Adopt Grassroots Marketing to Find Your Perfect Audience

Grassroots marketing may be a traditional aspect of political and social movements, but for many brands and advertisers, it can be a highly effective approach. While it might be an unfamiliar concept to some, this marketing type can be as worthwhile as influencer or multicultural marketing. 

Grassroots marketing focuses on relationship-building through highly targeted messaging—a stark contrast to mass-market advertising. As media consumers continue to pursue online communities, from niche podcasts to subcultures, this marketing approach is a great way to grow an audience from the ground up. Below, learn what it is and how you can add it to your strategy. 

What is Grassroots Marketing?

To get a clue of what grassroots marketing is, think of the name itself. This strategy creates interest in a product or brand by targeting niche communities and building relationships through word-of-mouth marketing, authenticity, and local engagement. 

This marketing type pays off over time as it creates long-lasting communities. By adopting this approach, you’re getting that much closer to not just consumers but brand loyalists and advocates. Your target audience might be a small business, die-hard Afrobeats fans, or millennials in a specific city. 

Some of the key elements of a grassroots campaign include:

• Organic and word-of-mouth growth

• Audience-tailored messaging

• Community relationship-building

While grassroots marketing has a traditional emphasis on physical interactions, it’s not limited to in-person efforts. When combined with digital platforms, this marketing type offers brands even more reach and impact. 

Some may be wondering, "Wait, this is starting to sound like guerilla marketing.” Well, not quite. 

What's the Difference Between Grassroots and Guerilla Marketing?

We’re glad you asked. Both approaches are low-cost, audience-driven ways to raise brand awareness, but they ultimately differ when it comes to their audiences, goals, and approach. 

Grassroots marketing focuses on relationship- and community-building while targeting highly specific audiences. This long-term strategy requires mobilization over time.

Meanwhile, guerilla marketing targets larger audiences and widespread attention through attention-grabbing stunts and virality—often through short-term campaigns. 

Is Grassroots Marketing Right for Your Brand?

Deciding if grassroots marketing is right for your brand comes down to your budget, campaign goals, and target audience. For advertisers who want to see a quick blip in their metrics, a grassroots approach is unlikely the best fit. However, if your team has the time and vision, this type of campaign is a cost-effective way to build a long-lasting, loyal audience.

Pros:

• Less expensive than traditional campaigns

• Builds long-lasting customer relationships and communities 

• Loyal customers promote your brand through word of mouth

• Potential for higher engagement rates 

Cons:

• A potentially smaller reach compared to mass-market campaigns, so be sure to align your success metrics and expected ROI to the size of your audience 

• Takes time before you see significant results, so set up and monitor KPIs over a reasonable time period

• Difficult to correlate success metrics and grassroots efforts, so find ways to track and measure your tactics

Start Your Grassroots Marketing Campaign with Targeting 

Think of building a grassroots marketing campaign like caring for a lawn. If you take the time to prep the soil, sow the seed, and nourish the sprouting blades of grass, the few sparse blades turn into a dense patch and eventually, a lawn. Once that root system is established, you don’t have to be as hands-on to achieve the same results. Now, let’s ditch this metaphor and talk about audiences.

Identify Your Audience

To advertisers, demographics can be considered the bare minimum of a target audience. When building a grassroots movement, you need to know a lot more than someone’s age or household income (though it helps). Start by asking these questions: 

• Who do I want to reach and why? 

• What specific demographics am I looking for? 

• What are their pain points and needs? 

• Which platforms can I use to reach my audience? 

• How do I measure if my products or services are beneficial to my target audience? 

Think about your customers as more generalized characters. When you understand your audience at the individual human level, you’ll know where to meet them, literally and metaphorically. Put three or four of these characters together, and you’ve found your audience.

Next, you’ll need advanced targeting capabilities to help you increase trust, reduce spend, and, most importantly, build deeper audience connections. Here's how to do it with our targeting solutions that are available on our streaming platforms. 

Audience Targeting

Find and connect with your perfect audience using first-party data, including age, gender, and geography. Our audience targeting solutions include more than just demographics but audience segments and database matching. 

Advertisers who partner with us access zip-code level demographic targeting and over 20 third-party data partners.

Contextual Targeting

Place your grassroots marketing message in complementary environments—with the right audience, right time, and right context on the other line. 

Our contextual targeting solutions include language, music and non-music content, activities, and moods. Whether you want to target bilingual, English- and Spanish-speaking listeners, rock fans, or consumers who are feeling relaxed, it’s all possible here. 

Engagement and Predictive Audience Targeting

As you know by now, true grassroots marketing campaigns grow organically from a small core audience, increasing exponentially over time. Engagement targeting helps you nurture these connections and expand your reach naturally.

By focusing on custom audiences or  listeners who have already shown intent in your brand, you can build momentum for your campaign—with audiences primed to respond positively to your message.

We offer:

• Lookalike modeling: Scale your campaign by reaching new customers based on existing audiences—identify them from your own data or on-platform ad engagement

• Behavioral retargeting: Strengthen bonds by re-engaging listeners who've already shown interest in your brand

Driving Behavioral Lifts and Store Visits Through Local Targeting 

In a past campaign, we put grassroots marketing in action through local targeting. The goal? Boost foot traffic to a mattress retailer’s store locations. Here’s how we made it happen: We used a mix of streaming and podcast placements to reach audio streamers and podcast listeners. By leveraging geo-targeting capabilities, we connected with those ages 18 and up within key designated market areas (DMAs) for the retailer. And when served creatives aiming to generate awareness for the retailer’s sales and charitable initiatives, listeners were motivated to visit store locations. 

The results included:

• +30% behavioral lift      

• +3.8K incremental store visits                                                                                

• 16.4K total store visits

Get Started with SiriusXM Media

If your campaigns have hit a wall or your strategy is in desperate need of a change, this might be your sign to adopt grassroots marketing. By combining authentic grassroots principles with sophisticated targeting capabilities, you can build truly authentic communities.

Are you ready to find an audience that’s in it for the long haul? Let’s talk.

Read Next