Why Trying to Attract Large (National) Advertisers Online is a Bad Idea for Local

The conventional wisdom suggests that attracting national advertisers to local would mean big money. It doesn't.

"Can you help us attract large national advertisers to our site?"

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable question and implied goal. It's NOT!

For print publishers, the idea of a national advertiser makes total sense. In fact, we wrote a blog about the challenges of attracting large brands just a couple of weeks ago.

Simply drop some mediocre piece of content or house ad to make room or add pages if necessary. But the situation online is far different because ad space is much more finite (on a given page).

Most national advertisers limit their buy to more traditional display ads online and they are looking to reach, well, everybody.

Or at least a major demographic of the population at large.

As a result, they don't care whether they reach them on any one of thousands of sites which make their ad space available for programmatic buying in an ad network or your highly targeted local site. In fact, if you use Google Adsense they may already be reaching your audience for next to nothing.

That's the rub, the value of your highly targeted audience isn't particularly valuable to national brands.

Do you think you provide Coke, Pepsi or Toyota with a unique audience they can't get elsewhere? This isn't to say there are no exceptions to the rule, big players who want to be associated with local publications and are willing to pay a premium to do so.

Macy's has a local inventory strategy and Whole Foods along with others seeking to provide a farm-to-fork offering are clearly locally aligned but I'm hard-pressed to think of another off the top of my head.

They're also the likely prospects who will go beyond simple display advertising to sponsor events, run social promotions, sponsor emails and pay for native advertising (Sponsored Content) which is one area local publishers can truly offer unique value.

The point is, attracting national advertisers to buy from your local site isn't the panacea many people make it out to be.

So, let's look at local businesses to contrast their goals and constraints. Local business owners (or potentially local franchises) want to:

• reach the right audience with minimal waste
• benefit from mobile, social and other buzzwords they only loosely understand
• work with a trusted brand/person - preferably for all of their marketing
• avoid making a stupid decision - as much for personal ego reasons as financial
• there are probably a dozen more that I'm missing

What this means is that you can literally charge more to local businesses AND deliver more value to them at the same time!

If you're not able to effectively sell to local businesses, things don't get easier when dealing with national brands and their media buyers.

Selling to small businesses clearly presents a challenge because they tend to be busy and unsophisticated so getting local advertisers to come to you and selling a solution they can understand, ad sales should never be a technical sale, are both critical.

Locable specializes in helping local publishers grow and engaged audience and deliver unique campaigns. Request a demo and program overview to learn more about our technology, technique and new full-service Publisher Concierge options.