January is Definitely “Open a Franchise” Month

As the calendar turns to 2015, everyone around the world is working on their new years’ resolutions. Some of the more popular ones for personal lives are always about sending more time with your family, eating healthier, or going to the gym more frequently.

However, equally as important to personal goals are professional goals. For some people, 2015 may be the year for a raise or promotion. Maybe it’s changing jobs. But for others, 2015 will be the year that they finally decide to explore entrepreneurship in a serious manner.

And, as you can imagine, that means good things for the franchise sales business.

Since us here at FranchiseHelp are at the forefront of how people are searching for franchising information on the internet, we thought we’d share a few pieces of evidence that show just how much more people want to open a franchise in January.

First of all, let’s take a look at Google Trends. As we’ve written about earlier, Google Trends is a site where Google will share with you high level statistics regarding the popularity, geography, etc. of different search terms.

Here’s the chart mapping searches for “Open a Franchise” from February 2014 – January 2015:

Notice anything weird?

Oh yeah, as soon as January rolls around, searches for “Open a Franchise” absolutely skyrocket.

So how does that translate to traffic coming to FranchiseHelp?

Using Google Analytics, one of our many data providers, we can see the trend in how people are visiting FranchiseHelp organically. (If you remember, organic traffic is the visitors that come to FranchiseHelp for free by simply from doing a search in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.)

Here’s what FranchiseHelp’s organic traffic looked like from January 1st – January 7th, 2015 compared to the 7 days previous, December 25th – December 31st, 2014:

(Obviously this isn’t the purest analysis given a predicted slowdown around the holidays, but it’s the best comparator I can make.)

We’ve seen a 38% increase in visitors and a 36% increase in page views, a lift that is likely seen all the way across the franchise industry.

As you can see, January is definitely “Open a Franchise” month. Of course, that doesn’t mean that many more franchises are going to be actually opened in January, but the processes are beginning now such that in 3-12 months, there will be a huge boost in sales.

For franchise lead generators, it means that we have to be on our best game this time of year. Given that there is a spike in traffic, our systems have to be ready to handle everything. Server capacity will be tested as well as any lead verification systems in place. (I can promise you that our operations team isn’t having the best month!)

For franchisors, their sales processes are going to be put to the test. Although it’s likely that business didn’t ramp until the 5th, the sales teams were met with a huge supply of leads, ready to get started toward owner their own location.

If you have a question about how your website can attract more traffic in January (as well as throughout the entire year), let us know! We can’t wait to help.