Last week I posted a short opinion discussing advertising funds and the benefits and drawbacks associated with them (as it relates to franchises, specifically). One of my responses asked about a start-up franchise vs. a more established brand and it sparked me to pull some information from our research.
We've polled over 40,000 franchisees from 320+ companies and asked them
about the importance of marketing in their businesses. I can report the
following results:
When franchisees are asked about their marketing skills, they answered
with the following (answers add up to less than 100 percent because
some chose not to answer):
excellent – 16.19 %
very good – 32.85 %
average – 36.70
%
poor – 5.93 %
However, when asked how important having
marketing knowledge for their business is, they answered:
critical – 49.27 %
important – 33.48 %
helpful – 8.43 %
not needed – 0.48 %
critical or important skill to know, only
49 percent say they have
very good or excellent skills.
As I'm sure many young entrepreneurs have discovered, navigating the crazy world of marketing is time consuming and tracking the results is even tougher. My first, and most important words of wisdom are the be sure whatever you spend on marketing, you can track the how well the money is spent. Secondly, review your marketing spends very regularly, even if it's only for a few minutes a day. It's easy to let a Google PPC campaign get out of hand if you move that decimal point one way to the right.
Jack Burris is Vice President and Partner with Franchise Business
Review and is also a regular contributor for Startup Nation's Franchise
Business Coaching Blog. You can contact him directly at
thefranchiseguy.
