The Challenge

Homebase is an all-in-one SMB team management platform that serves over 100,000 small businesses and two million hourly workers to modernize scheduling, hiring, payroll and other crucial team management needs. Every month, Homebase launches their Main Street Health Report (MSHR), which looks at data from Homebase’s small business owners/customers and hourly workers to determine the ‘state of Main Street’ today. This report is a key initiative that supports Homebase’s mission of shining a light on the economic/external factors impacting small businesses today and the crucial role they play in supporting the U.S. economy more broadly. Homebase data is also cited by a number of economists, analysts and even Federal Reserve Banks as an indicator of broader economic trends, so getting in front of these audiences is key.

The Solution

In order to maximize coverage for the report launch each month when it releases, and ensure we’d set ourselves up for success with future report launches, SourceCode took a two-pronged approach. First, we focused on building strong relationships with key economic reporters that cover topics relevant to Homebase. Knowing that the report comes out monthly, it was important for us to establish open lines of communication with these key media and have an ongoing dialogue about what might be of interest to them so that we could tailor our outreach accordingly. Second, beyond telling the larger economic story, we looked at ways to splice the data by various verticals (e.g., food, beverage and restaurant, hospitality and tourism, retail) as well as regionally so that we could expand the number of outlets the report would be relevant to, such as trades and local media. We are also able to analyze the data over time, call out interesting spikes, dips and trends that are relevant to each reporter month over month, year over year, etc.

The Result

Since the beginning of our engagement with Homebase in January 2023, SourceCode has secured over 300 pieces of earned coverage tied to MSHR data, a dramatic uptick from last year (even this early on in the year). A major milestone moment included landing Homebase on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and having both the Homebase founder and their customers included in stories. We have also established relationships with key, top-tier reporters at CNBC, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, who now regularly come to SourceCode in search of Homebase data to supplement their stories, in addition to asking for specific data to be pulled ahead of the report’s release. Our relationship-building approach has been so successful that many of the reporters we now work with regularly have direct access to Homebase’s AWS so they can pull data on an as-needed basis, as it relates to other timely moments such as monthly BLS jobs report. The client has been thrilled with these results, nearly doubling their quality clip score year over year, improving number of impressions via high-reaching syndications and increasing backlink inclusion from near zero to 25%.