Nicole Hudson, a Franchising Digital Marketing Consultant & Principal of Inbound Lead Solutions and Ryan Vaspra, the Vice President of Media at Aviatech, show case in Franchising World how Franchise Development Sales teams can increase lead generation and grow their franchise opportunities brand by participating in social selling and connect with potential franchise business owners on LinkedIn.

1. 68 FRANCHISING WORLD JULY 2013
LinkedIn Company Pages:
Optimized for Franchise
Development
By Nicole Hudson and Ryan Vaspra
MARKETING
According to the 2012 Annual Franchise
Development Report from Franchise Update Media
Group, an estimated 46 percent of a company’s
franchise development marketing budget is allocated
to public relations, search engine optimization and
social media. The result is that an estimated 39
percent of awarded franchise licenses in 2011 were
attributed to SEO and social media.
Public relations effectiveness has historically been
difficult to quantify, but has become an increasingly
important competency as awareness grows of the
value of public relations content that is optimized for
online use. When this medium is tailored for search
engine optimization by promoting PR content in
online channels like LinkedIn, it has the capacity to
show measurable return on investment by driving
engagement in social media and generating inbound
links, which influence page authority and rank for SEO.
An estimated 39 percent
of awarded franchise
licenses in 2011 were
attributed to SEO and
social media.
Behavior and research
patterns of how franchise
candidates are educating
themselves and
communicating with your
brand are evolving.

2. FRANCHISING WORLD JULY 2013 69
Nick Powills, CFE, chief brand strategist at No Limit
Agency, a public relations firm specializing in franchising
said “Brands should no longer silo communications. PR,
social media, marketing and advertising must work together
in order to provide maximum value for each medium. While
communications in silos is challenging to quantify the
singular value, when impressions are spread across multiple
channels, the results are maximized. Lead generation is
not about a magic moment, rather many magic moments
merged together and repeatedly.”
Franchise organizations know that social media is
becoming more important as both a communication tool
in the sales process and a conversion channel for lead
generation. Spending on social media for franchise
development rose in both 2012 and 2013. The social media
channel that is garnering the most interest from franchise
executives and could provide huge dividends for the
franchise sales community is LinkedIn.
People join LinkedIn to showcase their careers, work
expertise, and find content, information, individuals or
business opportunities that advance their professional lives.
Also, when someone visits LinkedIn, the person is most likely
in a business-focused mindset, helping business’ content
perform inherently better. In a recent study of more than
5,000 businesses, HubSpot found that traffic from LinkedIn
generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74
percent, almost three times higher (277 percent) than both
Twitter (0.69 percent) and Facebook (0.77 percent).
Paul Litterer, the senior sales executive of national
accounts and franchise partners at HubSpot said, “LinkedIn
is a great place to start online lead generation on several
fronts. You can monitor and participate in groups that
represent your industry or groups that contain the right
prospects for your industry. Using topics covered in such
groups, you can start to strategize your own online marketing
program around the questions and concerns of people
within your market.”
How does a brand, and specifically franchise
development, take advantage of LinkedIn company pages to
showcase the business-ownership opportunity?
1. Create a Company Page. This is a free tool that
will help you craft a better corporate brand and further
communicate your brand story and value propositions to
your target audience.
2. Main Header Images. Take advantage of
company pages’ new expanded header image (646×220
pixels) functionality. Add a variety of images that reflect a
range of business priorities, lifestyle and representations
of your ideal franchise candidate, marketing campaigns or
promotions.
3. Banners. Create banners that show the vibrant
nature of your business and culture. Showcase the franchise
owners and employees that a candidate will engage
with throughout the franchise ownership process from
investigation, to meet-the-team day to training and the
business launch.
4. Products and Services. Build your “Products and
Services” pages to showcase both the services you offer the
consumer and the franchise ownership opportunity. Craft
this content to be rich in the keywords and phrases that are
defined in the brand’s development SEO strategy. There is
also the opportunity to greatly increase lead conversion on
the Products and Services pages. In the eight areas where a
prospect can convert into the sales funnel, make sure these
are correctly optimized with images, calls to action, content,
and landing pages that link into your customer relationship
management and to automated marketing programs such as
HubSpot. (Continued on page 70)

3. 70 FRANCHISING WORLD JULY 2013
5. Recommendations. Don’t be shy about asking
for recommendations of your products. Develop campaigns
that recommendations from your customers of the services
your franchise provides and ask your top validators to
provide recommendations on being a franchise owner.
6. Posting Updates. One of the many “silver bullets”
in this channel is content curation. This is repurposing all
of your public relations articles, both past and present,
nationally and locally. Share your blog articles and reshare
content from other sources that educates your audience on
your brand, how to be a business owner and franchising.
The key to success is to make sure you have optimized these
posts for SEO, unique calls to action and landing pages.
This sets the stage for conversion into the sales funnel
and placement into a lead nurturing campaign as further
investigation of your franchise opportunity continues.
7. Engagement. Post status updates, share blog
posts and curate content that speaks to your audience and
then be there to continue the conversation when responses
occur. It can’t be all about your brand. The ideal candidates
that are looking to purchase a franchise are interested in
very specific things: entrepreneurship, career change,
business funding and planning, SBA loans, 401(k) rollovers,
work-life balance and franchising as a whole. These are the
themes you need to incorporate into your brand and content
strategy.
Service Brands International is a great example of
a franchisor using LinkedIn for franchise development.
The company has a family of brands − Molly Maid, Mr.
Handyman and ProTect Painters − all engaging in company
pages that market the franchise opportunity while the
parent company page integrates all the brands. The affiliate
marketing strategy that has been applied to the products
and services pages can be a powerful mix to generate
awareness and secure brand real estate on search engine
results pages.
In March, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions released a case
study on how Service Brands International uses company
pages for franchise development lead generation and SEO.
The results showed, “after 12 months of renewed focus from
the franchise development marketing team on all the brands’
LinkedIn company pages, the Service Brands company page
increased followers by 70 percent; the Mr. Handyman page
by 38 percent; the Molly Maid page by 67 percent; and the
Protect Painters page by 83 percent.”
Lana Khavinson, a senior product manager of company
pages at LinkedIn said, “LinkedIn is committed to supporting
its members as they build communities and develop brands.
As advanced targeting evolves within the LinkedIn network,
franchise companies have a great opportunity to recruit
new employees, find experienced vendors and connect
with professionals that are uniquely qualified to be franchise
owners.”
The behavior and research patterns of how franchise
opportunity candidates are educating themselves and
communicating with your brand are forever evolving. They
are engaging with social media, having conversations, and
consuming content from a variety of channels that need to
be aligned to work in conjunction with your website and other
marketing channels. Take advantage of all the great lead
development tools that LinkedIn has created and connect with
the 2 million-plus members that participate in this business
network.
What are you waiting for? Start your conversation today. n
Nicole Hudson is a digital
marketing consultant and Ryan
Vaspra is vice president of media
services for Aviatech. Hudson
can be reached at 248-808-9922 or
nhudson@inboundleadsolutions.
com and Vaspra at 858-777-5000
and info@aviatech.com.
HUDSON VASPRA
(Continued from page 69)