The Franchise Lead Generation Demand Gap: What it Means
November 11, 2021 — Are you seeing more competition for the best franchise prospects, or finding it harder to identify the number of prospects you need to achieve your franchise development goals? Are you experiencing soaring franchise lead costs in filling your pipeline?
The flow of aspiring business owners took the biggest hit in the history of lead generation in March-April 2020 as work-from-home orders and business closings gripped the affected countries. While the demand for qualified prospects has all but reached the February 2020 pre-pandemic level, the flow of interested applicants, on average, lags behind as seen in the monthly chart above.
On top of that, Google and Apple are making it harder through well-intentioned privacy measures which have the impact of limiting the supply of prospects, reducing your ability to precisely measure ROI for a source like Facebook, and potentially extinguishing your ability to retarget applicants who visit your frandev website. The number of active contracts of FranchiseVentures compared to the actual number in February 2020 is a proxy for franchise development prospect demand, actual monthly franchise inquiries are used similarly as an empirical measurement of franchise demand.
Throw a Facebook outage in there, and general price inflation that franchise lead generation sources are themselves experiencing — and you’ve got a formula for a tight market going into 2022.
On the other hand, pandemic-induced desires for self-determination and financial independence raised the tide of franchise interest as seen in our monthly surveys of startup sentiment. The key drivers of business ownership were unchanged by the global pandemic.
The Great Resignation is jet fuel for the franchising and franchise lead generation.
The below chart is a plot of the difference between demand and supply — or the supply-demand gap. The message is that there are many good franchise opportunities to choose from — and frandev teams have to work harder to achieve the same results in times when this gap is higher (up on the chart). Historically, over decades we have seen this seasonally, but the pandemic response was an overwhelming factor over the last few years.
In the next few weeks we will provide tools and ideas you can use to overcome the challenges of supply and cost in this environment. Meanwhile, if you have franchise lead sources that are working for you, stick with them.
Download a copy of the full October 2021 Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™report here. See excerpts from prior SSI™ surveys and subscribe to receive the Small Business Startup Sentiment Index™ monthly report when it is released.
The charts above are derived from the proprietary data on literally hundreds of thousands of individuals who have inquired about the thousands of businesses or franchises for sale on the digital assets of FranchiseVentures.
To inquire about your share of this franchise lead flow, and develop a program to suit your needs, please contact us.
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 Thursday, November 11th, 2021.