I've read some posts on various industry portals that state that SEO is a better alternative to find franchise prospects than the franchise search engine portals (all well known to those in the industry).
Let's take a close look at these suppositions and what I call unfounded fear being driven in the minds of franchise sales executives.
Are we going to let an article change our behavior that has proven results? We need to look behind this.
One comment on a franchise group page came right out and basically said in effect that "internet franchise search portals" are dead. To me it's irresponsible to make such a bold statement. There is absolutely no hard metrics to make this statement. In fact it appears to be self-promoting. Is it relevant that the declaration was made by a group of people that are trying to get their audience to use their SEO services? Nothing worse than self-promoting declarations ungrounded in science.
I don't believe that lead generation portal advertising is dead -- and not by a long-shot.
It's true -- all franchisors want to direct prospects direct their websites. And social media is one way to do this. Any franchisor not implementing practices and programs to capture this kind of lead from the deep dark sea of prospects is missing out on growth opportunities.
In my view social media is part of a mix and to not drive leads through the franchise search portals is a huge mistake in spending. The franchisor that dismisses it as "dead" shows a lack of respect for the science behind lead generation. They do studies and their conversion rates are verifiable. Conversion metrics are proven.
It's true that brokers buy leads. But is this inherently bad? I find it rewarding to work with brokers. By and large they do a good job working with their clients to match them with franchises that will lead to fulfilling business lives.
But there are more reasons not to ignore the portals.
Users of portals do so at early stages of thinking about owning a business. They get to wander around and the media form becomes aspirational. Decisions get made over longer periods of time that that which social media is designed to prompt. To spend all the money on SEO is unwise because that is extremely costly as well and with wise spending on the portals one is "fishing where all the fish swim". They may not all want what we have to offer -- but at least our wares are for sale in the same marketplace.
Second, It's hard to know exactly what the user does, but for sure they go to the portals and the instincts of people are to open up another window and go to the franchisor's website. That would seem to the franchisor as a direct connection between the consumer and the website via SEO. But it's not. The lead came from the franchise search portal.
In fact the biggest challenge of social media (twitter, facebook, et al) from a consumer's perspective is that it is promotional in nature, and the users of such media, smell it and call it out. It's pure promotion and users frequently run for the hills. This is a truth spoken of by a great leader in social media at socialmediaexaminer.com. Don't be fooled, social media is no panacea to playing difficult odds in lead generation. It is just one avenue for spending and getting message out.
While the gauntlet may be thrown down by the pure SEO types, the fight is far from over. The franchisor -- perhaps with very few exceptions -- is best served with a mix of media forms -- and using the franchise search portals while the jury is out.
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Tom states: "There is absolutely no hard metrics to make this statement."
Tom, it is relatively easy to track with Alexa the comparative scores of the franchise portals - all have been losing traffic.
I don't know any franchisor who's making their franchise sales numbers with SEO.
In fact, I don't know if SEO can work as a primary leadgen tactic.
What would be a long-tail key word phrase to signify buying intent of a prospect who wants to buy a Hardee's franchise?
According to the 2013 Franchise Update Annual Franchise Development Report, the internet was the largest producer of franchise sales of those surveyed, at 42%. Within the internet category, no source was noted more than franchise portals as being the top source for franchise sales, at 43%. Only 31% recognized SEO as their top source. Its also worth noting that the 43% is up from 32% in the 2012 report. Portals are not going away. Just the opposite. They continue to prove to be a valuable resource.
Interesting post!
For the record, it should never be an either / or for lead generation. SEO (meaning organic search ranking and Paid search via retargeting and adwords) is is VERY effective and essential form of lead generation. Almost 100% of franchise buyers use search engines to do research and learn about brands. Saying SEO doesn't work is flying in the face of research and results that say otherwise. We use BOTH SEO and portals for every client we manage lead generation for and SEO accounts for one of the highest close rates of all lead sources.
Portals are also effective but as many people have commented, come with some real challenges. There are essentially two types of portals today - those that work hard to help generate buyers and those that just generate leads. Portals have fairly gotten a lot of criticism for some unethical practices over the years. We like portals that have adapted to align with the way people buy and research franchises today, especially Franchise Gator's new site and Franchise Solutions flexible lead generation tactics.
In general, it takes 3-4 times the number of leads to close a portal leads (300-400 per close) as a company website lead that comes from SEO which can close 1 in 75 or 1 in 100. Portal leads have closes but take more calls and a lot more work to sift through. Call response time (within 5 mins) is essential as the average portal lead fills out 4 forms at one time and only the first caller earns a conversation. Portal leads take more explanation than a company website lead or a broker lead, 100
That's one reason people use brokers - essentially 'highly paid sifters' who often use portals for their own lead generation.
Based on my experience generating several thousand leads a month for a number of clients, I can say that people who buy franchises that originate as a portal lead are not always 'early in the process' as this post states. That's a myth that the portals themselves spread. Portals get search traffic from all types of visitors, each at different stages in the sales funnel. Franchise Buyers are often further along in the process and typically opt in when they have settled on an industry or a specific brand.
For instance, once of our clients was on Undercover Boss and we closed a couple of deals - one came in from a search lead through the company website and the other came in through a franchise portal (franchise.com).
They were both the same type of online buyer at the same point in the funnel and one saw a search ranking for the portal that triggered a click. The other clicked on a ranking for the company's franchise website. Both were using Google to to research.
In another instance, we have a carpet cleaning client who gets high quality leads from Franchise Gator on a regular basis. In tracking IP addresses and digging with Eric Bell from Gator to figure out where closes come from, we see that Gator ranks on Page 1 organically for 'Carpet Cleaning Franchise' and gets organic, SEO traffic for this term specifically. In other cases, we see closes from portals where the portal ad page is optimized well for a brand-related search and some number of portal leads come from brand-searches.
No matter what, portals are not dead and should be part of the mix. There are better lead sources for smart franchisors with the right (seo friendly) websites that have enough content depth but we always keep portals as part of our mix and they do contribute to the number of closed deals.
Eric, that is the what survey showed.
But, for the last 4-5 years all the major franchise portals have been losing traffic.
Even franchisegator.com has been losing traffic.
Thomas, consider your claim about "Carpet Cleaning Franchise" and its rank.
Franchisegator.com doesn't rank on the first page for that keyword phrase for me.
Some other aggregators do, some have PPC ads that are keyed to that expression. (Indeed, some aggregators look like they ranking organically because google is so bad identifying paid search - which is why they got a nasty gram from the FTC.)
Because search is so dependent on context, you cannot expect what you see in your search to be the same as anyone else's.
Michael,
I just checked to make sure - we track SERP ranking for the brands we work with and Gator is ranked at #4 today and has been in the top 6 for the past 90 days (not counting PPC ads). It had been #1 before that. Brand - ChemDry, Coit, Oxi and Stanley Steemer are also fairly high from time to time. You might be logged into a Google email account which will deliver search results more geared to your online habits or likes that a typical user would see if you don't see it at that spot.
You are right about PPC searches - we are using paid search more often these days to help increase visibility for brands. The line between paid and organic is thinner than it has ever been and there is far less quality difference in leads from PPC vs leads from organic searches in the pipeline I pay attention to.
As for portals loosing traffic, that may be true. The measure of any lead source's quality is just how effective is it. Does it have quality visitors who opt in and what percentage get how far (and ultimately close) in the sales process?
Portals can improve, no doubt. People are also closing more deals from some portals than they had been and there are clearly closeable deals in the mix of portal leads. Would I say all you need is a company website and a portal budget? No way. Are portals part of a successful mix? I think they should be and I'm happy to see some portals trying to produce better results.
Michael, no doubt that the traffic on the portals has taken a step backward, but that's not a great indication as to how well the portals are or are not working. When I first started with Franchise Gator in 2005, we had 750 customers, drove between 500k and 750k unique visitors on a monthly basis, and our Alexa ranking was under 10k. A lot happened when the economy turned. For starters, the pool of potential franchise buyers shrunk a great deal. Nothing affected our end results more than this. Additionally, many of our customers had to pull back their advertising efforts to make it through the downturn. We also saw a lot of our customers go out of business. For all those reasons and more, our customer base continually shrank. As did our traffic. Traffic and customer base have always gone hand in hand. Less pages to index, fewer options for visitors, etc...
And before anyone suggests that fewer customers speaks clearly to the demise of portals, I point again to the statistics I noted before. Its just not true. What is true is that the landscape has changed, and I think the dust has finally settled. Our traffic and customer count has remained steady for a few years now. We'll never get to over 700 customers again, and that's fine. We wouldn't be able to be successful for all of them at once. For those that are still using portals, there is a great amount of success to be had.
(By the way, Michael, Alexa does not measure traffic, but rather it ranks sites compared to one another. A lower Alexa score does not automatically mean traffic has diminished. It could also mean that other sites have seen more traffic as your own traffic has remained steady.)
Thomas Scott has hit on a lot of good points. Nowadays a lot more work needs to go into a successful portal campaign. Response time and follow up procedures are paramount. As is having the stamina (and sales personnel) to call 100 portal leads in an effort to find 10 or 20 worthy candidates. I'm very up front about this with our customers, and I feel confident in saying that the sales reps with most other portals also work hard to set expectations appropriately. We never purport portals as a silver bullet. In fact, when discussing the changes the portals have seen over the years, our ability to better coach our customers might be the most important.
Eric -
Portals are the lifeblood for franchise inquiries for some franchisors.
You're right the www.Alexa.com is a traffic rank measurement, which is useful for comparing franchise web portals traffic ranks.
A better measure for franchise web portals is to share their Google Analytics and let franchisors use this information.
The surveys filled out by franchisors on lead source, cost per lead, cost per sale, etc... are notoriously inaccurate.
Because we know many franchise sales teams do a crappy job of tracking franchise marketing activities and frankly the task of completing survey is not important to them or their administrative assistant.
Joe,
How much is and isn't tracked is actually discussed in the report. Almost a third of those surveyed, for instance, don't even track cost-per-lead.
As it pertains to this discussion, I don't think franchise portals would get more credit than they deserve. Just the opposite if anything.
Eric -
Franchise marketing web portals could be transparent if they shared their Google Analytics with franchisors.
Don't you think?
Eric says: " I don't think franchise portals would get more credit than they deserve. Just the opposite if anything."
That is interesting.
Why do you say that, Eric?
Joe -
What information specifically would you like to see from GA?
Michael -
I say that because leads from portals are the easiest to track. They come directly from the portal, whereas a lead from SEO, SEM, or a social media channel can all come in the same form - that of a lead from the franchisor's website. If there's a lead with an unknown source, I just don't see it being attributed to a portal for that reason.
And for the most part that is accurate. The exception is the case where a prospect uses the portal to learn about a concept, doesn't complete the form on the portal, but rather heads to the franchisor's website and completes the form there. In most cases, the portal won't be credited for this lead. (Advances are finally being made in this area with more widespread implementation of pixel tracking.)
Eric -
If I have a QSR landing page I'd like the Google Analytics for that page and for the site.
Thanks Eric.
Makes sense.
I think most of what the portals are doing is creating inquiries and not leads. Lots of inquiries may never turn out to cross the threshold into a lead.
Joe,
Google Analytics covers a lot of data. I would need to know what data you (or anyone) would like to see that would be helpful to them so I know what report to pull. Demographics? Visits? Time on site, to name a few.
Michael,
What you wrote is probably the most important thing to understand about portals. You're absolutely right, their inquiries. You can't really expect anything more than that when you consider the prospect only read about a page of text on your opportunity. There are nuances to working inquiries vs qualified leads. Anyone knows how to work a qualified lead, but can you take an inquiry and make him/her a qualified lead? A franchisor that is good at that will succeed with the portals. I have conducted webinars focusing on how to be successful with franchise portals, and most of the presentation covers this topic specifically.
Eric, happy to publish any presentations or articles you have on the difference between inquiries and leads.
The topic be will the focus of an upcoming Capital Area Franchise Association meeting in September - so timely advice.
Michael,
The presentation I put together is titled "Success With Franchise Portals" and a copy of it can be found here: http://cc.readytalk.com/play?id=8m265g. If you would like me to create a presentation not solely focused on portals, but more on the topic of inquiries vs leads, just say the word. I appreciate your interest.