Your community is already alive to the influences surrounding it: businesses, events, organizations, seasonal traditions, and relevant news. You don’t have to write a new story from scratch; you just need to discover where you fit into the existing storyline. Generosity, creativity, and a genuine desire to contribute to community well-being are what it takes to become a visible player in local life.
‘Barnacle SEO’ was a term first popularized by Will Scott in 2011 to describe the process of attaching your business to existing high-ranking entities (like major directories) and then promoting them as a means of dominating search engine results for desired terms.
Today, we’re going to take that novel concept in a different direction, with the goal of increasing brand awareness for single, multi-location, and enterprise local businesses by latching onto existing influences in any given community.
Independently owned businesses hit roadblocks when they fear they have nothing real to say. Multi-location businesses fret over meaningful differentiation of one location from another. Large enterprises struggle with fostering local authenticity because the distance between the CEO and the clerk behind the checkout counter is sometimes too great, and brand-wide initiatives may result in generic, rather than truly local, messaging.
How to overcome these challenges? The solution lies in realizing that almost any given community is already writing your local story; you just have to discover how to latch onto it.
A large part of your blog posts, social outreach, and even paid advertising can be based on the fact that there are local, national, and global influences already firmly established in the minds of your consumers, almost every day of the year. Whether it’s the small-town 4th of July BBQ or the big-city Earth Day celebration, there are events, holidays, weather patterns, long-standing customs, and emerging news items of which your customers are already aware. Your barnacle local awareness marketing simply involves tying your business into pre-existing conditions, proving that you, too, are aware.
For Example:
1) Almost every local Chamber of Commerce website has an events calendar which will detail most significant community happenings. You can also use sites like Eventbrite for further inspiration. And, indeed, there are paid opportunity-finding services like ZipSprout that can do the work for you and hook you up with with relevant sponsorship matches. Remember, you’re looking for well-known happenings that are already part of your customers’ consciousness — events that they are seeing advertised around town, promoted on the web, local TV, and radio.
On the national/global side, major news sites will be your best bet. Some events (like international summits or sports championships) are publicized well in advance. Others will require-up-to the minute awareness of items in the ‘15 minutes news cycle’ that could impact your customers in some relevant way.
Gather links as you do your research and enter them in the spreadsheet.
Here are two real world examples of how other businesses utlized this approach:
- Here’s an inspiring story about a NYC-based organization called New Women New Yorkers which helps immigrant women gain access to resources that will make their lives safer, more profitable, and more interesting in their new country. A local Lebanese restaurant called Manousheh answered the organization’s call for sponsorships and donations for an event, and was thanked on an events page and mentioned on events sites like this one. To close the barnacle loop, all the restaurant needs to do is start a page on their own site mentioning that they support this organization and that they participated in an event. It would be nice, too, if the organization would make sponsor logos link to their websites. Everybody is off to a good start here and just needs to go one step further.
- 2016 marked the 41st anniversary of a Santa Fe event called Pancakes on The Plaza. Local bank First National of Santa Fe comes out as a winner with a featured logo on this sponsors page and with a barnacle shout out on their own website, promoting both their participation and the event, plus proud mentions on their Facebook page. The deal is further sweetened by blog mentions like this one, this one, this one... and the list goes on!
Good Luck! Let us know how it works and feel free to comment.