Targeting Franchisees when Money is Not an Option

Every franchise is different. And because of this fact, every franchise’s lead generation process needs to be slightly different than the next. What works for one franchise is going to be different from the next.

However, one truism in franchise lead generation is that we’re all looking for people with money. And the more money the better.

So a central question to the success of online lead generation is, "HOW DO I FIND PEOPLE WITH MONEY?"

The first point I want to make sounds obvious, but it’s impossible to perfectly target people with a certain level of money. Wouldn’t it be great to say, “I only want my ads to be shown to people with over $100,000 in the bank.” Keep dreaming!

If you’re looking for placing ads that reach people with a certain net worth (or similar financial metric) then you’re bound to using a proxy i.e. an advertising strategy or partner that over-indexes on an audience with financial clout.

The most obvious example of this is using a publication that is predominantly read by affluents. If you elect to spend money with a traditional media outlet, you’d likely be met with a media kit that tells you exactly what type of audience they attract in terms of financial clout.

For example, take a look at the WSJ.com audience profile:

They’re very eager (it’s available to the public) to tell you that their audience has:

• Average Household Income: $248,828
• Average Household Net Worth: $1,335,022

As well as casually dropping in there that they have quite a few millionaires that read their publication.

So if the Wall Street Journal has so many people with so much money, it begs the question why every franchise doesn’t decide to advertise there. And of course the answer lies in the outrageously expensive rates that you have to pay to get in front of that type of audience.

(Their online advertising rates are not published online but trust me when I say that their CPMs are some of the highest on the web.)

Some of you may have the financial resources to advertise on WSJ.com, but I’m assuming that the majority of franchises can’t. So, you’re in search of another proxy.

Here at FranchiseHelp, we’re constantly in search of proxies for money, and we wanted to share data from two of our favorites.

If you go through our franchise matching quiz, you’ll see questions all over the spectrum which we are able to cross-reference against the liquid capital question.

Here’s what the data looks like for education level:

(Isn't it fascinating that not graduating high school has a higher liquid capital level than both graduating high school and obtaining an associate's degree!)

And here’s the data for job title:

As you can see, as you go up the education and occupational chain, you see people with significantly higher amounts of liquid capital available.

You may have already known this, but it’s pretty striking to see how college and post-grad degrees correlate to money. (Remember, that’s our ultimate goal.) What about executives, retirees, and the self-employed?

So why does it all matter?

Well, it turns out that new online media platforms allow you to target audiences based on all different sorts of criteria.

One of those criterion is even targeting based on actual net worth. But, as you can imagine, those audiences are super-expensive for the exact same reasons as the WSJ being pricey.

And therefore an alternative strategy is to target an audience based on education or job title. And you can even tailor the ads and landing pages to reflect the audience. I guarantee that you’ll save money in advertising costs, and you may find that it’s the secret to unlocking an audience that you otherwise couldn’t reach!

If your online franchisee lead generation strategies are outdated and you want to chat about it, send us a note!