If you’re expecting people to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds in buying a franchise from you, don’t be surprised if one of the things they judge you by is your company blog.
Why? Because a blog is like a company’s pulse: it’s an easy way to check if there are signs of life there.
If your enthusiasm for the blog died some years ago and the last post on it (now there’s a pertinent phrase) was in 2016, how can you expect the prospective franchisee with all that money to have much enthusiasm about you and your company?
More than most of your other communications, the blog is an expression of your company’s personality – a chance to give behind-the-scenes glimpses, share useful tips, and establish your organisation in the public’s eye as more than just a collection of real estate and balance-sheets.
What are your people like? What do they do when they’re not recruiting franchisees? Does your company support a charity, win awards, or break new ground?
What do your franchisees think about you? Why do you enjoy working with them? And why did you start the whole thing in the first place?
People love to know these things, and enjoy reading about them. They expect to find them on your blog – but if they get there and the cupboard is bare, they’ll be as disappointed as Old Mother Hubbard’s dog.
Bone up on what makes a good blog – look at your rivals’, for example – and turn yours into something to be proud of, something that says what you’d like to say about you and your company and doesn’t say, in effect, that you can’t be bothered.
If you can’t write, or don’t enjoy it, that’s not necessarily a problem. You’re brilliant at what you do – or you wouldn’t be able to award franchises in it – so get someone else to write it for you.
You may have someone sufficiently talented in-house, or you could just as easily use a freelance writer who’d do the honours for you.
It depends what you want your blog to do for you – or at least, what impression you want it to give about you and your organisation to potential investors and franchisees.
If you want it to showcase your employees’ expertise, either ask them to write a guest post or get a freelance or agency to interview them and write it for you.
Ditto with case studies. Whatever you say about yourself and your successes, it will always sound better coming from someone else who’s sufficiently independent not to have to say nice things about you if they don’t wish to.
If you fill their quotes with retail-speak, it won’t ring true, so get an experienced writer to capture the voice of the person featured in the case study and write it from a human perspective.
As they taught me in Lesson One, Day One at journalism college, the best stories are about people, not things.
If a factory burns down, that’s all very sad for the owner (“Factory boss loses fortune in blaze”) but another way of looking at it is the effect its closure will have on half the town (“Thousands lose livelihoods as factory burns”).
Which story’s going to sell the most newspapers, and which one is going to catch the attention of most people?
That’s why you should always think of the humans involved when you’re writing anything, especially on a blog.
The piece might be about some new widget you’ve developed, but what people really want to know is what it can do for them. Will it change their lives, or make their work easier – that sort of thing.
Make you blog interesting, and engaging, and it will say all the right things about you and your company – things that would-be franchisees with hundreds of thousands of pounds burning a hole in their pockets will really want to know.