Cause marketing is marketing that gets covered by the local news stations. It’s when a for-profit organization teams up with a cause to raise awareness, fun, or consumer participation, for potential profit to the organization.
But profit isn’t the sole benefit. Cause marketing has a virtual plethora of other benefits to your organization, cause, employees, and customers.
Successful cause marketing isn’t easy, however. For cause marketing to be successful, you must delve into what matters to your ideal customers. Selecting a cause that aligns with your audience is crucial. If you do good, but it is in the wrong place, then does it count?
Well, of course, being in good standing with the community and industry is essential. Still, you will find that executives will likely not want to fund a cause if there is no proof that it’s positively contributing to your company.
Delve Into Your Target Market
When you find a cause that your target audience can back up, you really learn the things that motivate your customers. These are things that they will spend extra time and cash on. That’s a pretty special set of motivators.
Now that you know more about the motivations of your audience, you can take theses learnings back to your regular marketing efforts.
Engage Your Employees
When I wrote in the past about engaging your employees, I didn’t cover this. Cause marketing is a brilliant way to get your employees involved.
Find out what they are excited about, what causes they would rally behind. Poll them to get ideas on what sort of cause you should fund. Then let them get involved. Give them paid time off to support the cause. What employee wouldn’t want a moment out of the office and get to support a good cause? It just makes everybody feel good.
If you are so inclined, you can even provide them with branded physical and virtual tools that make them appreciate and promote the cause even further.
This all comes with the added benefit that engaged employees are better employees. They stick around longer and produce better work. This makes your company a better company.
Engage Existing Customers
You already have a group of people that have bought from you in the past. Why not make them happy they bought from you? That will make them continue to purchase from your organization.
Thinking about your existing customers can also tell you a lot about which cause to select. Learn more about the people who work for the businesses that buy your products. What charities do they participate in? What do they post about on social media? These are clues that are invaluable for learning the most that you can about those who buy your product. Hopefully, this will allow you to attract more people from that audience.
Raise Awareness
Cause marketing gets a lot of press. That means that the events you sponsor or even throw will be talked about, for free. This is some of the most natural PR your organization can get.
You support the cause, and then the cause supports you. If you’ve targeted your cause to the right market, your name will be read off the screens of laptops, tablets, phones, and maybe even a newspaper!
Reach New (And Relevant Audiences)
Again, depending on the accuracy of your targeting, you have the potential to reach a brand new audience. After all, if you picked a cause that is of interest to your ideal customers, what is to say that that very cause doesn’t affect another similar audience?
This new audience will be exposed to your brand and will likely keep your company top-of-mind next time they need to purchase something to make their jobs easier.
Start New Conversations
In B2B, your content is likely focused on education or your product and services. Cause marketing gives you something new to talk about.
With a cause comes passion. This is perfect for B2B, which can often feel lifeless and emotionless. That is until you give it a cause. Suddenly you have a movement to talk about, something that people care about. This brings variety to your content.
Before cause marketing, the only reason that people were buying from you was to fill their needs and your pocket. But give your company a cause and people will buy from you to support it. Brand marketing might change your company forever.
Let us know what you think:
- Does your organization do cause marketing?
- How is it implemented?
- What cause(s) does your brand support?
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