How to Generate More Leads for a Franchise Website

You’re sitting at home on the couch and you’re thinking to yourself, “how can I grow my business?” This is a question every business owner, marketer, franchisee, or franchisor is asking themselves. Why? Because it’s not easy. Sales are the lifeblood of any business. So how do we get more of them? Let’s dive in.

First of all, you already know it’s all about your franchise marketing and sales efforts.

What does direct mail get you? More calls. More leads.

What do your pay-per-click ads on Facebook and Google get you? More calls. More leads.

And so on, and so forth.

But what do all of these marketing channels have in common? They all direct traffic to your website. Even direct mailer leads don’t necessarily just call you, they look you up online first.

Pay-per-click ads drive traffic to your website. Your reviews online get your website a click.

Everything you do to market your business drives traffic to your website. With this in mind, there are two ways to increase sales for your business.

How to get more leads from your website

1. You can increase both the amount and the quality of traffic to your website.
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   OR
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2. You can increase the conversion rate of your website.
   
   

Numbers don’t lie, so here’s some basic math to highlight which option is best for business:

Let’s say you spend $1 per click to your website (and that’s conservative depending on where that traffic is coming from), and you get ~1000 people to your website that month, you’d spend $1000.

If your conversion rate is 1-2% (typical for service business websites), you’d win 10-20 leads.

Assuming you can contact them right away, you may close 70% as new customers.

This means you spent $1000 and got 7-14 new customers. If we are optimistic and assume an average ticket price of $500, you make $7000 (at 14 new customers), for a $1000 spend.

That’s a 7x return.

Pretty good! Unrealistic, but good.

Now, you have two options: You can spend another $1000 on ads, and maybe get another 20 leads. Or, you can pay someone to optimize your website and improve your conversion rate (or do it yourself).

If you go with option 1 and spend another $1000 on ads, you may win another 7-14 new customers. If you go with option 2 and increase your conversion rate (even from 2% to 3%) before spending that money you'd win 21 new customers.

But here’s the kicker.

Next month, when you go to spend $2000 on ads, if you didn’t improve your conversion rate the month before, you’ll only get 28 new customers (14 from the first $1000, and 14 from the second $1000). But if you did improve your conversion rate, now your $2000 will get you 42 new customers (3% x $2000 x 70%). That is a 300% increase in customers for only a 100% increase in ad spend.

If that sounded confusing, check out our income calculator and see how much money you could be saving with our Convert sites’ conversion rate guarantee.

The takeaway from all this is: It’s less expensive and more effective to improve your website’s conversion rate than it is to spend money to increase traffic. AND improving your conversion rate makes ALL of your marketing more efficient today and in the future.

How to get a lead generating website

Now that we know that conversion rate optimization is the best way to drive more leads from your website, we need a website that is optimized for conversions.

You have a few options for this:

You can try to build one yourself with our ultimate guide here or you can hire an agency to do it for you.

Here’s the problem with hiring an agency to build your website:

1. Most agencies will charge thousands of dollars to build a website and have zero guarantee regarding your conversion rate.
2. A lot of agencies will focus heavily on either SEO (search engine optimization) or aesthetic.
   
   2a. To be frank, it doesn’t matter how you think your website looks. What matters is how well your website serves your customers and convinces them to use your service. That's what helps make good customer service.
   
   2b. SEO is just another tactic to drive traffic to your website. It is a long-term strategy that can cost thousands of dollars to do well. In addition, nobody can guarantee your website hits page 1 on Google.
   
   
   

OR! You can get a Convert website. Allow us to explain why this is the best option.

Convert Websites - Guaranteed to win you more sales, or it’s free.

Convert is a fully managed website service that guarantees a minimum 4% conversion rate (that’s 2-3X the average conversion rate), or it’s free. In other words, with a Convert website you will win 10% more sales through your website, guaranteed.

If you don’t know what your conversion rate is, you’re flying blind. With a Convert website, your dashboard will show you website performance and provide a breakdown per marketing channel so you can optimize your marketing efforts - it holds us accountable too!

We’re able to offer this guarantee because Convert customers typically see a 6-10% conversion rate, with some as high as 20% (see screenshot below).

How would it affect your business if your marketing was bringing in 2x, 3x, 10x, or even 20x more leads and sales than it currently is, without spending a dime more on your marketing? That’s why Convert is so powerful for your business.

This is a testimonial (unsolicited) from someone after they implemented Convert for their business below.

How Convert websites are designed

Convert websites aren’t designed for you, they’re designed for your customers.

We start by sitting down and having a strategy call with you. In this call we’ll get to know you, your company and your brand.

Then, we run a data analysis on your reviews to find trends in what your customers care about, and use that data to design your website in a way that appeals to them. Reviews are powerful and they help us design a website that appeals to your customers.

Here’s a couple of examples of how reviews can inform website design:

The review above, for example, tells us the customer values prompt service, which is something we would highlight as a benefit on the website.

This review tells us that this customer values professionalism - another benefit to highlight on the website.

To build you a website that is both custom designed for your brand and optimized for converting traffic into leads we use 3 points of data:

1. We use information from your strategy call.
2. Learnings from your reviews.
3. And we consult our data from the thousands of other websites we manage in your industry to inform our decisions.
   
   
   

If you want to learn more about our design process, you can find all 19,000 words of it here: 11 Steps to an Unstoppable Lead-Generation Website (With Live Examples)

SEO for your franchise website

While SEO is NOT the most efficient tactic to get leads to your website, we optimize your website for it nonetheless.

Because Convert websites are designed and structured for multi-location businesses, this works well for businesses with multiple locations, like a franchise. Each individual location will be search engine optimized for the specific geographic location.

All Convert websites include on-page SEO. This means we structure the code and text of your website to be easily readable by Google to help you climb the ranks on search engines.

To give you an idea of what on-page SEO factors Convert provides, see the image below or consult this guide on increasing your Convert website search rankings:

How to set up a franchise website

When we build websites for businesses with multiple locations, we have a proven structure in mind, which we will share with you here.

To begin, each website page will either be shared among all sites or distinct to each franchisee or location website:

1. Pages that are company-wide: these are pages that are shared/used by every location.
2. Pages per location: distinct pages per website, such as a review page or careers page.
3. Pages that could be shared or distinct depending on preference.
   
   
   

To be shared by the entire company, we recommend the following pages:

• The franchise’s homepage: The goal is to sell potential franchisees on why they should join the franchise.
• Legal pages: Privacy policies, terms of use, etc.
  
  
  

For each location we recommend:

• A specific “homepage”: The goal is to sell that franchisees’ services. These can be the same or vary based on location.
• A reviews page: Since reviews are tied to each location, a reviews page will be needed for each franchisee website.
• A Showcase page: Showcasing that location’s portfolio of work and offer visual proof of value.
  
  
  

Depending on your preferences, either per location or to be shared by the company, we suggest:

• Other landing pages: These are dedicated, self contained pages designed to get a visitor to take a specific action such as becoming a lead or giving an email. We recommend these landing pages per location, however, this depends on how much a franchise wants to centralize its marketing efforts. McDonalds, for example, handles the marketing for its franchise owners to ensure brand consistency.
• A blog: We can set up a CMS (content management system) page to make as much content as you want. Please note that we will set up this page, however, will not populate it with content.
• A careers page: This is another landing page, but different enough to stand alone. Having a page on your website, either per location or shared by the company, that showcases your team, culture, and motivates people to apply to your company is a great way to find better staff for your team.
  
  
  

Please note that by using a Convert website you are able to customize these options and we will build it for you. If you have specific questions about how to set up a franchise website, we would be happy to jump on a call.

Tracking leads through your website

With Convert, any leads that call you through your website, request a quote, or otherwise book your services online, get tracked in your Convert dashboard. In states where it’s legal, all calls get recorded as well. You can use this to go back and listen to your phone calls and train staff.

Each location’s homepage can have its own tracking phone number, and dedicated lead capture tool (such as online booking, or requesting a quote), that routes those calls and leads to the Convert dashboard in the NiceJob app for that specific location. This makes it super easy for your individual franchisees to manage and close leads, and track how their individual marketing efforts are converting traffic into those leads. What works in one location may not work in another (for example: the number of people searching for a keyword you’re running Google Ads for is different across locations), so having location-specific tracking is valuable.

If your franchise centralizes your marketing efforts, however, we can use one tracking phone number and lead capture for all locations. The downside of this, is that the franchise would have to handle routing those leads or booking those jobs for its franchisees, and conversion rate tracking would only give an aggregate number, however we can give access to the Google Analytics account we create for your website that can give you a more granular breakdown.

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Connecting Your Website to your Other Software (e.g. CRMs)

NiceJob has a robust list of integration partnerships that allow you to automate your marketing through your website.

Some examples include:
ResponsiBid: A website plugin to help window cleaners allow their websites to automate the bidding process. It supercharges your website from an online brochure into a lead generating and sale closing powerhouse.

Jobber: A field service management software that provides the most efficient way to organize visit scheduling, quotes, invoicing, billing and your team.

Housecall Pro: Makes it easy to schedule, dispatch, estimate, invoice, process payments, get booked online, and communicate with your customers.

FieldPulse: Manage customers, schedule jobs, create estimates and invoices, track employee time and location, and much more!

And over 1000 more, such as ServiceTitan, Quickbooks, Intercom, Zendesk, and Zapier.

See the full list here. If it’s not listed, then it’s likely because we connect to them through Zapier.

We also have an API that can work with whatever software you have. Learn more about that here.

Implementation and billing

We recommend a Convert website for one location first, to show you what we can do, and if you like it and the results, we can build the rest.

Billing is handled via one billing account for the franchise, but in special cases each location in NiceJob can have their own billing account to pay for their location’s share of the monthly cost.

For brand consistency and SEO reasons it is not a good idea for individual franchisees to have their own distinct websites, so making this mandatory for franchisees is recommended, as is centralizing billing.

Pricing

Converts pricing for one location can be found here. Discounts apply for franchises with more than 10 locations, and range as high as up to 25% off for more than 100+ locations.

Contact us today at hello@nicejob.co, or book a demo with us here to get started!