The Perfect Time To Reach Candidates

If you had a job you hated (theoretical – because you don’t actually, right?), when during the week would you be most interested in exploring franchising as a way to finally have your own business?

There are surely many ways to measure the best time to connect with franchise candidates. One way Franchise Business Review looks at its activity is via hourly spend on our pay-per-click advertising, which is active 24/7. By analyzing the total spend per hour per day, we get a sense of the most and least popular times for “franchise opportunities” searches, as well as other top keywords.

Our collective data, which is reflected in the red heat map graphic below, confirms many of our assumptions, while also exposing some possible “off-hours” opportunities.

• • Search activity ticks up Sunday evening, specifically between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, as denoted by the brighter red markers in the graphic. It then continues for all of Monday’s typical waking hours, peaking for the day at around 1 p.m. ET, when the greatest number of North Americans across the four time zones is taking lunch.

• • Tuesday is interesting. It’s early in the work week, and with several more days before a weekend, folks are certainly interested in escaping their daily grind. It’s not quite Monday numbers, but it’s a good day to tap into entrepreneurial interest. Activity tapers after the lunch hours, but then between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET, we see the most active 60-minute period of the week. Perhaps it’s that feeling of “I need a day off, but I’m not even halfway to the weekend.” Maybe there’s just nothing good on TV on Tuesdays – apologies to the “NCIS”, “Person of Interest”, and “The Flash” fans out there.

• • Wednesday is a flatter version of Tuesday, with what you might call an average amount of activity throughout the majority of the day. It then tapers off into the weekend, which, overall, is the worst time to try to attract your next franchisee. Even so, the later evenings of Thursday through Saturday do see some activity.

All this is not to say that your marketing and development teams need to focus on the brightest red time periods within our graphic. It reflects only our own data, and yours may differ. Another thing to consider is that a higher quantity of franchise seekers at a given time does not mean you won’t have a better quality conversation at a different time. In fact, Saturday morning might be a great time to touch base with a happy, relaxed, future franchise owner.

Lastly, there’s something to be said for the philosophy of “when they zig, you zag.” If you push out your franchise marketing at 3 a.m. on a Thursday, you might not reach a whole lot of people, but there will be significantly less clutter for you to fight through to reach those who are active at that time.

Click graphic for larger version.

How to read this graphic:

The days of the week are listed on the horizontal axis and the hours of each day, starting with 0 (the 60 minutes following midnight), are listed vertically. The brightness of the box where a day and hour meet indicates how much money is spent by our pay-per-click campaigns relative to other hours. The brightest red colors indicate the most spend, while solid black is the lowest.