The success of your company can be attributed to many different factors – your USP, a little bit of luck, and perhaps most importantly, your ability to connect with your customers. After all, your customers will be the primary source of your businesses income, meaning that your relationship with them is paramount to your longevity and overall success. Thankfully, there are various ways to cultivate an authentic relationship with your customers. One such method is through community engagement. 

Community engagement, quite simply, refers to the way in which your brand or company interacts with the local community. Is your brand known locally? Are you engaged with community issues or attending community events? Good engagement helps you to increase brand awareness and grow your business through word of mouth. Bad engagement isolates you from the very customers you are trying to draw in. 

With that in mind, here are some top tips that you can use to improve your company’s community engagement. 

• Ensure you cater to the whole community. While your business and services will be marketed towards a specific target audience, you must be able to engage with the community as a whole. One way in which you can achieve this goal is by working on your communication and utilising translation services so that everyone can become part of the conversation. This is particularly important for government businesses, where language barriers manifest as significant (and otherwise costly) issues. By utilising government translation services for both your website and in-person interactions, you’re able to close the gap in communication and expand your customer base. 

• Get involved in local fundraising. Customers tend to favour brands that contribute to the local community in some way or another. One way in which you can achieve this goal is by getting involved in fundraising or charitable events. For example, you could opt to donate a small percentage of your profits towards a different local charity each month and even ask your customers to select where they’d want this money to go. 

• Be an active member of the community. It will be near impossible to improve community engagement without actually engaging with the community. Do not always wait for your customers to come through your door. Instead, find as many ways as possible to engage with them – such as through your social media presence or by attending local events. 

• Take their opinions on board. Customer feedback is a great way to ensure that your business remains on track and that you always have the intended impact upon your consumers. It can also be a great way to enhance your community engagement due to the fact that it shows you genuinely care about your customers and will take their feedback (both positive and negative on board). Whatsmore, there are plenty of ways to seek out this feedback. For example, you could host focus groups or ask customers to leave you feedback online whenever they make a purchase. As always, you should ensure you respond to this feedback promptly.