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Community Involvement Marketing Can Work for Small Business
Small businesses rely on the support of local customers. While globalization is unavoidable, there’s still something special about patronizing neighborhood businesses. Community involvement marketing helps businesses to build brand awareness and strengthen relationships with their neighbors. Community involvement marketing can establish your business as an integral part of where your customers live, work and shop.
Finding Success with Community Involvement Marketing
Community involvement marketing helps you get to know those around you. And helps them get to know your business. Like social media marketing, you should focus on strategic relationship building. For example, it looks bad if you show up to the community parade just to sell water bottles in the summer heat. But give out free water along with information about your products and services, and you’ll get the right kind of attention. Done strategically, community involvement marketing can elevate your brand and business.
Know Your Audience
Business 2 Community advises businesses interested in community involvement marketing start by doing their research. It’s important to understand the dynamics of local events and the audiences these occasions attract. Planning your marketing strategy relative to the event is essential to building relationships in an efficient, appropriate way. Additionally, it’s important to focus on professionalism. You may let your hair down a bit because you’re at a community event, but don’t go so far that you create a negative impression.
Play a Helpful Role in the Community
Attending local events isn’t the only way to engage your community. Business News Daily recommends sponsorship as a way to build strong brand awareness. Sponsoring a charity or local event is a great way to connect with the public. You can also build deeper personal relationships by providing workshops for your neighborhood.
For example, if you’re an HVAC contractor, during the summer you could set up a booth at a local event and do a workshop on basic air conditioning unit maintenance. By doing so, you’re helping people understand how to get more value from their systems and showcasing your expertise. This helps convey that you’re genuinely interested in helping them, rather than just selling cooling and heating products or services. Engaging with members of your community can make them more inclined to seek out your services or products in the future.
Food trucks serve as another example of successful community involvement marketing. Since they’re able to easily relocate, they have an unlimited amount of chances to connect with the community. When a food truck shows up with a discounted menu at a local or charity event, it starts to gain recognition. Maybe your business doesn’t have a natural tie to such events, but with creativity, you can often find a way to get involved in the fun.
Creating Space for Relationship Building
As a small business owner, you are busy. Finding the time and resources to research community events and develop a presence in your area can be difficult. And because community involvement marketing tends to deliver returns gradually over time, it can be hard to justify putting effort toward it. But a careful funding strategy using business marketing loans can help.
Working capital financing can be an ideal funding source to support your community involvement marketing initiatives. They help you enact plans that will eventually lead to new customer referrals and long-term loyalty. And with lenders like QuickBridge, business borrowers get just enough financing to spur growth, but not so much that you’re left with long-term debt. Contact us today to learn more.
