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As Pioneer’s Senior Director of Client & Partner Strategy, Sarah Lancaster works across Pioneer’s teams to help build long-lasting relationships and deliver a clear strategic approach to communications. Utility Pioneers asked Sarah for more support on strategic competition marketing plans, so she’s writing a series with tips learned after managing member campaigns for several years.
Competition—fighting for someone to pick you over other options—is a new mindset for many co-op communicators. For decades, most electric and telco cooperatives didn’t have to compete for subscribers. If you served a community well, members stayed satisfied. Relationships and trust mattered. Your reputation traveled faster than any ad campaign could. And honestly, sometimes you were the only choice in town.
Today, life looks different. National brands are entering rural markets. Communities that once had few choices are now flooded with options, served up at an overwhelming pace with mailers, digital ads, celebrity endorsements, teaser rates and promises of better and faster service. For cooperatives, this shift feels personal.
When for-profit brands move into your territory, it’s easy to react emotionally. It’s tempting to lower prices, match every promotion and abandon who you are to stay afloat. But competing like a for-profit corporation rips apart what made your utility successful in the first place—local trust and a mission to serve. This remains your greatest competitive advantage.
Use these five strategies to target the competition without sacrificing your co-op values:
1. Keep Your Eye on the Ball
Don’t lose focus on your mission and most important goal—serving your members. You’ve been here the whole time providing reliable electricity, phone service and now fiber-fast internet well before any for-profit, big-name brands were in town. Don’t get caught up in the competition’s tactics, false narratives, price wars and speed comparisons and forget who you are and why you’re here.
2. Have a Strong Game Plan
Before you knock on the first door or send an email, know three things:
- What you’re going to say.
- Who you’re saying it to.
- Why what you’re saying matters.
Be prepared to say the same thing multiple times across all marketing channels. Your tagline could be amazing, but it doesn’t matter if the right people don’t see the ad or if your message is filled with jargon no one understands.
You may also be competing in areas you’ve not served before, where residents and business owners are not familiar with your brand or the co-op difference. Don’t assume everyone knows what a co-op is and why joining a co-op adds value. Honestly, your own members may not fully understand the benefit of a community-owned utility.
If you fail to clearly and consistently share your own story, your competition will tell it for you—to their advantage.
3. Be a Team Player
Don’t forget to tell staff about your marketing strategy. If you’re running a special promotion, but your member services team members haven’t heard anything about it, they’ll fumble when folks call to sign up or upgrade service. Set your staff up for success with promotion talking points and utility subscription goals.
Word of mouth is a powerful tool, too. Encourage staff members to ask for Google reviews from happy members with an easily accessible QR code to scan in the moment. It only takes one satisfied member to influence others.
4. Analyze Performance
If your marketing channels aren’t backed by performance data, you’re throwing valuable marketing dollars away. Digital ads, email campaigns, websites and social sites are wonderful for tracking engagement, clicks and conversions. But you must know what the numbers mean to turn data into actionable, cost-saving campaigns.
Pioneer Portal connects data from all your communication channels on one platform so you can see the number of people who saw your ad, clicked on it and checked service eligibility. You can see who visited your website and came back. Repeat visitors are highly likely to do business with you.
While national brands with endless budgets can buy these impressions, co-ops can run targeted campaigns, get better results and create campaigns where every click, conversion and member interaction reinforces what makes your utility stand out from the rest.
5. Meet Higher Costs Creatively
Co-ops usually cannot compete on price compared to big brands, but that doesn’t mean the game is over. Be creative. What about using a higher price tag to your advantage? With a message like, “You get what you pay for,” show what subscribers get and the value your co-op offers compared to the competition, even though your price may be higher. If you go this route, you must deliver on the promise. Internet service has to be reliable and strong, support has to be quick and invoices have to be accurate.
If this is too risky for you, focus on temptation. It’s tempting to go with “fast” internet that is only $40 per month, but how does it feel once you’re connected, working from home, your computer is frozen, your child’s video game won’t load and your husband can’t stream a plumbing DIY tutorial? You missed a big meeting, your child is cranky, the bathroom is out of order and everyone wants to cry. Temptation often isn’t worth the price you really pay. We know that there was a turning point in about 2023 when rural subscribers began valuing reliability over price.
Competition may be new for cooperatives, but community and trust aren’t. Stop selling internet access and speed. Instead, sell an experience, with fast, reliable internet access backed by the support of local folks who answer when you call and show up when you need them.
Need Broadband Marketing Tactics?
Pioneer interviewed your peers and our team to create two broadband marketing guides:
- What to Expect When You’re Connecting: Great for a utility offering internet access for the first time.
- How to Boost Broadband Connections: Perfect for utilities ready to push their marketing to the next level, with subscriber story cycles, ways to develop and target personas and examples of effective ads from across the nation.
Our team creates campaign stories together with broadband service providers across the nation. We’d love to work with you!