Changes in Franchise Development Lead Generation Paid Sources Planned for 2025

By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights

March 26, 2025 – When asked about advertising plans for 2025, 100% of franchise development teams already using the major franchise lead generation sources expected to increase their spending somewhat or significantly in 2025.

This is following a difficult 2024 where, despite challenging business conditions and the distractions of an election year, more than 58% of franchisors surveyed either stuck to their growth plans (50.0%) or increased them. Franchises increasing their expansion plans (8.3%) included all  tiers of system sizes, and 98% of them increased their spending in 2024 across the four largest third-party advertising platforms.

Brokers or Referral Networks fell to third in expected usage in 2025, as Meta (Instagram/Facebook) rose to second place.

In 2025, 87% of franchisors expect to employ Google paid advertising (including YouTube), up from 82.5% in 2024. 

Meta (Instagram and Facebook) rose to second place at 76.8% in anticipated usage for 2025, up from 69.8% in 2024, edging out usage of broker/referral networks.

Franchise Portals as a group grew from 61.9% usage to 68.6%, an increase of 11%, the highest growth among the top four sources. Franchise Insights is sponsored by Franchise Ventures, the largest lead generation platform.

Only LinkedIn (grew 13%) and TikTok (grew 37%) grew faster in usage, though at 52.2 and 21.7% respectively, were the smallest in usage for franchise lead generation.

Franchise Portals are expected to grow the most in usage in 2025 among the top four sources of franchise leads.

Supporting the validity of data from the Franchise Insights 2025 Franchise Lead Generation Sources survey, a broad cross-section of franchise development teams participated, from emerging systems to well-established franchises with many thousands of units.

FranchiseInsights.com surveys franchisors periodically to get a pulse on the industry, provide benchmarking and identify franchise development best practices. This survey was conducted in January 2025.

We will continue to share more nuggets about optimizing your franchise development lead generation results in upcoming articles at Franchise Insights. 

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Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.

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Published on Wednesday, March 26th, 2025.