What Makes a Good Franchise Directory?
Over the past ten years we have seen an explosion in internet advertising as everyone has jumped into using this fantastic new medium for promoting their product or services. A particular area which has had niche but heavy growth has been that of franchise advertising and there are now hundreds of sites across the globe dedicated to bringing franchise opportunities and franchise information to the masses.
Looking at these franchise directory portals we can see a huge variation in the information they have to offer and we can group these into the following.
Franchise directories – These function and serve solely to display franchise opportunities in a directory format and generally display logos and promotional materials in a categorised format.
Franchise information portals – These tend to go one step further than plain directories and also offer advice and articles to a prospective franchise seekers as well as a categorised list of franchises.
Franchise Resource Portals – These have all of the above features and more, offering franchise advice, franchise articles, dates of franchise exhibitions, reviews, categorised franchise opportunities, franchise news and web 2.0 user interaction.
We can look at the above in a staged way where 1 is a skeleton platform, building up to 3 which is a full bells and whistles platform. When looking at these franchise directory platforms one must remember that the main aim of the site owners is to have paying franchisors list their franchise on them, this is where the money comes from and why the site is in existence. So, you must remember that not necessarily all are ethical franchise directories and are happy to take on world + dog to advertise their franchise.