What are the smart ways to market your brand next year, and how can franchisors maximise their marketing strategies to optimise franchise recruitment?
Jim’s Group marketing chief Joel Kleber shares his views on what will drive interest in a brand. Here are his top tips on marketing well in 2025.
Longer form content
Kleber’s experience over the year has shown the appeal of authentic, long-form content; audiences are engaging with longer form video and audio, he says.
“Podcasts for us have been extremely effective in bringing our prospects into Jim’s training without too much effort.
“The three-minute franchise testimonial is far less effective than a 60 minute unedited interview with a franchisee,” he says.
“People consume sometimes 50 episodes before investing with us. This makes for a far better franchisee as they know exactly what they are getting themselves into.”
Kleber cautions franchisors against flexing too much control of the content to ensure it meets the brand message.
“It’s important for management to stay out of the way and do not edit that content; people want to hear about a ‘genuine’ business experience, the ups and downs of the franchise experience,” he says.
Daily content
Kleber suggests daily short-form video content is a must-have for any franchise brand serious about growth.
It has never been more important for the founder/CEO to be active on social media, daily video content, he suggests.
“The founder story is an important part of any business now and it’s brings new people into your brand.”
He’s also a fan of AI tools that can re-purpose long-form video content.
“We have already been using runway and ideogram to generate social media content with great success.”
Smart ways to reach potential buyers
Kleber suggests has two more top marketing tips for a franchise brand in 2025: invest in a YouTube channel with daily content and a regular podcast.
“It amazes me when I look at competitors and see their last upload is from four years ago, for example. What does that say to your prospects?” he asks.
“We have been getting people into our training from them seeing a TikTok video which then peaks their interest in us and then they seek out more content on our YouTube channel for example.
“You have to have a lot of what I call ‘seed planters’ which is the first bit of content they see from your brand which triggers their interest in a franchise.”
Create short-form video content with simple phone videos and achieve 100k views with minimal effort, he suggests. It’s a great way to find out about being a franchisee or to answer common franchise questions.
Posting multiple seed planter videos daily across multiple platform attracts a new cohort of ‘non-followers’ who are then brought in to your funnel, he says.
Posting several times daily on multiple social media accounts has worked for the Jim’s Group, he says.
“Wherever there is a platform with an audience that we can reach for free, we have content going into those platforms multiple times a day.
“We are in an attention economy and people move on very quickly, so you have to keep showing up and you can only do that with multiple posts per day if your focus is on social,” Kleber says.
So what are the new tools?
Kleber highlights the following as “exciting tools that will change marketing over the next couple of years”:
- Chat GPT
- opus clip
- repurpose.io
- ideogram
- runway
- swell.ai
- heygen
What message should franchisors be sending out?
“For the Jim’s Group, it’s about waking people up to the fact that, unlike their corporate job, service businesses aren’t going to be overly disrupted by AI over the next five years,” Kleber says.
“The other point is that there is a massive lack of awareness around the type of income that is achievable with a home services franchise if you work hard.”
Transparency about the business is another of Kleber’s top marketing tips for 2025.
He praises the US approach of openly promoting entrepreneurship and the money that can be made in home services.
“I have been changing our content to become more in line with the US, and we openly state revenues of the business,” he says.
