Target Marketing for Lead Generation

Generating leads is the main goal of any franchise development campaigns. Finding qualified leads online requires a wide variety of techniques, including paid advertising, organic strategies, quality content, search engine optimization efforts, and so much more. At the core of all of those efforts is target marketing, which is critical for lead generation.

Target marketing is what allows you to concentrate your marketing efforts on the people who are most interested in investing in your franchise and would be the best fit. Rather than throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, so to speak, target marketing is deliberate about speaking directly to your franchise prospects. Fine-tuned target marketing = a high ROI.

Persona Development

The key to targeting the right marketing segmentation is taking the time to understand and create buyer personas. These are representations of your highest quality franchise candidates, based on research, brand knowledge, and data.

As archetypes of the type of people who invest in your franchise, personas act as a guide for all your digital marketing. The persona creation process is the first step in fully understanding your audience, and developing a content / messaging strategy across all platforms.

Find Your Audience

Simply put, personas help you find your audience, articulate their goals, needs, and objections, and create content and ads that answer their questions. Even better, defining personas helps you to know where your audience spends time online, which informs where you should allocate budget.

Target Marketing Segmentation for Your Prospects

Once you know where to find your prospects online, you can effectively target them with relevant content. It is essential to use both paid and organic strategies to most effectively reach your audience. We have written before about the importance of using paid and organic social media, and those principles apply to your other content as well!

Using personas as a guide, you can create outstanding content with the purpose of franchise lead generation through organic searches. Blog posts can address specific questions or pain points for specific candidates, while web copy can deliberately reach a wider audience. An SEO strategy driven by personas is essential for site and blog content so that your website ranks well when prospects type their search queries into Google.

Paid ads on Google and Facebook complement your organic content and are the best way to reach your target audience. Both of these platforms have sophisticated targeting options we utilize to do so.

Get Their Info

An added benefit of using personas in creating content is that in garnering qualified candidates’ interest right off the bat, they are more likely to fill out a contact form on your site. Then a member of your sales team can get in touch directly, or through an email campaign.

Convert Leads into Franchisees

Now that you have contact information for your leads—who are qualified, having read all that amazing content on your site and in your downloadables—you can work on converting them into franchisees. From here, you can get to know each lead on an individual basis, and address his or her specific concerns and show them the value of your brand.

If you need help with your franchise’s targeted marketing and persona development, we would love to hear from you. Integrated Digital Strategies has worked closely with dozens of franchise brands to improve their lead quality through a number of inbound marketing strategies, including target marketing.

Get in touch with us to learn more about how we can help your franchise grow.