Franchise swipe file
Twelve agencies that sell a marketing system to franchisors, checked against both the Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Centre, plus the candidate facing ads our clients' funnels have to beat. Websites scraped, video creative transcribed off the files.
They are all on Google. Almost nobody is on Meta.
Twelve franchise marketing agencies, every one checked against both the Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Centre. The split is near total, and it is the most useful thing in this file.
| Agency | Meta | What they are | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expandify | 7 ads, 131d control | 0 | Meta only. The outlier. |
| Digital Rocket | 22 ads, launched 9 Oct | 0 | Meta only. Just arrived. |
| Lead PPC | none | 7 ads | Search. Price and cost per sale public. |
| FMS Franchise | none | 28 ads | Sells franchising TO businesses. Upstream of us. |
| Curious Jane | none | 20 ads | Search and display. Agency switching angle. |
| Ignite Visibility | exact page | 200 ads | Generalist. Franchise is one vertical. |
| TopFire Media | none | 0 | PR, SEO, awards, trade press |
| Hot Dish Advertising | none | 0 | 400+ brands. IFA and trade led. |
| Franchise Performance Group | none | 0 | FSO hybrid. Outsourced sales. |
| Franchise Elevator | none | 0 | PR led, Fishman PR founders |
| ClickTecs | none | 0 | Mostly local franchisee marketing |
| Brand Journalists | none | 0 | Website currently down (Cloudflare 1000) |
Read it carefully before celebrating. Meta is open, but it is open partly because the incumbents concluded that franchisor intent lives on Google Search, and they are not obviously wrong. A franchisor looking for help types "franchise development marketing agency" into Google. Nobody opens Instagram hoping to find one.
Our Meta plan is a bet that broad targeting plus a strong enough message can create demand that search only captures. That is a reasonable bet, Expandify has run one body for 131 days on it, and it is still a bet. Worth running a small Google Search line alongside, on the terms Lead PPC has already proven.
Expandify
Montreal founded, ten years, opening a Miami office. "Expansion partner to North America's fastest growing franchise brands since 2017." Seven live ads, thirty six reels, one control body running 131 days.
The control. Six of seven ads, identical copy, live since 2 June 2026.
Their creative, seen
Their offer, in their own words
Packaging
"Three, six and twelve month programs. All programs get the full spectrum. Unlimited campaigns, unlimited territories, all of your graphics, all of your videos, all of your advertising copies. We put together the entire landing page. All of your Facebook and Google retargeting pixels. Weekly calls, 24/7 access."
"We basically replace an entire brand's marketing department."
The media budget they recommend
"No less than $100 a day. That's $3,000 a month, split between four to five territories. At over 8 locations, roughly $300 a day, $6,000 to $9,000 a month across ten markets."
That number tells you their price tier. A client spending $3k a month on media is not paying a mid five figure fee. We are a different category of purchase.
Their sales process
"Right after the call he receives a summary of what we discussed, our pricing sheet with all the different tiers, and an automatic invite for our next meeting next week. We position ourselves as the authority and keep him moving toward a decision."
Two call close with heavy post call automation. They run on tiers, not a single price.
What they have that we do not
Ten years, $20M+ spent, Montreal and Miami, a guarantee (they claim to be one of very few franchise specific agencies offering one), tiered contracts, a named territory by territory methodology, a trade show footprint and a working content machine.
The five objections they published themselves
From a reel where they say they ran AI over hundreds of their own sales conversations. Treat this as the objection list for our calls too, because it is the same buyer.
| # | Objection | How Expandify answers it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lead quality. "Meta doesn't send quality leads" | Denies the premise. Says it is campaign setup, positioning and the landing page. |
| 2 | Guarantees and ROI | They offer a guarantee and lean on being one of very few in franchising that do. |
| 3 | References. "Brands want to work with notable companies" | Dozens of case studies on the site, plus referenceable clients. |
| 4 | Budget | Reframes it: "usually not a budget issue but a reallocation and an organisational issue. Most brands are spending, just not in the right places." |
| 5 | Contract length | Concedes franchising is a long sales cycle, then sells a 90 day entry tier to de risk it. |
Note the shape of that list. Three of the five are trust objections, not value objections. References, guarantees and contract length are all the same question: what happens if this does not work. That is the gap our zero franchise case studies sits in, and the dead enquiry list launch is the answer to it.
Their funnel, confirmed live
Meta ad β CTA "Learn more" β expandify.com homepage β one button, "Start Expanding Today" β book a call. No VSL page, no webinar, no education step. Hero: "Expand your franchise to the next level. Your next franchisee is closer than you think." Proof on site: 10+ years, $20M+ spent, 24/7 access, one case study (Identity Coffee into Scottsdale in under 90 days).
They sell a better top of funnel into the same broken middle. The candidate is still taught one to one, four calls deep, by a development rep.
Their organic machine: 36 reels, three tracks
Franchise industry education Steal this
Why 7-Eleven is the biggest franchise in the world. The Jersey Mike's origin story. "Everyone knows what a franchise is until you ask them to explain it." Why every brand chases 100 locations. Why Texas and Florida are the easy registration states and New York is not.
This is the track that builds authority with franchisors, and it is the one we should copy. Note the registration states content: it proves they speak the language.
Trade show floor interviews Steal this
Shot at the Montreal and National Franchise Shows. The show organiser. A multi brand operator running 65 banners and 7,000 locations. Cheap to make, high trust, impossible to fake.
Directly relevant to us: the trade show circuit is where this entire industry physically stands in one room.
Founder lifestyle Ignore
The Miami move, penthouse tours, 75 Hard, networking tips. Their biggest view counts are here and on a consumer donut taste test at 232k views.
That is reach with no buyer in it. 232,000 views from people who will never award a franchise.
Digital Rocket / FranchiseFlow
Founder Ivan Janku. Franchise is one of four named verticals and their franchise system has a name. Better positioned than Expandify on every axis except the one that matters.
Their creative, which is the most copyable thing in this file
Twenty one variants of one body, each paired with a different image. The format is the same every time: a plain, unpolished photograph of a franchise development person having a bad day, with one brutal number laid over it. No stock photography, no brand polish, and they swear in several of them.
The calendar screenshot is the best of them. It does not describe the problem, it shows the reader their own diary. That is the most directly stealable idea in this entire file, and the franchise version of it writes itself.
Their proof, which we do not have
Resicert, AU and NZ
Six year client. 50+ franchises sold. $4M+ signed revenue. Cost per lead fell A$43.75 to A$18.39, a 58 percent drop.
Video testimonial: "Fired 5 agencies before Digital Rocket. Still here, 6 years on."
The guarantee, well built
Audit first, then baseline, target and deadline in writing. Miss it and they work with no management fee.
"We don't guarantee your sales team's close rate. We guarantee the acquisition improvement we agree to control." Copy that boundary logic exactly.
Funnel
Site, then "Find profit leaks", a free 30 minute audit, "no pitch, no obligation, up to 3 profit leaks named", gated on an application with three stated conditions: meaningful monthly budget, wants revenue not leads, wants a system not cheap leads.
Angles
"Your last agency stopped at the lead." · "We don't sell ads. We sell profit you can trace." · "Up to 80% of ad spend wasted" · "Most clients fired 4 to 5 agencies before they found us."
Where they stop, and this is our whole position
Read what FranchiseFlow actually does. It scores capital, territory fit, timeline and motivation. It filters bad fits out of the diary. It feeds signed agreements back to the platforms. Every one of those happens around the candidate. Nothing in their system changes what a candidate understands.
They make the franchisor buy better leads. They do not make a lead more likely to convert. Their own franchise headline is "your last agency stopped at the lead". Theirs stops at the qualified lead, and they admit the boundary in their own guarantee.
Digital Rocket will get you fewer, better candidates. Nothing about that changes what happens to one after they book.
They are also a potential partner. They qualify the front, we warm the middle, neither of us touches the award. Worth a conversation once we have one franchise result.
What the established agencies actually run
Three of them advertise, all on Google Search, none on Meta. Their ad copy gives away pricing, cost per sale claims and proof numbers that their websites do not.
Lead PPC — the only one buying franchisor traffic properly
200+ franchisors, $25M+ managed, 80+ brands. Seven live Google Search ads under advertiser "Grant James, Verified". Their control hook is "Need More Franchisees?", used in three of four variants.
Their published insight, worth more than the ads: across 200+ franchisors, competitor keywords had the cheapest cost per lead and cost per sale of any keyword except branded terms. Generic terms like "franchise opportunities" drew tyre kickers and produced no sales.
The five who advertise nowhere
TopFire Media
Entrepreneur Top Franchise Marketing Agency 2018 to 2022. Most honest headline in the category: "Franchise Development (Sales) is Hard! You have lots of options for generating leads, and most are not that good."
Lead magnets: a "10 Must-haves When Hiring a Franchise Marketing Agency" ebook and a free Franchise Marketing Assessment. Framing: "it's finding the needles in the haystack".
Hot Dish Advertising
400+ brands, "more than 1,100 franchise agreements" fuelled, repeatedly named #1 Franchise Marketing Supplier. Their enquiry form splits Consumer, Franchise and Employer Development, so franchise recruitment is a third of the business.
Franchise Performance Group
Joe Mathews, since 2002. 150+ brands, half of clients in the Entrepreneur 500. Lead gen and outsourced franchise sales, so they compete for the broker budget too.
The stat to steal: "Of the 1 to 2 million people a year who become a franchise candidate, only 13,000 to 20,000 will become franchise buyers." Roughly 1 percent, corroborating the 1.5 percent figure from a different direction.
Franchise Elevator
Backed by the founders of Fishman PR. Deliberately targets the bottom of our market: "Some are just starting with their first marketing fund. Others have been burned by bad marketing."
Note "broker content marketing" as a service line. They market to brokers on behalf of brands. Nobody else lists that.
Ignite Visibility
The only one whose copy reaches into our territory: "attract qualified candidates, improve progression to Discovery Day, and measure marketing performance through signed agreements... measured on awarded units rather than on leads or impressions."
Proof: a med spa franchise at $67 cost per lead. They name the Discovery Day problem and solve it with SEO, paid media and CRM attribution. Not with education.
Brand Journalists
Described in the trade press as the premier US franchise lead generation firm: since 2008, 180+ brands, 10,000+ franchisees recruited.
Their website is currently down (Cloudflare Error 1000, misconfigured DNS at their end, checked 11 Oct 2026). Nothing verified first hand.
Not one of twelve agencies runs, sells or mentions a live recurring educational event. The category's entire vocabulary is leads, qualification, attribution and cost per sale. Everybody optimises the purchase of attention. Nobody does anything with it once it is bought.
ClientTether
Franchise CRM and speed to lead software. Three live ads. Sells to franchisors, but about their franchisees' customer leads, not candidate recruitment. Not a competitor for our budget, but the hook is the best written thing in the category.
Franchise Direct and the 371 ad corpus
Franchise Direct is a portal running 58 live ads on behalf of franchisor clients. This is the candidate facing side: the creative our clients already buy, and the standard our registration funnel has to clear.
The formula, repeated 58 times
Language distribution across 371 franchisor ads
| Device | Share | Read |
|---|---|---|
| "Learn more" | 23% | The default. Means nothing, commits to nothing. |
| "Territories" | 22% | The category's scarcity device, usually with no map behind it. |
| "Request info" | 18% | The form fill. |
| Financing | 3% | Underused given capital is the primary qualifier. |
| Apply | 2% | |
| "Download packet" | 2% | Far rarer than the industry believes. |
| "Book a call" | 1 ad | One. Out of 371. |
| "Webinar" | 1 ad | One. Out of 371. This is the opening. |
The two specimens worth keeping
Rallio
Nine live ads, all selling AI social media and review management to individual franchise locations at $97 a month. Different buyer, different problem, no overlap. Logged so nobody mistakes it for a competitor later.
The steal list
Ten things in this file that should change what we actually run.
- Never open on lead quality. Every single competitor owns it, and Digital Rocket owns it with six years of proof. Opening there puts us on their ground in a fight we cannot win yet. Open on broker fees, the four repeated calls, the fourteen day silence or the 75 percent Discovery Day.
- Build a repulsion layer into every creative. Expandify uses industry statistics, Digital Rocket uses vocabulary. Without one, broad targeting on Meta hands us franchise candidates instead of franchisors. Ours should be the measured numbers: "371 ads, 194 brands, one webinar."
- Run a small Google Search line too. Four of the agencies advertise and every one is on Search, not Meta. Lead PPC has already proven the terms. Meta is where we create demand; Search is where we catch the franchisor who went looking.
- Steal Expandify's VSL structure, swap the mechanism. Stated dream, five numbered desires, "not unrealistic, just needs the right system", mechanism, close. Better than a pain led open for a buyer who does not think they have our problem.
- Steal the ClientTether hook shape. One question naming a failure they already suspect, one line of consequence, then mechanism. "Losing candidates because nobody teaches them until a rep has time?"
- Copy Digital Rocket's guarantee boundary, not their guarantee. "We don't guarantee your sales team's close rate. We guarantee the acquisition improvement we agree to control." That sentence makes a guarantee safe to offer. Ours would be scoped to cost per qualified booked call.
- Answer the trust objection before it is raised. Expandify published their own five objections and three are trust, not value: references, guarantees, contract length. Our answer to all three is the same, and it is better than a case study: the first launch runs on the client's dead enquiry list, no media spend, risk on us.
- Expect the agency-switching conversation. Three separate competitors lead with it. Franchisors are chronically dissatisfied with agencies, which opens the door and also predicts they will churn us. Build the first ninety days around a visible result.
- Price above the category deliberately. Lead PPC advertises $2,250 a month publicly. Expandify tells clients to spend $3,000 a month on media. We are not in that conversation and should never be benchmarked into it. The anchor is the broker commission: $22,000 to $40,000 a deal, every deal.
- Treat FMS Franchise as a referral source, not a rival. They turn businesses into franchisors. Every client they sign becomes our ICP in about two years, and they have sold 11,340 franchises across 1,579 brands.