The local marketing and advertising space is made up of several major groups: advertisers (enterprises and SMBs), publishers (print and digital), technology providers and agencies. Beyond our legacy serving local media publishers and yellow pages agencies, we’ve made great progress adding technology providers as members. Now, to round out our member ecosystem, we’ve started to focus more on expanding outreach to independent, digital agencies.

As digital media and marketing have taken a greater share of attention and budgets, there has been a growing emphasis on location-based marketing tactics. As brands have come to understand the importance of local and small business advertisers have adopted digital, agencies have been adapting.

New regional and local marketing agencies are popping up across the country. There are roughly 60,000 agencies in the U.S.; roughly 5,000 of them are independently owned and have come into existence in the past five years. Many of these agencies serve SMBs. Their interests are aligned with some of our new local-business-owner initiatives like LSA Bootcamp, www.MarketingBitz.com, webinars and more.

To learn more about agency needs and challenges, we held focus groups in Detroit and Chicago and discovered an appetite for better research and a desire for more in-depth understanding of location-based marketing tactics. We also added Sharon Rowlands, CEO of digital marketing agency ReachLocal, to our board last year. “The data and information that we get from LSA’s reports, conferences, content and general market expertise is a great resource for our business,” said Sharon.

In addition, we recently hired Sara Ryan as our Business Development Director. She’s focused on building agency relationships and developing services that align with their needs. You can contact her directly to learn more about LSA membership for agencies.

This process prompted LSA to add several new offerings to the existing list of member benefits (access depends on membership level):

• DATA CONCIERGE/INQUIRY SERVICE: Instead of searching through a database of reports and data yourself, send research requests to the LSA team and we will get you the data, trends and insights to fit your needs.
• SMALL BUSINESS EXPOSURE: Get the attention of LSA’s small business audience at LSA Bootcamp, on MarketingBitz.com and via webinars, contributed blog posts, presentations and more.
• CUSTOMER PITCH SUPPORT: Leverage LSA’s years of experience, research expertise and creativity to make your next client/partner pitch as effective as possible.
• CREATIVE DESIGN SUPPORT: LSA’s design team is here to support members with creative projects such as logo/brand design, infographics, web design feedback/suggestions, document/presentation design, online ad design and much more.
• CO-OP OPPORTUNITY AUDIT: Give us a business category and we will let you know which brands offer co-op advertising funds for that category.

The bottom line is: if you’re an agency of 1 or 200, LSA can help you grow. If you are a current member interested in learning more, email us. If you’re not a member yet, click here to learn more.