Why Your Business Should Increase Community Outreach

Every business should invest in community outreach, particularly if you are a small or medium-sized business and find it difficult to connect to your target audience. Community outreach simultaneously works to improve your community and also improves your image. With a winning PR and community outreach campaign, you can get your business in the news, can win the hearts of your customers, and can also help support the very people who support you.

There are many financial, holistic, and marketing benefits to community outreach. The outreach in question can be as small as donating to a charity, all the way towards offering training workshops to help people get back up on their feet, to even hosting fundraising events yourself.

With the right approach, you can get the maximum number of benefits for your efforts, which include:

1. Community Awareness

Giving back is a great marketing opportunity, but only when you do it right. You can sponsor a charity event, provide a charitable contribution, and can champion a cause that you care about (particularly if it works to help the local community). All options offer excellent PR opportunities for your business, and with that PR, great opportunities to introduce your brand to new audiences.

2. Improved SEO

Being newsworthy and having your business mentioned by new sites is one of the best ways to naturally improve your off-site SEO. Search engine optimization plays a big role in how highly your website ranks on search engines, and one of the key factors that search engines consider is how many reputable sites are linking to you. So being newsworthy, especially in a feel-good piece that helps win over the hearts of your target audience, is a great way to boost visibility on social media organically.

3. Make Your Business More Sustainable

Giving back may not be the only step towards making your business more sustainable, but it is a key part of any ethical business and should be included in your own sustainability efforts. A truly sustainable business model is one that has a triple focus: “people, planet, profit”, and community outreach is just one aspect of the “people” component.  Other “people” sustainability efforts will need to concern those who operate along your supply chain.

4. Support Your Community

Giving back is primarily about helping others in your community. Of course, great marketing opportunities increased visibility online, and being able to market yourself as an ethical company is all great, but one thing every business needs to keep in mind is the actual impact they can have on their communities.

You can support your community directly by offering workshops, job opportunities, traineeships, and so on. You can support them indirectly by helping improve social and support services. Regardless of which option you go for, know that you are working to improve the community as a whole, which in turn makes the area more affluent and helps give your community (your customers) more spending money to then go to their favorite local brand.