What Gannett’s Partnership with Snap Means for Local Marketers
With the ability to reach 90% of 13-to-24 year-olds across the U.S., Snapchat has always held a unique spot in the local marketer’s playbook. Despite its obvious benefits from a marketing perspective — with the ability to connect to more Gen Z consumers than Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger combined — Snapchat’s youth-focused advertising tools haven’t always been easy for small and mid-size businesses to take advantage of.
That could soon be changing.
A new partnership between Gannett and Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, could make it easier for millions of small and mid-size businesses to take advantage of Snapchat’s local marketing tools.
Leveraging Snapchat for local
As the largest local news organization in the U.S., Gannett has unique access to individual communities that few others can compete with. The company and its marketing solutions brand, LOCALiQ, already work with more than 100,000 small businesses to manage digital advertising and online presence through a suite of digital marketing products. With a new partnership in place, Gannett will be able to bring Snapchat’s advertising platform to its local business clients in the U.S. and Canada.
“This collaboration reconfirms LOCALiQ’s mission: to make marketing innovative, efficient, and effective for our customers,” explains Kevin Gentzel, chief revenue officer and president of marketing solutions at Gannett.
Snapchat’s sustained growth, particularly among users in the highly-engaged millennial and Gen Z audiences, makes it especially attractive for Gannett’s local business advertisers. That core group of users, coupled with differentiated ad solutions and recent investments in ad products to drive leads, has made working with the social media company an alluring prospect to many local businesses.
By partnering with Gannett, Snap will be able to expand the number of SMBs it works with around the country. Gannett’s LOCALiQ sales teams will be trained in managing Snap marketing campaigns for their local business clients, simplifying what could otherwise be a time-consuming endeavor. Businesses will have access to analytics dashboards from both LOCALiQ and Snapchat as well.
After nearly a year of struggling to survive during the Covid-19 pandemic, local businesses around the country are still essentially fighting for their lives. Gannett is billing its strategy to build out its local marketing products in 2021 as a way to provide more market expertise to the very businesses that need it the most. Going forward, the company plans to increasingly focus on efficiency as it develops newer ways to drive leads to its business clients.
Snap’s view of local
Snap has been making a major push in the local business space as well, particularly in the past year. Partnering with a well-known brand like Gannett could help the company gain an even stronger foothold within the SMB marketing community.
Snap been launching tools designed for local businesses at a rapid clip as of late. “Promote Local Place,” for example, is a feature launched by Snapchat in the summer of 2020 to help local businesses drive potential customers to nearby locations and increase awareness of the business’ presence on the Snap Map. The Snap Map, for the uninitiated, is a personalized map that’s unique to each user. It features the people and places that users care about within Snap’s 35 million business listings. Users can access store hours, reviews, and integrations with food delivery partners like UberEats, DoorDash, and Grubhub. They can also make dining reservations with OpenTable.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Gannett to bring the power of Snapchat advertising to their network of local businesses all across the U.S. and Canada,” explains Alexander Dao, Snap Inc.’s head of global sales partnerships. “As more and more local businesses embrace digital marketing, we look forward to helping them reach our large and highly engaged millennial and Gen Z audience.”
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
