What's Actually Working in Franchise Development Marketing Right Now

Here's a number that should make every franchise marketer uncomfortable: the average cost to acquire a new franchisee is now $17,000. That's the blended industry average from the AFDR report, and it keeps climbing. We've done this to ourselves. Three different entities fishing in the same lead gen pond — brands, portals, and brokers — all bidding against each other, driving up costs, and calling the same people leads.

So what actually works? I sat down with two people who are in the middle of it every day — Larisa Walega, Chief Growth Officer at Ziebart, and Liane Caruso, founder of Franchise Assembly and Fractional CMO — and we got into the real conversation franchise development marketers need to be having.

First, some things that aren't working as well as you think.

Franchise portals. Liane went straight to it. Larisa did too, and she had the data to back it up. When she came into her current role at Ziebart, she added a metric most brands aren't tracking: contact rate. Not cost per lead. Not inquiry volume. How often does a portal "lead" turn into an actual human response — a call, a text, an email?

For Ziebart, that number was below 10%. They were spending thousands of dollars on portals and "we do not have one in our pipeline at this point," as Larisa put it. For an automotive aftercare brand, portal leads just weren't converting to real conversations. They moved on.

LinkedIn advertising got called out too. Liane made the case plainly: the franchise industry is deeply active on LinkedIn, but we're mostly talking to each other. "We're not talking to the prospects," she said. The targeting tools aren't precise enough for franchise candidate identification, and the platform hasn't given the industry the infrastructure it actually needs. (Larisa's request: can we please get franchising as a dropdown option? LinkedIn, we're watching.)

What IS working — and why it's not a quick win.

Ziebart's top Franchise Development tactic right now isn't a digital ad channel. It's PR. And not PR as a one-quarter campaign push — 17 years of sustained brand-building investment funded deliberately out of a corporate marketing budget, not restricted ad fund dollars.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. When you're working with restricted franchise marketing funds, you're accountable to how every dollar is spent on behalf of franchisees. PR lives outside that structure for Ziebart, which gives them the flexibility to swing it toward Franchise Development messaging some years and consumer positioning others. The result isn't a traceable cost-per-lead. It's compounding brand awareness that fills the top of the funnel in a way you simply cannot buy through paid channels right now.

"PR, without a doubt, has been the number one driving change in the reputation of Ziebart as a franchise," Larisa said. "And then it just snowballed from there."

Liane called out the investment directly: "Kudos to you guys for putting PR into a corporate marketing fund. That's one of the smartest things I've heard from a franchise brand in a really long time."

The challenge most brands face is that Franchise Development budgets are tied to fees generated from Franchise Development sales — which creates real pressure to show direct ROI from every tactic. PR doesn't work that way. It builds the top of the funnel that makes every bottom-of-funnel dollar work harder. Most brands skip it because they can't draw a straight line.

The Meta shift nobody saw coming.

This year, for the first time in Ziebart's history, their website is not their number one Franchise Development lead source. That spot now belongs to a Meta-based media buying platform that uses proprietary targeting and list-building to reach specific candidate profiles.

The result for Ziebart? Triple-digit lead growth, and a meaningful shift in the type of candidate coming in: more automotive industry professionals, fewer general-interest "I like cars" inquiries.

Larisa's director of franchise development is clear about it: he's "never had a greater lead source."

Liane's take on Meta overall is more cautious. She doesn't love it as a top-of-funnel tool — franchise candidates aren't buying shoes, they need to visit your website, understand the opportunity, and then fill out a form. Lead forms on Meta skip that step, and she doesn't care if you get 100 fewer leads if the ones you get have actually been to your website first. Her use case for Meta: retargeting people who have already raised their hand.

Both positions are valid. The difference is targeting sophistication.

Google search is fading — and GEO is the next chapter.

Ziebart has near-zero Google search spend in their Franchise Development budget right now. Not because search doesn't matter, but because AI search results are increasingly occupying the top of the page and pushing traditional PPC results down. The brand's response: invest in content that large language models will actually pull from. Larisa is tracking GEO scores and monitoring which content sources are driving their brand's presence in LLM results.

"If you're not starting to lean toward those things and really educating yourself, you're kind of behind already," she said.

This is a hard thing to budget for because GEO doesn't produce a direct lead count. It's infrastructure work. It feeds the machine that's increasingly answering franchise candidate questions before those candidates ever visit a website.

Brokers: valid, but not a set-it-and-forget-it.

Liane's take on brokers is surgical. They're not a waste — they're reaching candidates who want help navigating a high-stakes decision and aren't going to show up through your organic channels. There's a real need there. But joining a broker group and not nurturing those relationships is the same as buying a portal and not tracking your contact rate. It's a write-off.

"It's almost a full-time job just to nurture the broker relationships," Liane said. "If you're gonna do brokers, you've gotta go all in."

And there's an emerging question worth sitting with: as AI tools get more sophisticated, does the broker's role as "hand holder through a complex decision" start to shift? The AI chatbot might become the broker for the next generation of franchise candidates. That doesn't make brokers irrelevant today. But it's worth thinking about how you're resourcing your organic strategy alongside broker investment.

The real problem in Franchise Development marketing is resourcing.

The thread that ran through this entire conversation: most franchise brands do not have a dedicated marketing resource for franchise development. Consumer marketing teams are focused on franchisee profitability — as they should be. Franchise Development sales teams are running marketing functions they weren't built to run. And the result is fragmented strategy, poorly nurtured channels, and budget that doesn't work as hard as it could.

Liane put it directly: "Why don't we have more marketers in Franchise Development supporting the sales? Marketing is there to support sales and should be wholly focused on franchise development."

There's no silver bullet here. Portals, PR, paid media, brokers, GEO content — none of these works in isolation and none of them works without someone owning the strategy. The question to take into your next budget cycle: have you dedicated the right resources to actually work the channels you're investing in?

Because without that, you're not running a Franchise Development marketing strategy. You're just spending money.

This post was inspired by a conversation with Larisa Walega, Chief Growth Officer, Ziebart, and Liane Caruso, Founder, Franchise Assembly and Fractional CMO, recorded for the Franchise Marketing Spotlight in [Month Year].Listen to the full conversation at https://youtu.be/WFEFEvtxJSE