Marketing and SEO matchmaking platform ZipSprout is introducing a new tool in 2018. The Sprout Seeker Tool aims to help local businesses automatically find the sponsorship opportunities in their area and most relevant to their target customers.
ZipSprout Sprout Seeker
Because local businesses are so tapped into their community, it makes these sponsorship opportunities a natural fit for a lot of small businesses.
Megan Hannay, co-founder and CEO of ZipSprout said in an email to Small Business Trends, “A small business has a few distinct advantages when it comes to local marketing — and the biggest one is that local business owners know their community much better than their national competitors. Many local business owners are already giving to local organizations, maybe 5Ks or youth sports team. Getting involved is a natural extension of being a local entity. ZipSprout helps businesses build strategy around the local marketing they already do. Like a meetup.com for local businesses owners, ZipSprout helps find local sponsorship opportunities that fit a business’s brand and mission.”
And that’s just one of ZipSprout’s offerings. The company actually launched back in December 2015. At the time, Hannay was working at ZipSprout’s parent company, Citation Labs. And she started working on ZipSprout as a side project.
Hannay says, “At the time, I was developing a campaign for a national brand client, finding local sponsorship opportunities in San Diego. After about 100 conversations with local organizations, my cofounder — Garrett — and I realized that we’d found a large, untapped channel for local marketing. So we formed ZipSprout, hired a team and have been building local relationships for two years.”
Since that time, ZipSprout has facilitated more than $746,379 in local donations and sponsorships. But until now, those connections came from the company’s more full-service marketing matchmaker service. The new Sprout Seeker Tool is supposed to be a more DIY type of option, allowing businesses to automatically find the opportunities in their area and filter by category, reach and relevance.
The company also has a newsletter businesses can sign up for to receive information about sponsorship opportunities in their communities. This, in tandem with the new tool launching next year, can really help businesses better reach local customers through those sponsorship opportunities.
Hanney says, “For small businesses, our monthly newsletter and upcoming tool are the two best options. Both are subscription offerings, so local business owners can sign up on the website and go from there. These offerings make it easier for local (and national) entities to find out about sponsor-able events in any location. We believe that if the research is easier, then business owners can instead focus on relationship building with local organizers.”
After the beta phase of the new tool, Hannay says the tool will be available on a subscription basis for a low monthly cost. If you’re interested in signing up, ZipSprout is accepting applications for beta testers now. You can sign up on the company’s website.
Images: ZipSprout
This article, “ZipSprout Connects Small Businesses to Local Sponsorship Opportunities” was first published on Small Business Trends