Blog, Marketing

Is Your Franchise Recruitment Website is Outdated?

February 18, 2020 - Blog, Marketing

7 Signs Your Franchise Recruitment Website is Outdated (and Holding You Back) In today’s competitive franchise recruitment marketing space, your online presence plays a massive role. No matter the industry you serve, your website must speak to the customer and draw them in to learn more. Your franchise recruitment website is no different. Nearly 70 percent of the B2B buying journey happens online—but it isn’t a linear process. Your prospect franchisees often start their journey online and then ping pong back and forth between personal interactions online, something like this:

• Reach out for more information
• Talk to sales
• Go back to do more research online to validate findings
• Start contract discussions
• Return to online data once again to further validate findings

With that in mind, your website should be considered a central hub of your franchise recruitment marketing strategy. If you’re wondering whether or not it’s time for a new website, here are seven signs your website is outdated and keeping you from growing your brand.

1. Security and privacy are an issue

Online attacks and downtime from your website host can rob your franchise business of opportunities and leave you vulnerable to liability issues. Security is an aspect of websites that many companies don’t think about at the onset. Only once you experience an outage with your website host or a hacker threatens you with ransomware does security become a focus for many businesses. But you don’t want to wait until you face an attack or liability to focus on your website’s security. Evaluate the security of your website host and content management system to decide if it’s time to upgrade.

2. It lacks lead generation funnels

Because so much of the buying journey happens online, you need to think about how you turn website visitors into prospects and prospects into customers. Your website should guide visitors to the content that they need to know to learn more about your franchise offering. Franchise recruitment websites should have a variety of ways to get in touch or learn more about you, including:

• Contact forms
• Lead magnet downloads (i.e., whitepapers, ebooks, guides, etc.)
• Newsletter signup

When a visitor has a question, make it easy to find contact information by placing a link to your contact form on every page or along the sidebar. Lead magnets help you learn who is interested in your franchise and collect their contact information to offer more valuable content. And for those who are very early in the buying process, a simple newsletter signup form is ideal to invite visitors to stay in touch in a more passive way.

3. The design is outdated

Website designs shift and change with time. And while you may not need to always have the most modern design, over time your website will become more and more dated. Today’s websites feature edge-to-edge imagery to maximize the space. Even fonts change and need a good refresh. To feel good about choosing to work with your franchise business, a website visitor needs to know that you will adapt and grow with changes in the marketplace. Sometimes franchises update their branding and their B2C website but neglect their franchise recruitment site. Keeping your franchise recruitment webpage consistent with the latest branding helps capitalize on brand recognition while demonstrating franchise marketing capacity.

4. Mobile and tablet optimization is poor

When new devices hit the market, website optimization changes. If your website is not responsive based on the device size that someone is viewing your website from, it’s time to update your website. Websites that render poorly on various devices make it difficult to read the text, interact with content and learn more about your business. Poor mobile optimization will also hurt your SEO and make it harder for potential investors to find you.

5. Load times are slow

As technology improves, expectations for websites also change. If your website is outdated, it likely has slower load times than the industry standard. Those slow load times will hurt your SEO and lead your visitors to abandon your site before getting the content that they came for. Old technology, such as Flash, can slow down your franchise recruitment website immensely. Evaluate your load times using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to learn more about your opportunities for improved load times.

6. SEO is lacking or difficult to manage

Some website platforms lack the necessary tools to manage your SEO to ensure you show up when potential investors search for franchises like yours. You need full access to your website’s functions to ensure maximum optimization. In some cases, your website template, content management system or format don’t meet today’s needs for customization to ensure your website’s SEO is at its best. That’s where a new franchise recruitment website can benefit your business.

7. Your content is lacking or out of date

Just like technology has changed over the years, so has marketing content. New trends feature content that speaks directly to the customer in a friendly and easy-to-read manner. Many franchise recruitment websites also fall short in the quantity and quality of content they provide. Sharing the right information will help turn cold leads into warm leads and warm leads into hot leads while simultaneously helping you identify the most qualified candidates for your brand. While website content might sound like an easy fix, outdated templates and limited tools might make it challenging to format your website content in a modern and simple manner that your website visitors expect. How to modernize your franchise recruitment website iluma Agency offers marketing services tailored to meet the needs of franchise businesses, including franchise recruitment websites that offer the right content, design and security to ensure your success. Contact us to learn how we can help you reach your franchise marketing goals.