Does your funeral home sponsor a soccer team? Do you make an appearance every year in the town parade?

Home improvement businesses that aren’t leveraging local marketing channels for branding are likely losing marketing share to the competition. Local sponsorships offer one channel for building appropriate brand awareness with a targeted, geocentric audience.

Partnerships with local organizations, such as associations, nonprofits, or events, let you expand home improvement marketing reach in a way that enforces your commitment to consumers.

These partnerships position you as a company that cares about the community and the people within it, which can lead to more consumers willing to trust you with their windows or other home upgrades.

And while you’re joining the community to help make it or the lives within it better, you can benefit from a wide variety of local marketing opportunities. Just some benefits of local sponsorships include:

• Local ads on event flyers, programs or banners
• Booths or tents at an event where you can interact directly with potential clientele
• Inclusion of your brand in press releases, news stories and website listings
• Back links to your site from event or organization web pages, newsletters and social media
• Your logo on swag, such as T-shirts, handed out by event organizers or associations

Local sponsorships are branding opportunities, so you don’t always get a direct link to your products or site. And that’s okay.

The branding component, coupled with the fact that local sponsorship activity takes time — event organizers often seek sponsorship commitments months in advance — makes this an opportunity for positioning yourself as an expert provider in the niche rather than a channel for advertising specific deals or products.

Increase the return on your local marketing investment by choosing partner organizations with target audiences that match yours. For example, real estate events or home decor organizations both draw audiences already interested in owning homes and making those houses their own.

Home improvement marketing via local sponsorships works especially well when you can show off your expertise and products in a booth. But don’t overlook opportunities for simply getting your name in front of crowds, such as banners at local ballgames.

However you approach local sponsorships, remember that the opportunities are diverse. You can integrate sponsorships with your existing marketing strategies or use them as a singular channel to drive local branding.

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