Cause Marketing
What is Cause Marketing?
Cause marketing is showing your community (both online & offline) how much you care by connecting your company with a local non-profit/cause and cross-promoting each other. In short; it’s moving beyond just “making a dollar” to making a real difference (which, ironically, helps your bottom line).
Cause marketing is ONGOING. It’s not sponsoring one charity event each year. It’s not writing a check a few times a year. It’s partnering with a non-profit and marketing that nonprofit to raise awareness and help throughout the year.
Integrating “Cause Marketing” into your business marketing strategy gives you an advantage over many of your competitors that only focus on the for-profit side of business. In addition to what you do for your clients cause marketing lets you tell people what your business does for your community.
Cause marketing is one way of “telling an effective story” about your business that really gets you the attention of your target markets. With all the conversations you can create on social media you need to give people the stories to tell; you know – the ones they want to tell their friends.
For example, people can talk about one of two things:
“(Your company) is an amazing place with amazing service. I highly recommend them.” (Definitely a good thing for people to say).
“(Your company) is an amazing place that helps (insert non-profit/charity here) in the local community.” (This adds a viral marketing element by giving people a story that’s easy to remember and that is different from most marketing messages they will read/hear).
Results from implementing a social media & cause marketing strategy:
- Connect yourself/your business to community causes/non-profits to create a genuine emotional connection with your target market – which gives them another reason to do business with you (instead of your competition).
- Cutting through ‘online’ noise—your company will further stand out from the rest of the crowd.
- Raising awareness for your company while raising awareness for a local cause only increases your marketing effectiveness.
- People care more about what you do when they know what you are doing for your community—you can combine (the marketing for) your professional and philanthropic lives.
- With cause marketing you have a reason (a nonprofit/cause) to consistently and unobtrusively stay in front of potential clients in more ways than just sales-pitch follow-ups (which can get annoying to prospective clients).
