Community is key

An often overlooked but highly fruitful tool that actually doesn’t cost a penny is community, both in a local, neighbourhood sense and an online and social one. Community underpins the good work your business is doing, giving people a place they relate to and feel at home in, which often results in plenty of free promotion via word-of-mouth and social channels.

How to harness and grow your community

Of course there are the obvious go-to essentials of great service, personal touches and listening to/actioning customer feedback that will get people talking about you. But there’s a lot more that can be done to really boost community involvement. Try using locally sourced produce from other community favourites, helping them out and lowering your carbon footprint at the same time and why not setup local initiatives to donate or give back to your neighbours in need.

If you want to get really creative, we’ve seen several clients of ours see great success by linking up with local talent and allowing them to design their packaging, creating unique connections with customers and shining a spotlight on the designers themselves:

Staiths Café: Hooked up with a number of local designers to produce some wonderfully striking and colourful designs for their limited edition run of coffee cups, giving them the chance to display their take on Staiths branding.

Cup of Kin: Students at the university were allowed to give their take on the Cup of Kin branding, creating some eclectic and colourful designs.

HatHats: Students from local schools designed the Christmas cups for HatHats coffee shops limited run – a really nice touch and an easy-win amongst those who have kids.

At Brand Your, we’re proud to have helped a number of our clients connect with their local community through their packaging. We make it possible by offering low minimum orders (starting at just 1,000 units) and quick lead times, just in case you have a brainwave and need some products produced quickly.

So, get creative and think about how you can get your community involved, benefiting them and you at the same time.