Iowa Interstate All Battery franchisees, Matt and Nancy Breen, helped Al Roker of the Today Show deliver much needed batteries to a youth center facility in Des Moines, Iowa. This contribution was Interstate All Battery Center's part in providing products to selected charities for the "Today's Lend a Hand" tour.
There are plenty of franchise opportunities in the cleaning services and maintenance sector. They vary by many aspects including investment level, commercial vs. residential services, the amount of support the franchisor supplies and several other factors...
Take a look at our annual Top Franchises Guide for 2010! We are proud to announce 133 franchise companies - out of over 500 brands surveyed this year - that are doing things right and putting their franchisees first.
Last week I posted a short opinion discussing advertising funds and the benefits and drawbacks associated with them (as it relates to franchises, specifically). One of my responses asked about a start-up franchise vs. a more established brand and it sparked me to pull some information from our research.
We've polled over 40,000 franchisees from 320+ companies and asked them about the importance of marketing in their businesses. I can report the following results:
When franchisees are asked about their marketing skills, they answered with the following (answers add up to less than 100 percent because some chose not to answer):
excellent - 16.19 %
very good - 32.85 %
average - 36.70 %
poor - 5.93 %
However, when asked how important having marketing knowledge for their business is, they answered:
critical - 49.27 %
important - 33.48 %
helpful - 8.43 %
not needed - 0.48 %
So while 82 percent say marketing is a critical or important skill to know, only 49 percent say they have very good or excellent skills.
As I'm sure many young entrepreneurs have discovered, navigating the crazy world of marketing is time consuming and tracking the results is even tougher. My first, and most important words of wisdom are the be sure whatever you spend on marketing, you can track the how well the money is spent. Secondly, review your marketing spends very regularly, even if it's only for a few minutes a day. It's easy to let a Google PPC campaign get out of hand if you move that decimal point one way to the right.
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