The Brickell Bubble… will it happen or won’t it? Edition v1.5: For those of you not living in downtown Miami called Brickell over the last few years you’ve missed a building of a city pretty much. It makes me wonder with a billion dollar mall and an estimated 34 new buildings mostly sky scrapers how they will sustain this growth in such a small area across the bay from famed South Beach and Millionaires Row.
The Franchise Portal Bubble – is the market oversaturated with them and why are they focused on business opportunities since the market turn of 2008 are the questions I asked myself? The answer is obvious – Franchise Expansion tanked like everything else, but some business opportunities actually picked up speed. Franchise Portals that wouldn’t have touched many business opportunities prior to the crash now saw them as easy targets. So, the question remains: Are large Franchise portals the way to go for people who either own or are in charge of marketing Business Opportunities, Distributorship / Dealership Opportunities, Licensee Opportunities for lead generation that leads to a sale or even to sell your existing business?
The quick answer is yes and no. However, first let me explain the premise that some Franchise Portal sales people use to close clients to advertise on their site. They pitch that their site acts in much of the same way that the Ronald Reagan trickledown system of economics system was explained to the general populous during that era. That if a person can afford a Franchise then surely they can afford a Business Opportunity. This raised my eyebrow on my end so I decided to test six Franchise Portals leads over a few months to see if those leads were more plentiful, of better quality and ultimately closed more sales to increase the bottom line at the end of the sales cycle.
The results are that having now worked with multiple Franchise Portals that the leads come in so fast sometimes it is unreal. Makes you smile ear-to-ear thinking that you or your marketing manager is the smartest person the globe and have solved all problems–including cash flow since sales = money usually.
See, here is the problem, the disconnect if you will is that all those scores of leads don’t lead to more sales in the end for the most part. I do know that they lead to more people exploring and even opting in way too soon to ‘just get information’ and this leads to a rainbow effect that if you ever took Macro Eco 101 you would know simply doesn’t work. The truth is, the majority of the advertisers on sites that are NOT directly related to the core principle of the portal’s website and has a direct connection to the users / shoppers and YOUR potential future clients should be maintained. I’m not saying that I haven’t made sales using leads that came from Franchise Portals for Business Opportunities. What I am saying is for that extra cost, often a contract that is at least three months long, limited customer service and various other issues like placement since the site tends to be so crowed people have a hard time even finding your ad amongst all the ‘Franchises”.
That thinking wasted a lot of money for a lot of business opportunities.
Carpe Diem
Special Sauce Burnt End Tid Bit: My blog next week will be short and super helpful. If you want to not only improve your Alexa ranking, but also potentially over time your Page Rank I’ll have my top ways to achieve your goals.