Marketing Strategy Tips for Social Enterprises

As a social enterprise operator, you’re focused just as much — if not more — on social and environmental impact as you are on your bottom line. That perspective shapes your leadership, requiring you to view and run your business through a different lens than many traditional business owners. This unique business model extends directly into marketing and marketing strategy, where the wrong messaging or measurement strategy can severely limit the impact of the good work you’re doing.

In this guide, we’ve put together a collection of marketing strategy tips that have worked for our business and other social enterprises that we’ve partnered with over the years. Take a look below, and no matter what else you do, listen to and pull ideas from the audience you serve; they are the greatest treasure trove for new marketing strategy ideas.

Develop Consistent, Mission-Driven Messaging

As a social enterprise with a big-picture goal or mission, you should know your mission inside and out and infuse it into your marketing strategy and messaging consistently. You don’t have to directly quote your mission all the time (in fact, don’t – it won’t sound very genuine if you repeat yourself constantly), but take a look at the heart of your mission and what it means to your business leaders, employees, and current loyal customers and partners. From there, develop an overarching content strategy and individual pieces of content that really reflect what you’ve learned about this mission and why it matters. Your mission-driven messaging should be consistent and coherent enough to be remembered and repeated. You want people to know who you are and what you do without having to think about it.

All of your employees should be on the same page about what your mission is and what it means, so it can be communicated coherently all the way down. Whether your team is responding to a social media comment, handling a customer service complaint, speaking to a new hire in the break room, or writing the latest educational blog for your website, you want everything that comes from your brand to reflect back the same kind of messaging. Your customers will notice and have concerns about what your brand stands for if you don’t get consistent messaging right.

Build Your Authority and Reach Through Educational Content

Social enterprises have a duty to their audience to keep them informed on the cause(s) that matter to them. What’s more, focusing your marketing strategy on creating this type of content is a great way to build trust and eventual loyalty with customers who are interested in learning more about your chosen social enterprise topic. Nothing says “I should buy from this brand” better than establishing your brand as the expert in that area and backing it up with proof that you live out what you preach. That’s why educational content, though it rarely directly translates into earned revenue, can be so lucrative and useful for a social enterprise. 

Educational content ideas to pursue for your social enterprise include:

• Educational blogs: These can be on topics that directly relate to what you sell, what your partners are doing, and who or what causes you’re helping. Guest bloggers can also help you with more niche educational content as needed and put you in front of an even bigger audience.
• Subscriber newsletters: These give you the chance to balance educational blog-type content with content that shows what’s happening in your organization; you can also pitch your products and services here, in one of the most direct forms of audience communication available. Subscribers will feel more connected to your brand and your cause as a result of these newsletters that inform and entertain.
• Explainer videos and podcasts: Not everyone is a reader, so it’s a good idea to create other types of content that can educate and reach your audience. Explainer videos and podcasts that focus on various educational topics can be posted on social media, embedded in your website and newsletters, and easily shared by your audience with friends and family who might also be interested in these topics.
• Workshops and conferences: Especially if your brand is looking to ingratiate itself in a local physical community, in-person workshops and conferences are a great way to educate while building meaningful connections. Even larger brands with no main home base can use this content creation approach; with video conferencing tools so widespread, it’s easier than ever before to host online workshops and conferences.

Be Clear About Where You Invest and Reinvest

Your customers expect transparent communications throughout your operations, but especially in your marketing content. If they feel you are not being honest about what you sell, why you sell it, and what happens to their money and donations after purchase, they’ll likely move on to a brand that they trust more.

So how can you use marketing to build that trust with transparency?

Here are a few ideas: 

• Illustrate a clear impact loop, either with visuals or written content that clearly explains the full lifecycle of what you’re selling and what it leads to. Direct this content to the consumer, showing them what happens after their purchase, how it happens, and how it feeds into the next or larger goal of the brand. You can also illustrate feedback loops that show how customers’ ideas and contributions lead to future ideas and plans for the brand.
• If you’re partnering with influencers or other organizations, be sure they align with your values and that you’re transparent about what this partnership is and what it accomplishes. 
• Messaging on your website should illustrate where you invest and reinvest, especially in your local community. Consider having dedicated pages for both customer and charity/cause testimonials, videos that tell the story of what you do and why, and program pages that tell customers how their purchases directly enable you to invest in important causes.

Take a Human-Centered Approach to Marketing

A loyal 500-person community is more valuable to a social enterprise than 20,000 passive followers, so don’t worry too much about the overall numbers on your social media accounts and website. Instead, work hard to build a community that puts your supporters and their beliefs first. And really emphasize that community, giving them opportunities not only to engage with you but to engage with other members of the greater social enterprise community and brand following. These connections will help them feel more connected to your brand and may lead to new growth opportunities for your brand and the causes it supports.

Human-centered marketing ideas should either highlight people your brand cares about or information and feedback opportunities that your people care about. Marketing solutions that center people may include customer or partner testimonials and stories, referral and rewards programs, and forums where members of your audience can interact. Content that dives into what your customers, employees, and partners care most about may include behind-the-scenes updates, impact milestones and reports, and customer voting and survey opportunities to directly collect feedback on a regular basis. These can also provide valuable insights into other types of content to prioritize in your marketing.

Make Your Impact Measurable and Tangible

Social enterprises work to do work that matters, so when it comes to their marketing, it’s also important to measure what matters. Typical marketing metrics like reposts, engagement, and reach are all well and good to measure, but you want to know more than that about the impact your marketing is having. 

Here are some questions and subjective data points that you should explore as a social enterprise that wants to measure marketing impact beyond the basics:

• Are your comments on social media generally favorable? 
• Are people engaging in conversation, either with your brand or with each other? 
• Do you have returning customers, one-off customers, or people who simply visit your website and leave quickly? 
• What are your referral numbers like? 
• What’s happening with your CTAs on the website, email newsletters, etc.? 
• How are people engaging with your educational content?
• Are people reading and engaging with your impact reports?

Your impact focus should not be on how many people see your content but on how many people are truly affected by your content in a way that leads to action or change. Asking these kinds of questions and researching the answers is a great way to supplement the more concrete marketing data that you’re probably already collecting.

Getting Marketing Right as a Social Enterprise

Your marketing should resonate with your audience at a deeper level when you’re operating as a social enterprise. We get that, because we work to do the same thing with our own brand marketing and for the clients that we serve.

If you’re not seeing the growth you’d liked from your current marketing strategy or you’re not really sure where to start with impact-driven marketing efforts, we’re here to help. Contact Mane Impact today to learn more about what we can do to improve your social enterprise marketing strategy in a meaningful way.