Tag: showhomes

How to Increase Franchise Sales with Social Media

Social Media tools are improving marketing and sales efforts for small businesses every day. Nowhere is the impact greater than within franchise systems.
 
Not only are smart franchisors driving traffic into outlets’ locations and onto websites, but they are also driving recruitment of new franchisees using social media channels.
 
Here are two simple ways we can engage prospective franchisees: sharing our story in order to attract new interest and exploring the social web for new leads with whom we should connect.    

 

I. Speak and Share – Tell Your Stories

 
As one client recently stated, “I want potential franchisees to experience what my current franchisees are experiencing.”  

Prospective franchisees are searching for information well before they pick up the phone or take your call. Be found! More blogs, Fan Pages, and other platforms populated with your content means more candidates will find your brand and your story.  Showhomes has had an amazing increasing in franchise sales this year partially due aggressive social media efforts.

In the below example, I am marketing and developing new business for the “Java121” Coffee Franchise Company. I’m using the Engage121 app to share these stories across all platforms (Facebook Fan Page, our blog, Twitter, and any other platforms I choose). As the same time, I’m cross-pollenating that same content for all of my current franchisees’ platforms as well!

I compose a bit of content and perhaps share a link to an article. Note that with Engage121’s merge fields, the content will be customized for each franchisee.  

 

 

Next I choose all or any franchisees on whose behalf this message will be sent. Also, I choose all or any platforms to which I’m posting:Done! We have just shared that content, with a link to more information about our coffee to all of my corporate brand pages, blogs, and Twitter accounts as well as all of those pages, blogs, and Twitter accounts belonging to every franchisee in the system. This message about our product, brand, and system is out there! If I had 250 franchisees, this content would have posted to over 1,000 individual sites instantly. 

Smart marketers and franchise development pro’s are not limiting these stories to only focus on products and services. They are sharing the success stories about franchisees’ booming businesses to attract candidates who wish to be a part of that opportunity.  

    
II. Explore and Find New Connections
 

You must seek out discussions held by potential candidates. This is something impossible to do just a couple of years ago! Using Engage121, I am searching not only Twitter, but also virtually all social media platforms, hundreds of thousands of blogs and traditional media (newspapers, TV, magazine, etc.). 

I ran a quick search of the phrase “start my own business” and found 34 people tweeting that phrase just the past 24 hours! These are leads I need to engage! Note, you may also filter your results by state, county, or city for targeted exploration. I can engage this person in conversation immediately. Introduce yourself and start the conversation!  

       
 
I can “tag” anyone if find, so here I’m tagging someone as “candidate”. This is useful for keeping up with large groups of individuals and listening to what they’re saying later on. 

 

Also note that any leads from traditional sources that you’re managing via a CRM system or other means should be imported into this application so you can listen to and engage via their social media hot spots as well!
 
 

Showhomes Hits Franchise Expansion Goal

Here is a recent DailyVista article regarding Showhomes. The company’s rapid expansion in the current economy is an exciting story that is resonating with media, consumers, and business leaders nationwide.

My firm has worked with Showhomes for a couple of years and I am still fascinated by the company’s story and its ability to tell the story well. Congratulations on another great year!  
 

Showhomes Home Staging 

Showhomes Home Staging Company Hits Franchise Expansion Goal

By Stephanie Jacoby

Managing Editor, DailyVista  

May 11, 2010

Showhomes, a home staging provider, announced it has added 11 franchise units by April of 2010, thus surpassing its expansion goal and setting a company record for new units opened, according to the company.

The Nashville, Tenn.-based company expects that 2010 will be its seventh consecutive year of steady incline. Showhomes is also on track to open 40 new locations this year, even further exceeding its 2010 goal of 25. Showhomes has opened 20 franchises in 2009, compared to the 15 that were projected, and intends to sell out all available units by 2014.

“If you take a step back, we are a home-based business, we are in a hot category of small business, the cash requirements for opening are low, we have an excellent track record, we have some of the best franchisee validation in the industry and we have a really high potential return on investment,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Kelton said in a statement. “When you add it all up, I can’t think of a better franchise in today’s market.”

Showhomes is a home staging franchise that uses live-in home stagers to help realtors sell vacant houses. These live-in home stagers help manage vacant houses while they are on the market for sale and offset a home owner’s expense to stage the home.

Thomas Scott, vice president of marketing, told DailyVista that Showhomes has been around since 1986, but has really seen a boom in its business due to the heightened interest in the art of staging a home for sale.

“HGTV started airing home staging shows, and thanks to them, home staging became a buzz word,” he said. “Staging preps houses for sales – they show better, and that started our momentum. During the current housing bust, when everyone is talking about how bad the market is, we’re one of the few good stories out there in real estate. It’s been golden for us to expand.”

The depressed real estate market has been very helpful for Showhomes, and as such, the company has plans to build out a national foot print, which may include an upwards of 150 to 200 new units.

“We’re well on track to do that, we’re ahead of where we thought we’d be, so it’s a good problem to have,” Scott said. “We’re expanding heavily in the Northeast, and adding more units in Florida, Texas and California. We’re expanding wherever there’s interest.”

Showhomes is big in Southern California, and is hoping to open in Napa Valley and in Sacramento in the coming months. Kelton says that the franchise does well in many markets, small and large, because there are vacant houses everywhere, and even in the boom, it has a lot to do with how often people move. Most consumers will purchase new homes before they sell their old homes and move all their furniture to the new place, which creates a need for vacant home staging.

“Franchising in general has been struggling. It’s one of the real ironies in the market, because in a recession more people want to start their own business more than normal because they’re out of work so there is a big disconnect between franchise companies and people who want to open a franchise,” Scott said. “With our forward-thinking approach, we engage customers and put information out there. Aggressive Blogging, social media and social media PR have really generated sales for us.”

Coupled with Web content, guest blogging and other types of non-traditional communications, Showhomes’ current online content and social media efforts have allowed folks who are naturally interested in real estate or home staging to tune into the company story long before they talk to a salesperson. When they do inquire about either owning their own Showhomes franchise, or requesting the company’s services, they have already done some research and are engaged.

“We’ve also found on the franchise sales side, one thing that’s working today is old-school trade shows,” Scott said. “The entire last decade companies spent getting connected to the Internet, and now with all those portals, people don’t trust sales people.”

Scott says his company saw a big turnaround at trade shows in 2009 and that they now produce almost a third of its overall sales. Consumers want to meet a live person and those that have an inherent interest in the industry go to Showhomes’ booth and meet their team.

“We are also big on what I’d say is social media PR,” Scott said. “We’ve found we have to be way more aggressive and more targeted with the PR we do – it drives a lot of the brand. PR works for us but only because we produce releases that tell real stories and don’t read like what a PR firm produces. We turn our releases into real stories that will get a journalist’s attention.”

“There’s no such thing as viral content in today’s market, it’s just good content,” he said. “We tend to produce things in-house because we find most PR and marketing firms don’t know how to produce good content. I’m a former journalist and I use journalists to do our writing. We know how to produce a campaign the gets results because we all have a very keen idea of what’s interesting and what’s absolute junk. The junk gets tuned out – the really interesting content is what you need to fuel a successful social media campaign.”

Showhomes finds that consumers in today’s market are using Google as a starting point for any kind of research. In line with this research, Scott spends a great deal of time tracking back to see where customers have found a link to the Showhomes Web site, and also implements quite a bit of search engine optimization to stay top of mind when it comes to home staging.

“We do lots of hyper-local searches – generating leads from Google searches and from Craig’s List,” he said. “We had to adapt our marketing in the last year, because social media has really changed the way customer make buying decisions. We’ve had to revamp almost everything we do and it’s been great for our franchisees. We’ve come up with more cost-effective campaigns, but it takes lots of brain power and going against the conventional wisdom.”

As far as potential franchisees, mortgage brokers are Showhomes’ target market at this point, which gives the company an opportunity to grow in the mortgage broker industry, which is struggling these days. Other interested parties are folks that are simply interested in real estate, not necessarily realtors themselves, just those intrigued by the industry.

Scott said that through his own consulting company; a lot of these marketing efforts are handled in-house, adding that due to his journalism background, he hires former journalists and writers to assist with press releases and other content as soon as he needs them. “What has emerged is that getting results is all about the content; you produce intelligent content, designed specifically for that audience, and that’s what fuels social media, instead of a PR agency or a marketing, or an SEO or a Web firm, you have a content strategy firm that produces PR, social media content, blogging content and all the other various pieces that go with it.”

Scott said that those who can tell the company’s story are the ones that truly generate traffic. Outside of franchising, these types of agencies are building content and are quickly becoming a mainstay in the communications industry.

  
 

For more information on Showhomes, please contact:
Thomas Scott
615-483-4923
tscott@showhomes.com
@ShowhomesThomas

5 Bizarre Ways PR Can Kill You Suddenly

 

(Thanks to guest blogger Thomas Scott for his insights on navigating the dangers of PR)
 
Can PR kill you suddenly? Death by PR
 
Probably not.
 
Can PR be hazardous to the health and well being of your company?
 
Absolutely. It can kill it in one fell swoop. Suddenly.
 

Public Relations practices are changing and the PR industry is in the middle of its most major culture shift in the past fifty years. We’re talking major paradigm shift here; the kind that happened when the iPod changed people’s music buying habits and Domino’s Pizza changed people’s pizza buying habits.

What’s the shift?

Journalists and bloggers, the individuals any successful PR campaign must target, have the lowest trust level of public relations companies, individuals and traditional PR content that they’ve ever had. We spent the entire last decade getting connected and wired to the internet and now we are suffering from overload. People want to have conversations where they trade tips and referrals and in order to have good conversations, you need interesting content.

Here are my 5 ways PR can suddenly kill your business – bizarre because they are counter-intuitive for those of us who have worked in the industry for lengthy amounts of time:

1. Write public relations and news releases in the traditional format. Trust me on this one – journalists have a keen awareness of ‘interesting’ and ‘not interesting.’ Those are the only two categories your content falls into. Period. Tell your story the way a journalist would tell it so it is really a story and not a release. Use traditional journalism methods to hook readers so they chose to know more. Forget to do this and your message will go right in the trash.
 
2. Write poorly thought of headlines. Headlines are called headlines because they serve a very important purpose: you are reading this blog post because I ‘gotcha’ with my headline. Admit it – it’s true! Take the time to write a catchy headline that people will flock to. Search Engine Optimization Experts understand this; it is at the root of the entire link baiting industry. Don’t know what that is? Google it – it applies more to PR than you realize!
 
3. Write content that is meaningless. As a journalist or blogger, I don’t care about your 59 cent taco. I care that your 59 cent taco kept the entire staff of a California farm employed in the down market or how a lowly 59 cent taco can decrease PMS levels in women suffering from a lack of iron (if that is true, please contact me). Be clear on what your story is and avoid stories that are not – well – stories. Journalists are professionally trained to seek out stories. No amount of calling on your part will convince them otherwise!
 
4. Call journalists to follow up. I know this is what real PR firms bill as a valuable service. I also know that as a journalist myself at a major market US daily, calling me to ‘follow up’ was a guaranteed way to get yourself and the company you represent blacklisted. Write better content and tell better, more compelling stories that people would want to talk about. Do that and you won’t have to call.
 
5. Forget about the longevity of a release. Creating content for a PR release is a lot more than sending to journalists. Current thinking among my unscientific group of 4 PR and social media friends is that if a content piece is really good, it is valuable. Keep your content and releases in your bank deposit vault – your company blog – so people can find it long afterwards and click on the link to your website. Every release you write should be on its own webpage, optimized with search engine tools and should have the ability for readers to both click through to your website and share on their social media networks. Forget that and all you’ll get is a whimper, not a bang.

Good luck! 

Thomas Scott

VP Marketing for Showhomes, a nationally franchised home staging company: http://www.showhomesfranchise.com

Thomas is recovering journalist and a new media and content specialist.