consultant to the public and to dozens of franchise companies. He is the founder and managing partner of Wilson Associates and can be reached at docfranchise@gmail.com. or direct office 480.838.1641

As a small business owner, you know how difficult it can be to compete for one of the ten hot spots on the first page in search engine rankings. Large companies have the resources, traffic and inbound links to be recognized as trusted and therefore rank higher. Long tail keywords with geographic targets is a great way to get started in the local search however we know that keywords/on page SEO only accounts for roughly 25% of the ranking process. Local searches have become increasingly popular as when people begin their search, many are looking to weed out the large companies and seek local businesses. Creating and/or claiming your business on the local directories in conjunction with long tail geographic keywords will improve your local rankings. With so many to choose from, which ones are best?

While it is inviting to create or claim your business on every directory, this can be counterproductive as these sites rank very high and will push your actual site to the 2nd or even 3rd page. The following is the top sites to create your local business listing.

5 Top Local Directories

1. Google Local. This I find to be the best as you are required to have a Google user account however once you create and then create your listing, it provides statistics such as impressions, actions (# of driving directions requested, #of clicks to your website). Listings are set up quickly and an automated call is placed to verify your information through a pin that they send.

2. Yahoo Local. As with Google local, you do need a Yahoo account to set up your company. They will verify the information via review of a human as they term this and once verified, the listing is submitted.

3. Bing/MSN. Quite similar to Google and Yahoo however despite reading that you can verify via telephone, I am set up to receive a postcard with a pin number on it.

4. Yellowpages.com. Free listings tend to get lost on their site as paid listings will rank higher for each category but on the search engines, your site will be recognized and rank well on the search engines.

5. LinkedIn. Creating a company page further enhances your rankings on the search engines. Traffic to the site may not be the most abundant but it is another way to rank.

These are the top online directories. Others such as Superpages and Kudzu will increase your rankings on search engines as well. If you are unsure and want to add your company listing to additional sites, be sure to do a search on them to see if others have provided feedback. This will help to determine if their site is the right place for your company.

Be sure to be consistent with your company description as many times your listings will appear one after another on searches and it can be confusing if you promote different parts of your business on each site.

Any additional directories that have worked for you? Ring me up and let me know!