How to Make a Career Change With a Marketing Franchise

Lily Sweeney, writer

Published at 30/10/2021, Updated on 04/05/2022 , Reading time: 5 min

How to Make a Career Change With a Marketing Franchise — Photo © How-to-Make-a-Career-Change-With-a-Marketing-Franchise.jpg

If you’d like to join the fast-expanding marketing industry and start your own business, you should consider making a career change with a marketing franchise. With franchisor support, flexibility and freedom, you’ll be able to enjoy the best of both worlds in a field that only looks set to continue growing and pulling in profits.

Digital ad spending is on the increase, and is likely to grow by 16.8% over the year, pushing the value of the marketing industry to almost £20 billion [Insider Intelligence]. It’s easy to see why so many people are entering this lucrative arena, but it’s also easy to see how getting it wrong could result in franchise failure. If you want to start your own marketing franchise in 2021, keep reading. This article will show you how to do it right.

Why consider making a career change with a marketing franchise?

If you’re ready to become your own boss and build a business with the support of a franchisor, marketing is a great sector in which to plant your flag. Particularly if you’re a friendly people person with a natural talent for sales and negotiation. Beyond the demand that’s so clearly evidenced by the huge size of the industry, here are some of the most important advantages of starting a marketing franchise:

You’ll be fully trained and supported (meaning you won’t need any experience in most cases)
You’ll have plenty of room to specialise and perfect your niche
Low cost investment options are available in the marketing sector
Your daily working life will be dynamic, exciting and full of room to be creative
You’ll be able to work flexibly (and from home in some cases)

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How to make a career change with a marketing franchise

There are three kinds of marketing franchise, rally - B2B (business to business), B2C (business to customer) and sectoral (sector/specialism focused). Whichever you choose to start, there are certain things you’ll need to do before signing that franchise agreement and kicking off your franchising journey. The following steps will help you to ensure you’ve chosen the right marketing franchise for you and gotten it off on the right foot...

1. Assess your skills and qualifications

Franchising is a great way not just to start a marketing franchise, but to become a marketer, even with no previous sales experience. As a franchisee, you’ll be fully trained and supported by your franchisor, and you’ll often find that certain baseline transferable skills are more valuable to your franchisor than concrete, relevant experience or qualification. Skills like:

Negotiation
Persuasion
Initiative
Creativity
Communication
Attention to detail
Leadership
Business management
People management
Time management

Ask yourself, first and foremost, whether you have these skills. If you don’t, you might be better off finding a different kind of franchise to invest in. If you do, you’re likely to be able to find success in the marketing industry, as long as you’re willing to put in the hard work and take in all the learning that’s offered to you during your programme of training.

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2. Research the industry

Once you know that you’re able to thrive in the industry and you’re well-suited to work as a marketer, it’s then time to figure out the industry itself. What’s the current state of play? Which emerging trends are dominating the conversation? Is the industry in a growth phase, a decline phase or a stagnant phase? Are there niche areas of marketing that you might be perfectly suited to entering?

Get an idea of what the industry looks like and where you might fit by doing plenty of research. Research interesting opportunities, research trends, and research competitors. Do as much as you can to get informed ahead of an investment. To get you started, here’s an idea of the tasks that you’ll likely be undertaking regularly as a franchisee within a marketing network:

Communicating and negotiating with clients
Communicating with employees
Producing content calendars, proposals and plans
Devising marketing strategies/materials/content
Setting budgets
Managing expectations
Overseeing and assessing the effectiveness of campaigns
Recruiting new employees and managing existing employees
Staying up-to-date on the latest industry developments and trends

3. Consider the costs

Look beyond the minimum requirement for buying a franchise, usually listed as the franchise fee and the cost of equipment. Getting a franchise up and running can involve hefty marketing costs and the need to survive on break-even books, or a period of net losses, before your business catches on. - Susan Adams, Forbes

Once you’re absolutely sure that a career in marketing is the right fit, and you’ve developed a pool of interesting marketing franchise investment opportunities to consider, it’s time to narrow it down.

The best way to do this is by paying close attention to the costs. Not just the cost of investing initially, but the costs associated with running the franchise and truly getting it off the ground. Speak with existing franchisees in companies that interest you, if you can, and get a true sense of the associated costs. The worst thing you can do is overplay your hand and end up ill-equipped to handle the financial demands of an investment.

To give you some idea of what you can expect within the marketing industry, in which associated costs vary greatly depending on the specifics of the business model, FASTSIGNS requires a minimum initial investment of £36,000, with franchise fees of £21,000 and a total investment cost of £120,000. Meanwhile, Minuteman Press requires a minimum initial investment of £25,000 and a total investment cost of £50,000, while Recognition Express requires a minimum initial investment of £9,000, with franchise fees of £8,000 and a total investment cost of £25,000.

Join the marketing industry and start running your own business today

Hopefully, you feel more confident than ever in your decision after reading this article. For more information on the wide world of marketing, and on smoothly launching your own marketing franchise, stay on Point Franchise. Discover the top five marketing franchises in the UK, or find out four helpful tips for running a marketing franchise.