Partner Success 360: Southern Eagle Distributing
Fun. Creative. Iconic.
These are just a few ways partners describe campaigns with The Post and Courier.
The Post and Courier has been engaging with Southern Eagle Distributors for the past decade through advertising, marketing, and events. If you have had or heard of Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra, Heineken, Truly, or even Natural Light (to name a few) and you live or just visited the Charleston area, you have had the pleasure of interacting with a Southern Eagle brand.
Southern Eagle, the child company of Southern Crown Partners, is a local Anheuser-Busch distributor who helps with the distribution of popular beer as well as Lowcountry and Georgia craft beer and other beverages.
“It’s been a great partnership,” Luke Cooper, Marketing Manager for Southern Eagle partner New Belgium Brewing explains. “Linking up with y’all [The Post and Courier] is getting our reach out there even better.”
Just like The Post and Courier, Southern Eagle has made a name of themselves in the Charleston area. Commonhouse Aleworks, New Realm Brewing, Rusty Bull Brewing, and Palmetto Brewing are just a few of the Southern Eagle brands that make it to the Sunday Funday brewery stops here in Charleston.
“What I have enjoyed the most is being able to work on such fun, creative concepts,” Southern Crown Partners Marketing Manager Katie Thompson boasts.
When Southern Eagle approached The Post and Courier with a challenge to market their latest beer, New Belgium’s Dominga Mimosa Sour, we knew we had to incorporate the “Sunday Funday” mindset to Southern Eagle’s next campaign.
“We really tried to go above and beyond, and not just do your cookie-cutter advertising that everyone else does. We really want it to be something unique and something that we’re proud of, and I knew and trusted that, if I had a vision that The Post and Courier could help me bring it to life,” Thompson tells us about developing campaigns with The Post and Courier team.
From the desire to promote the Dominga Mimosa Sour, The Charleston Brunch Guide was born. This guide allows for restaurants across the Lowcountry to submit their brunch listing for free. New Belgium, Southern Eagle’s brand, is displayed on all Brunch Guide promotional items – the guide itself, social media ads, The Post and Courier website‘s banner ads, and even print ads in The Post and Courier paper. This sponsorship, which started with the goal of promoting a new beer, now reaches our entire audience and database.
This is one of the many ways The Post and Courier partners with businesses. We know the importance of staying with your brand and vision while incorporating our knowledge, our audience built on trust, and our expertise to develop a plan that not only works but is successful.
“Just bounce off ideas. What do you think about this, and what do you think about that. It was a lot of great communication,” Luke Cooper says while explaining how concepts come to life.
Luke Cooper is no stranger to bouncing ideas around to create a great campaign. New Belgium was the beer sponsor for Bicycle Across South Carolina in 2020.
“Supporting the community and being active, and getting out and meeting people, and working with iconic companies like Post and Courier,” Cooper tell us about partnering with events like BASC.
Concepts collaborating BASC and New Belgium included media advertising, social media, newsletters to our subscriber database, live stream mentions, posters, inclusion on the BASC site, banner ads, blogs, a Happy Hour tent at the event, Photo Booth sponsorship, and so much more. Check out the full extent of their partnership here!
Before BASC and the Brunch Guide, The Post and Courier produced a free dining guide to promote local restaurants in the spring of 2020, when many were facing challenges. This gave restaurants the opportunity to promote their take-out options, menus, and hours of operation. Southern Eagle immediately jumped on the opportunity to support this dining guide.
In the first few days, we had over 100 restaurants add their information to the guide, and thousands of readers using the guide to support local restaurants. We promoted the guide in social media, email, print, and in our covid-19 section, highlighting a Southern Eagle brand throughout (Budweiser).
In all instances, events or campaigns, The Post and Courier highlights their connection to the community in major ways. In many cases, Southern Eagle and The Post and Courier both had philanthropic visions that were able to come to life in campaigns.
“I couldn’t speak more highly of digital marketing, social media, but at the same time, I truly think there is a place and an audience for print. I think there is a place for local events, and being able to encompass all of that has been awesome,” says Thompson.
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