🕒: Five minutes
The use of lead generation portals by franchisors has been around for more than 20 years now and has become essential for the success of any franchise development strategy. But why are they still relevant today?
A recent study has outlined that most franchisors are subscribing to between one-to-three portals each year. This highlights how franchisors value franchise portals as a valuable addition to their marketing strategy, and as an important means of generating franchise leads.
Indeed, franchise portals have long been touted as generating a very consistent and high volume of leads.
But do they remain the most cost-efficient way of generating franchise leads?
Lead generation sources as of 2019
As per a recent report from FranConnect, franchise portals remain the largest source of franchise leads, representing 32% of the total franchise leads generated through the year.
From this report, it is evident that online sources continue to lead over offline sources, representing more than 50% of the total leads generated in 2018.
In-house Marketing vs Portals
Over the last couple of years, there has been a slow shift in internet-based lead generation efforts to more proactive in-house elements. These include improved search engine optimisation, pay-per-click campaigns, and the utilisation of social media. All of these are underlined by the need for franchisors to improve their own websites to improve lead generation.
However, the franchise market remains a niche market where the competition is still very high and this results in a much higher lead acquisition cost for many franchisors when compared to franchise portals.
Why is this?
Portals benefit from economies of scale compared to individual franchisor websites.
In fact, whilst the average cost-per-lead for franchise portals is floating around $30-$50/lead, franchise-specific website leads are generally priced well in excess of the $100/lead mark, (depending on their industry) in order to generate relevant leads for their franchise.
Thus, franchise portals have proven to provide a significant cost advantage compared to individual franchisor websites, and sometimes by a factor of three or four times the cost.
The difference in cost comes from the fact that many early-stage prospects still don’t know what kind of business they want to invest in, never mind which specific franchise brand. A portal offers the prospective franchisee hundreds of brands to choose from - an individual franchisor simply cannot compete with this.
By leveraging their broad reach across search engines, offering users lots of choices, and having the technical and marketing scale for lead generation, portals remain popular from when they first appeared in the late 1990s to the present day.
Tip: When comparing franchise portals, ask whether they offer a pay-per-lead model.
Some of the available franchise portals now offer a pay-per-lead (PPL) model which is a great way to leverage franchise portals regarding any franchise lead generation strategies. This model allows franchisors to be in control of their budget by only paying for the leads they get, unlike the flat-rate subscription model.