The Guide To Local Marketing With Sponsorships

This piece outlines the who, why, and how of a scalable, grassroots multi-local marketing campaign. For startups looking to launch services in a new city, for national brands in need of regional events, or for businesses investing in city-specific PR, local sponsorships deliver new customer reach at the neighborhood level.

Who Needs Local Sponsorships?

Three types of businesses target local customers: national chains with brick-and-mortar stores, tech startups that grow city-to-city (often looking to replace national chains), and local businesses. Below are personas for each.

Local Marketing For Local Businesses

These businesses, such as doctors, lawyers, roofers, or successful mom-and-pop shops in City X, are big enough to have a marketing budget, and may even be able to pay an agency, but they’re also not going to have the sponsorship budget that a national chain would.

This type of client, like web national businesses, wants to rank in their city on Google, and, like national chains, they also want local branding. They face competition from one or both of these areas (depending on their business model), and they depend on community loyalty for their business. Some small businesses may already be involved in their local community as a result of their owners being locals, but others may be looking to expand their reach and find new local opportunities.

Local Marketing For Web National Businesses

These are companies that operate nationally but do not have brick-and-mortar locations in each city. They are often startups, looking to provide a tech alternative to a local problem, whether it be finding good food, a decent repairperson, or a pet sitter. In order to infiltrate local markets, web nationals need to rank well on Google, establish local social followings, and they need to develop a local presence in each city, which may entail local event attendance. If they can’t rank well against their competitors, and if locals don’t trust them, they will not gain ground over existing competition in each city they expand to.

Local Marketing For National Chains

These large brands already have hundreds, maybe thousands, of requests for sponsorships every year in cities across the US. To handle these requests, they’ve created a barrier to entry that includes a sponsorship request form that local events and organizations have to fill out, listing the category, reach, size, and other details of the request. Most of these corporations have a full-time employee (maybe more than one) whose job entails looking through these forms, choosing sponsorships, and coordinating them.

Unlike web national businesses, these clients are generally not as focused on local rankings or specific ROI measurement. Instead, their local marketing is seen more as a branding move. However, this missed connection between goodwill and ROI means that great marketing opportunities may be left on the table.

Benefits Of Local Sponsorships

Local Mission

It’s never too early to think “brand.” Even if you’re a startup. In fact, especially if you’re a startup. Your brand and its story will help differentiate your product and its pitch from competitors in the space. What does your company stand for? Local sponsorships can define this mission. If you’re not sure where to start, ask internal stakeholders:

• What intrinsic need does your product or service serve, and how is this need fulfilled in the nonprofit space?
• What common concern do most of our customers have? How can we address this concern in local communities?
• Where do our customers gather? How can we be there and make it a better space?

Your mission doesn’t have to be as serious as preventing theft from senior citizens. Coca-Cola cares most about our lives tasting good, and its philanthropic arm reflects those values by supporting life-improvement nonprofits around the world.

Local Marketing

Local sponsorships offer marketing packages to fit any company’s goals. Whether you want to reach Milwaukee elementary school parents via email marketing or garner more millennial impressions of your social media pages in San Diego, local sponsorships go beyond targeting advertising services; they reach people who are truly embedded in a community.

Conclusion

If online advertising is a browser cookie, local sponsorships are thin mints. While the former is a must-have of modern marketing, the latter leaves an unforgettable and fresh impression.

Local sponsorships provide reach without silos. If you can combine the efforts of local PR, social media, and SEO teams, you’ll find local opportunities that can stretch your region-based budget.

Having a mission or target customer will help narrow down opportunities, and a formula will help your team find the right level of sponsorship. Browser cookies may follow your site visitors around the web, but customers will come to you if you offer something they want.

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