How To Show That Your Business Cares

Does your business care about anything other than its bottom line? Well, doing so might, ironically, help you improve your bottom line in the first instance. Consider that business success is often dictated by how well you can present yourself to your audience, and what goodwill your business fosters over time. It’s not absolutely dictated by this, but to a large extent these factors can help or hinder your business in very many ways. Thankfully, showing that your business cares is easy to do, and the returns may last a long time.

Consider these methods of achieving this perspective, and why that is worth doing in the first instance:

Be Present

To begin with, you need to do everything you can to ensure that your business is present and available to reach. This means much more than simply responding to support requests, although that helps. Presence means being a public face with your firm, and doing more than just selling and promoting products. For example, heading to a gift fair 2018 convention to display your new products and engage with an audience, or connect with your audience through accepting feedback, or responding to letters, or fostering goodwill in the interest of free gifts or purchasing rewards.

To become present with your audience is to engage with them, and if you do this you’ll often find a long-standing need for customers to put a face to your organization. Nothing can be quite so depressing as feeling that a corporation you regularly support cares little for your presence in the slightest, especially if holding a customer account. Of course, we do not expect to be best friends with Coca-Cola, but for small to mid-level companies, a little engagement and relationship cultivation, even just in the form of requesting feedback, can go a long way.

Engage With Charities

Engaging with charities can help your firm conduct some good in the world on the back of your product success. Engaging with charities can be easier than you may consider, and it needn’t cut into your bottom line too harshly, nor should it serve as an exploitative means of promotion. Engaging with charities can show that your business is willing to take steps to do things the right way, perhaps not the easiest, cheapest or most convenient way. While businesses are the interest of generating profit, they can be much more than that if you put your mind to your business purpose.

You may decide to plant trees despite your heavy reliance on wood and paper, or you may donate to maintaining green spaces in the city. Engaging with charities can help your firm actually conduct some good, and extend some reach out into the wider world. You needn’t donate millions to make a difference, long-term incremental efforts to help can often cause the most impact over time, and it’s quite amazing to see how these benefits stack up in the long term.

Of course, this can also help your PR and perhaps bottom line. When choosing between two similar products at similar pricing, the company that chooses to send 10 cents to charity for every item purchased is of course going to be the preferential option, and it may cut into your profits minimally. Be sure to promote all your donations and charitable efforts online, as well as using your platform to support causes that your business cares about. Charity needn’t be a simple effort in donating money, you can also decide to change attitudes and promote people to your firm that may be worthwhile. For example, you may decide to support causes related to men or women’s rights, or perhaps reduce the stigma around mental illness if your product is in some way related.

For example, mattress companies may decide to take up the cause of eliminating rough sleeping, through charitable donations or simply lending exposure to smaller charities trying to do some good. To give someone a platform costs nothing and can help your practical business efforts feel more genuine and based in the real world. In other words, it humanizes your corporation.

Reward Clients

Rewarding customers can help tremendously. However, sending them free gifts after a certain amount of purchases isn’t the only thing to consider. You may ask your most loyal customers for a testimonial, with their name and picture on the main page of your website, essentially asking them to serve as a brand manager. You may ask for their community input on your messaging forums, perhaps helping out support requests in forums in exchange for major discounts on all future items. You may even decide to reward clients with more tangible and life-changing options, especially if you begin to make it big and a customer that has always believed in your output remains there from the start. For example, let’s say your business is a high-end manufacturer of kitchens designs and installations.

It might be that rewarding a client with an entirely free comped kitchen upgrade for years of loyalty could blow them away and from that point steward a customer for life. Doing something deeply significant for someone can absolutely have a positive effect on how they feel about your firm, and it’s great to pay your success forward from time to time. Of course, this is highly dependant on your circumstances, so be sure to only care for what your business is capable of.

Ethical Trading

Ethical trading is of course a mainline requirement these days, initiatives such as fairtrade among others have become the accepted norm for doing things. Exploiting people is simply not as convenient or fashionable as it might have once been for businesses the world over. Engaging in this practice of ethical trading is something that can also extend into many fields. For example, let’s say your business is heavily reliant on silicon plastics. It might be that you vet your suppliers from abroad more harshly, so that you can be sure the workers are paid a fair wage and that working conditions are good.

To do this with all of your suppliers allows you to ensure your operation fosters much less bad karma, and that none of your business practices have a skeleton in a closet, even if by association. Showing your business cares means making the right decisions, and choosing to do things the right way. Of course, you cannot be omniscient in everything that you decide, but you can make more appropriate and informed decisions if you do so, and open your business up to complete transparency. Then, discussing your operation on your website or in your press releases can use this as a point of pride, and ensure that anyone who interfaces with your firm is greeted with nothing but positive feeling and a clean conscience themselves.

Engagement

Engage with your audience. If the previous tips have seemed a little extreme, such as purchasing someone an entirely new kitchen, you must realize that you needn’t make an investment of this magnitude to do something worthwhile for your audience. Opening social media account and conversing with your customers can help you seem like you care about public opinion, especially on an individual by individual basis. You may share jokes with your audience, talk to other firms with a sly but funny sense of banter, or perhaps even offer promotions only to those who follow you on those social media platforms.

Engagement is a daily affair, and when hiring the right people to manage your social media platforms, will often help serve as free marketing for your firm, and help you humanize your entire output. It’s amazing just how platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have brought corporations to our homes and our pockets, and on the business side of the fence, it’s amazing how you can shape public opinion based on the small matters.

For example, if someone tweets your company singing the praises of your latest product, liking, retweeting them and thanking them publicly can help them feel vindicated in their outreach, but it also helps you use that person as a free testimonial. We are truly living in a marketing executive and PR representatives mutual dream, and with the right foresight, you can make sure that dream never ends.

The Passion

Here’s a wild proposal: what if you injected passion into everything and anything you performed as a firm? Reading business blogs across the internet, it’s quite clear to see how you can become tangled in a personal web of do’s and do not’s, and this can become quite stifling and mentally chaotic when trying to piece your mode of action together.

Passion is the remedy to this. It excites. It helps you care for what you’re offering. It generates the drive to continue to innovate and release products, and it drips from every product release you craft in its wake. Passion can help a business seem caring like no other methods, so be sure to try to revivify it in all firms.

With these excellent efforts, showing that your business cares will help audiences relate to you in an incredibly profound manner.