A franchise development marketing campaign uses a technical and multi-faceted strategy created to attract potential franchise leads and convert them into new franchisees. But how do you know if your campaign is working? Measuring the right franchise KPIs is a start.
With reliable and measurable data, you can better monitor a campaign’s performance and adjust your strategy as needed.
Setting goals around a campaign can let you know how its performance is going in an understandable way.
While you obviously have a budget and goals, those goals usually equal total units sold by a certain time. But that end number isn’t the only important metric to focus on in the process.
So, what should you be measuring within a campaign? How does it translate to your brand’s success in recruiting more franchisees? We will take a look at some important KPIs and how to measure them below.
Funneling Leads
One place we can begin to look for key benchmarks within a campaign is in your own funnel.
Looking here can answer certain questions: What leads are going into the funnel? What does the sales funnel look like from the time a lead comes in to when a franchise disclosure document is shared with them? How many advance to a discovery day? How many of these go on to sign?
By understanding the funnel and the data within it, we can see where the biggest opportunities are using a data-driven approach.
The number of leads generated is a fundamental metric of a franchise development marketing plan and it reflects the reach and attractiveness of your marketing campaigns. A steady or increasing number of leads indicates that your marketing efforts are drawing interest from potential franchisees.
Quality Matters
While having leads is a great start, you need to gauge the quality of leads your campaign is attracting.
Are these the leads you’re looking for in your campaign? Are they likely to move on to the next step in the process? Lead quality is an important metric to determine your campaign’s effectiveness.
A campaign can gather 500 leads, but if none of those leads is able to afford the investment, what does it really matter? The lead qualification rate measures the percentage of leads that meets your criteria for a potential franchisee. High-quality leads are more likely to convert, so this metric helps in assessing the effectiveness of your targeting strategies.
This is where CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, along with the first-party data stored within them, come in handy. CRMs are the best tool in determining whether a lead is qualified.
The goal is to fill the funnel with qualified leads and make sure we’re meeting a conversion rate that can get you to the total sales you need.
Conversion Metrics
The definition of a lead conversion can vary between brands.
Is it as simple as filling out a form on your website, which provides important information about your prospect? Is it the rate of those who go from lead to making it to discovery day? Or is it something else?
Determining this and communicating that to your team and your agency are crucial in determining conversion metrics that make sense to your brand.
These metrics help determine whether your marketing efforts have been successful and show a campaign’s nurturing strategy effectiveness.
Another metric to monitor in the process is the discovery day to signed agreement percentage, which is a metric that indicates the effectiveness of your discovery day program.
CPL and CPS – True Value
The total amount of money you invest into franchise development – brokers, advertising, PR, anything spent to get your leads to sign a contract – is calculated into your cost per sale. Your digital and social costs are what make up your cost per lead.
If your goal is to award 20 franchises over the course of the year, everything that goes into that will be divided by those 20 new franchisees, and that’s your cost per sale. The less you’re spending for a qualified lead, the more effective your campaign.
Curious Jane follows industry benchmarks set by the International Franchise Association. Each year, we’re able to see what the averages across franchising are, and our goal is to be lower than that. For 2023, the average CPL was $253 and the average CPS was $11,639.
The success of a franchise development marketing campaign requires an approach that includes a number of measurable data points to gauge effectiveness. By focusing on these key metrics and KPIs, your fran dev team can gain valuable insights into a campaign’s effectiveness and where they can improve.
