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Maximize Your Marketing

Written by Karen Kroll

When it comes to promoting your business, you want to be backed by the best name in the industry, one that is not only recognizable but also dependable. Here are a few ways franchising can be your ticket to marketing gold:
Welcome to the Web: Ronald Rice, a Mr. Appliance franchise owner in Edmonds, Washington, has a Web presence through the Mr. Appliance site at www.mrappliance.com/everett. He had considered creating his own site but found that it would be cost-prohibitive to develop and maintain. This is a more affordable solution. “They’ve gone through the expense of developing a good website and making it available to me through the franchise system for free,” he says. “Plus, Mr. Appliance updates it regularly for me.”

Quality leads: Practically speaking, Rice only can service customers located in and around the greater Seattle area. To narrow the leads he obtains through search engines, Rice uses a service arranged by Mr. Appliance that works with search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! to place Rice’s website among the top listings when a potential customer is searching online for an appliance repair business in his area. As a result, Rice obtains highly qualified leads.

Be recognized…everywhere: Because franchises like The Dwyer Group companies are nationwide (even worldwide), their names, logos, and slogans are recognized instantly. Oleg Nikishin, a Mr. Electric franchise owner in Warrington, Pennsylvania, is a witness to this: “One way or another, people have heard this name or have seen this name. Even from the beginning, when I had one truck, people would ask me, ‘How many trucks do you have because we see them all over.’ ”

You’re not alone: Wearing all of the hats in a small business can take its toll. As a franchisee, the tools you need to promote your business are right at your fingertips. Michael Porter, an Aire Serv franchise owner, says the media box he received during the first week of training was one of the greatest tools. “It has all of the information on every type of marketing. You get the little logos that people use for putting together billboard ads—I mean it’s everything for yellow pages or magazines or newspapers, it’s the artwork, it’s some of the slogans, and a ton of ideas. If it’s not exactly what you need, you send it to the marketing department and they fix it for you and send it right back.”

Brad Lucas, a Glass Doctor franchise owner in Fremont, California, went it alone for a while until purchasing trends proved too unstable. “I’m not a self-promoter. I grew up in an era and time when if you did quality work, the business just followed. That environment has changed. It takes marketing to create a business today. It takes a whole package of things that it didn’t used to take, and that’s something that Glass Doctor  offers me that I can’t get anywhere else.”