Using Video to Attract New Franchisees

Although we don’t speak about it explicitly very often on the Lead Generation Resource Center, there are three major types of advertisements that are found across the web. Looking back over the past decade, the vast majority of advertisements fell into one of these two buckets.

Text Ads

Display Ads

And even today, I would say that text and display ads dominate the landscape.

That being said, the fastest growing (and third) type of ad unit on the web is video.

Still in its infancy, video advertising has A LOT of kinks to work out until it becomes as ubiquitous as text and display. First and foremost, video ads require the viewer to have patience, a quality not often found in today’s modern web browsing experience.

But, starting in March 2016, FranchiseHelp decided to enter the video advertising game.

Before I get to my thoughts about using video to attract franchisees, I wanted to share with you some of the videos we’ve created:

As you can see, we’re taking a few different approaches to reach our audience. The majority of the ads are currently being served on YouTube and Facebook, so we can get pretty granular with the targeting we’re using.

Based on our early results, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Video creation is NOT easy – Making these videos either requires a lot of time, expertise, or money. In most cases, it takes all three. Committing resources to creating videos simply to then have to pay to serve those makes the process really tough.
• Telling a story in 15 seconds is difficult – We know we don’t have a lot of time to capture people’s attention. So distilling our value proposition down to 15 seconds wasn’t easy to do. Reminds me of the Blaise Pascal quote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
• Acquiring traffic using video means more educated visitors – Finally a positive! It turns out that visitors who have seen a video are far more in tuned with what it means to open a franchise. We know that once they spend 15 seconds thinking about the process, they’re ready for the experience that awaits after they click through to our website.
• Opportunity for growth is immense – There’s no doubt that video is here to stay. It’ll be the responsibility of the ad platforms to convince users to watch video. But as they get better at that, there’s no doubt that brands will want to take advantage of it. It’s like being able to deliver TV commercials to a specific audience!

We’ll keep y’all updated as we learn more about video ads. This is only the beginning.

For more information about FranchiseHelp’s lead generation programs, click here.