The article below is an excerpt from AIS Media’s Thomas Harpointner and FON’s W.C. Garth Snider’s white paper, “8 Critical Steps to Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Drive Franchise Sales”. To download the full white paper in PDF format, please click here.

Integrating social media into both your digital and traditional advertising can increase overall response rates and yield a higher return on investment (ROI) from your advertising.

Specifically, integrating a social media strategy into your franchise portal advertising is important to fully optimize and take advantage of social media. The most reputable franchise lead generation portals (of which Franchise Opportunities Network is one such company) are constantly searching for ways to generate more value for their franchise clients.

Collaborating with the portals on a social media strategy is where much of the “low hanging fruit” in online lead generation resides.

• Add social media calls-to-action (CTAs) into your traditional advertising to encourage readers to engage with your franchise offering online outside of the traditional website. As to your franchise portal advertising, make certain that your brochure on the website is replete with CTA’s.
• Publish the number of Facebook Fans, Facebook Likes, and/or Twitter followers to help enhance your brand’s credibility and provide third party endorsements.
• Again, integrate social media into other online marketing efforts such as email marketing campaigns and develop dedicated landing pages to help increase search engine rankings and automate word-of-mouth marketing.
• Create advertising campaigns that encourage content sharing.
• Direct readers to an offer-specific web page (landing page) or a franchise development website instead of the franchise’s website home page. Doing so will improve your ability to track and optimize the performance of the advertisement.