Franchise Update Magazine Issue III, 2011 | Page 38

Grow Market Lead

Challenge
the pros
“What are you doing to
create a compelling,
response-driven recruitment
website for your brand?”
Brian Spindel
President and COO
PostNet International

Things are moving fast
in new technologies and
the ways people are using
them to communicate. As
a franchise organization,
we continue to do our best to keep up
with the changes in technology and how
franchise prospects are using it to research
franchise opportunities.
Increasingly, this includes not only
using industry best practices to develop
a compelling website that urges a prospect to inquire/respond, but also the
best ways to increase traffic using social
media, SEO, PPC, and integrating all of
our consumer and franchising efforts to
get the best results. For example, to get
a franchise prospect to “like” your brand
on Facebook is very valuable to keep and
build interest, and more effective than the
older “drip” email campaigns.
It’s also important to use Google Analytics to understand what content is most
important and interesting to prospects
who visit our website, and to narrow
the places or information on the site
that create distraction. In other words,
the purpose of the site is to convert visitors into suspects/leads. So content that
drives that behavior should be improved
and enhanced, and anything else on the
site needs to be evaluated and studied.
Another best practice is creating a clear
and logical path for visitors that leads
them to respond. This can be done with
numbers, letters, colors, etc., but it should
always be clear what you want the visitor
to do next. Also, from a validation standpoint, online reputation management is
becoming very important, if not critical.
Ongoing monitoring and adjustments
to what you’re doing are important. The

36

“cycle of innovation” is always spinning.
We tweak, measure, study, and then tweak
again. We are always learning, and the
pace of change has accelerated so much
that this is now done regularly. I remember when you would launch a new site
and be good for two or three years, and
we changed more than most at that rate.
Now we watch the usage weekly and make
changes at least monthly.
Today, a franchisor needs not only to
really think about having a solid responsedriven website, but also about connecting
all the digital marketing and advertising
“dots” to make the website effective.
Projects we are working on now include
optimizing our sites for tablet devices,
as well as a mobile version of the site
so franchise prospects can easily learn
about our franchise program on their
smartphone—and, of course, respond!
Rob Goggins
Vice President of Franchise
Development
Great Clips

The Great Clips franchise
development website was
originally designed to
self-educate prospective
franchisees. We included
a detailed map with territory availability, franchisee testimonial videos, and
an SEO-enhanced blog. We focused on
aligning brand elements with our sa