Almost All Franchise Development Teams Increased Spending in 2024 at Largest Ad Platforms
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
March 19, 2025 – REVISED 3/25/25 – When asked about advertising execution in 2025, over 99% of franchise development teams already using either Google, Meta, LinkedIn or TikTok expected to increase their spending somewhat or significantly in 2025.
This is during 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.
Franchise Development teams increased Google spending the most, either “somewhat” at 34.5%, or 6.3% “significantly.”
In 2024, 34.5% of franchisors increased their Google spending “somewhat”, and 6.3% significantly. Meta spending increased “somewhat” at 20.6%, and 7.9% significantly.
On the other hand, LinkedIn was not used by 54% of respondents, more than the 42% not using it in the prior year survey. A further 3.2% said they decreased their LinkedIn spending somewhat, and another 4.8% decreased it significantly in 2024. Apparently LinkedIn is out of the “experimental” category, as most franchise development teams concentrate their spending on other platforms.
Nonetheless, 17.5% of respondents said they would increase their spending with LinkedIn in 2024, and another 3.2% increased their LinkedIn outlay “significantly.”
In 2024, 15.9% of franchise development teams experimented with TikTok paid advertising, though only 4.8% increased spending on that platform.
This year we added TikTok to the survey options, and found almost 16% of franchise development teams experimenting with the platform in 2024 despite the imminent banning of app downloads in the U.S. As of this writing, the app is still available pending negotiations about a potential purchase of the platform by U.S. investors.
Supporting its validity, the survey represented a broad cross-section of franchise development teams, 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.
Subscribe here to make sure you hear about them first.
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.
Interested in more insights from our proprietary data set? Subscribe here to make sure you hear about them first.
Contact Franchise Ventures to get your share of today’s aspiring franchise owners.
Published on Wednesday, March 19th, 2025.