Involving yourself, your brand, or business in community programs helps grow your company in various ways. Community involvement helps create and build a positive outlook within the community while allowing your employees to engage and interact with the surrounding communities. A poll conducted by Fortune magazine found that millennials have a preference and recommend businesses that give back and actively involve themselves with community support. If a customer has to make a choice on which company to engage with between one that supports its local community and one that doesn’t, they would go with one that does support the community- assuming both companies offer the same products. Consumers want to see businesses giving back to the community because it shows that the brands care about their customers.
So, how does community involvement help transform your business? In-short, Yes
Increase Brand Awareness
When your business is involved in supporting and helping the local community, your building positive brand awareness. Your business is able to gain awareness and promotions by discussing the experience the employees gain in the media. For example, before and after the community event, you can talk about your brand in social media, blog posts, and traditional media to further help your customers realize the connections your brand has with the local community. You can take photos to post on social media networks for fans and followers to engage in. This way, you help grow your social media presence while instilling trust, confidence, and positive image for your brand.
A Lasting Impression and Impact
The things you do to support your community whether it’s volunteering at a local school, animal shelter, or helping the elderly and picking up trash, it gives a big impact on the people around you. You establish your brand as a socially responsible company. This helps improve the reputation of your brand. The good deeds bring the community closer to a healthier, happier, and unified place to be. About 82 percent of consumers in the US consider a brand’s corporate social responsibility when deciding what products and services to buy from what company.
Growing internal Relationships
Participating in community programs allows your employees to interact and engage in a casual environment. Which in a way that’s different from the workplace. Allowing your employees to come together to work for a cause, it brings a spirit of cohesion. It adds value to their teamwork and they can bring their efforts together not just for the company they work in but also the community where they operate. This helps build the internal relationships of the business often leading to increased workplace morale.
It feels great when you see that you help a local community realize some goals and it gives you the strength to push hard both in the workplace and in your personal and community development. Your employees’ commitment and thoughts begin to strengthen when they see your brand doing the great things of helping the community. Think of it this way – if we could go out there and help the students in the local school or the elderly – what can stand before us if we want to grow our business? We can work together to enhance productivity, profitability, and ROI which, in turn, translates to better work pay and job security.
Audience Engagement
Brands are becoming more creative and for a reason – to explore every opportunity that would put them above their competitors. You can imagine a live event action that you capture and stream to your audiences. If you are taking part in cleaning up the streets or helping the elderly, you can tell your social media audiences in advance when the action will be taking place. You then organize to film and stream live the event so that the audiences can catch the live-action.
You may be surprised to see how your audiences also offer support for the event. Your brand mentions go viral and the live actions can easily be shared among many people thus resulting in a big impact on your brand’s awareness, nurturing of leads, and conversion of the leads to customers.
Sell your Brand
You may not realize it, however, many people who may not know about your brand will see and want to relate with it at the community event take part in. The reason you are participating in a local community support event is not that you want to sell your products and services or you want people to know what you do. However, out of curiosity, people would want to know more about you. The event provides a touchpoint where you start a business conversation journey.
As your employees engage in different activities to help the locals, they will talk about your brand – not because they want to, but because people are asking them questions. What you want to do is try to brand yourself – get there in t-shirts with logo printed on them or in company attires just to distinguish yourself and allow people to identify you.
The people you interact with and relate with at the support event tend to be convinced easily about the good of your brand. It makes it easier for you to convince them to be your audiences, customers, and fans and to buy your products. The exposure and relationship you build by participating in a community event to some extent break people’s restrains towards your brand. Community support and getting involved are things that will indirectly help in selling your brand.
Build connections
You understand that network is crucial for your business. While you may want to network by joining groups and forums consisting of other similar businesses, you can take a local community support event or activity as a point of connection. During that time, you or your employees may meet and engage a community member who turns out to be a brand advocate or a high-end customer.
The ties you create outside the professional settings can go a long way in building stronger business relationships. There is nothing that is really organic and inspiring as taking part in community support work and activities. It is a great way of marketing your brand without needing to spend money. And it has such a strong outcome in brand recognition, awareness, and interaction.
Community support can make it easy for you to push the members or potential customers you meet in those events down the sales funnel.
Bolter your Brand’s reputation
When your brand is involved in community work and support, it cements its reputation. To allow customers to be loyal to your brand, you want to show them that you care about them. When you go the extra mile to support a noble cause, it gives credit to your company. Reputation management is something that brands cannot overlook. They need to seek various ways they can build the reputation of a brand.
Community support and getting involved offer invaluable help to brands. They help build a reputation, sell a brand, create brand name awareness, and build connections. The events provide an environment that helps enhance teamwork and heave the morale of the employees. Brands can take the opportunity to help create content that they can use to build an online reputation and engage their fans. For instance, the photos you take there and the live actions can be used to help in setting up online conversations that could lead to increased fans and discussions about your brand.
