Local businesses have always held a distinct advantage over large companies in one area of marketing; using local publicity. As wonderful as people might view Starbucks or Home Depot, unless there is a large corporate presence in your town they should not be able to compete with you when it comes to garnering positive branding and community marketing from local news and publicity sources. Engaging in community activities not only provides personal satisfaction, but boosts employee morale and can be a vital part of your local business marketing strategy. The best thing is that you can help give back to the community while simultaneously expanding your business’s visibility.

What is it about?
Positive branding is the idea of having your business and its name associated with helpful activities. This in turn will naturally create a sort of informal community marketing as your reputation spreads based on actions completely unrelated to your actual business. What is the secret? You need to take the time to help out with community service.

Local Business Marketing Through Responsibility
Whenever there is a community fundraiser you typically have three or four different types of people helping. There are those who are leading the cause because it is their passion. Family and friends of participants are a second group. The third group is those people who like to support worthwhile causes. Lastly you have the socially conscious businesses who donate time and money in exchange for free marketing and publicity.
Being a business that gets involved in local causes is a win-win situation. Most importantly you are helping your community and being involved in helping solve a problem. Whether it is participating in the Human Race to fight cancer, Girls on the Run to support our female youth, or one of the numerous other causes that require public support; you are helping make a difference. Since the community is the bread and butter customer base for any local business and also friends and family, helping out is a wonderful thing to do. But it also gives you an opportunity for community marketing and exposure to so many people that might not know anything about you.

Getting Started
Let’s say you sell insurance. With so many brokers in that field it requires a decent amount of marketing to attract new clients. If you help sponsor a local charity run and encourage employee participation you not only have your name on t-shirts and perhaps listed on flyers, but you are also getting out to meet people and spread your positive brand. The next time someone is shopping for insurance they might remember meeting you at the event and give you a call. After the events, you can also create press releases, blog posts, videos, and other marketing materials that showcase your business’s value in the community.

Participating in the community can take many forms. Select events with causes related to your personal passions or your business specialties. Here are a few ideas to get your business involved:

• Donate materials or time to groups like Habitat for Humanity
• Participate and support runs/walks for causes
• Donate to local food banks and holiday food drives
• Help with local pet adoption groups
• Support local school events
• Be a mentor for new small business owners
• Perform occasional ‘pro-bono’ work for those in need
• Create employee incentives for service participation (i.e. the group that collects the most canned goods gets a jeans week, or afternoon off for charity run)

Community marketing does take time and energy. But you are helping expand your name and reinforce positive branding for yourself and your business while giving back to those around you. Having your name on the back of a t-shirt or listed in a local newspaper article as a sponsor or contributor can go a long ways towards passive local business marketing and keeping your name in people’s minds. It also provides an opportunity to show more about what type of values your company has and how well you fit as part of the community.

Further you can start with the listing your business on local Business Directory like Elapages.comand provide the latest events information about your business, address, maps, phone numbers, email and much more.

Don’t wait for the competition. Claim your listing with http://elapages.com/