Social marketing is the combination of the marketing processes of commerce and the sciences that study society.
It is a powerful tool of influence that changes market behaviour sustainably and inexpensively.
It is an approach aimed at changing and maintaining people’s behaviour, may it be for the benefit of an individual or society as a whole.
Social marketing is geared towards making people’s behaviour shift into what is perceived as beneficial, essential, desirable, acceptable, or of the norm.
Social marketing helps you decide which people to work with, what kind of behaviour to influence, how to control them, and how to measure it. It is a detailed, systematic, and well-planned process.
The objective of social marketing is to change behaviours or sustain them. It is not about what people perceive or how conscious they are regarding something.
It is not about manipulating knowledge or attitudes. It is about working with behaviours.
Attitude includes the mind’s inclination towards specific ideas, values, people, systems or institutions.
But behaviour, however, relates to the concrete manifestation of feelings, action, or inaction orally or/and through body language. If your marketing is not geared towards these, it is not social marketing.
Social marketing ensures that your marketing strategy is grounded in an understanding of people’s lives while making sure that goals are realistic and attainable.
It allows you to target the cost of your assets effectively and shoe interventions that have the best results over time and enable you to develop products, services, and information campaigns that fit people’s needs and motivations.
When done correctly, social marketing can give your enterprise longevity that may last your business through generations.
Getting Started on Social Marketing
During your planning stage, identify the things that need to be addressed, the resources you will need, whether they are raw or can be out-sourced and the risks involved, and your timetable.
Plan about how and for how long you are planning for your campaign to run.
A Gantt chart could be very useful in getting things started when conducting social marketing.
Research who your target audience is by identifying your demographics – whether they fit your requirements or whether you need to adjust to their needs.
Then Identify, assess, and plan your timeline.
Remember that when planning for social marketing, you must consider things that add value to your policies.
You must understand your target market and see through their perspective and have a clear objective of what you would like them to do.
It would help if you also calculated whether the benefits of doing what you would like them to do dwarfs the costs and potential barriers to doing it. It would be best if you also employed a mixture of activities to encourage people to complete your desired action.
Step 1: Scope
One of the primary purposes of scoping is to identify which interventions or methods to use based on what you most likely wish to achieve and sustain.
It is necessary to develop an understanding of your audience, what influences and motivates them, identify possible barriers, and more.
This part is where you engage your shareholders, identify and review available sources of information, conduct competition analysis, identify options for intervention, and translate these into writing.
Step 2: Develop
At this point, you should already be able to truly understand your target audience by having researched well and analyzing their behaviours.
With this, you should be well on your way to developing a specific program or intervention.
Develop your intervention and marketing mix (7P’s) to develop your product or service and then move to brand and position.
Prepare your evaluation plan while testing your product or service and come up with a social marketing plan to serve as your guide in the implementation stage; remember, that this will be your blueprint.
Step 3: Implement
This stage will differ depending on the type of intervention to be used.
Here, you will be able to see and act upon opportunities and problems during delivery, monitoring, and evaluation, while getting feedback from those involved in the delivery process and checking for other developments that are engaged during the intervention.
Feedback from your key stakeholders will be your primary concern as you may be required to adjust the implementation plan depending on their feedback.
Step 4: Evaluate
Evaluation is a must to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the completed interventions. The indicators used to measure the assessed outcome surrounding the response must be sound, valid, reliable, and detailed.
Prepare the evaluation design that can be used to identify possible vital areas such as its formative phase, outcome, and process, after which a written evaluation report should be presented.
Use what you learn from evaluating to adjust your social marketing where needed and strengthen or reinforce areas that the numbers tell you.
Step 5: FOLLOW-UP
This is the final stage of the entire process which most often than not, is being disregarded or overlooked.
By sharing the findings of the evaluation, these can be used as a springboard for future developments.
Social Marketing is Powerful.
Since this is commercial marketing founded and grounded in social sciences, social marketing will give your other marketing schemes the most inclusive and market-significant basis of action.
More than just based on clicks and demographics, it is based on actual behaviour. It gives the implementer the power of in-depth knowledge and the ability to use it to the business’ advantage and improve the lives of clients, society, and the economy.
Some bases of philosophy and study that can be used in social marketing are ObMod, HBO, and the psychological studies of the likes of Freud. Look them up!
The more you know about the foundational studies of human behaviour, the more likely you will succeed in social marketing.
Once you have planned your policies for your social media marketing, the next step is to find the most effective marketing tools to reach and engage your target market, bring them to your website and your store and win their purchases and loyalty.
One way for you to succeed in this is by employing digital marketing tools and services. Getting professional services can help you hack your growth marketing – you won’t have to start from nowhere.
With kasandz.com, you can put your research into practice effectively and efficiently. Kasandz.com offers you social marketing services that will further enable you to leverage customer behaviour and act accordingly to turn all your efforts into sales and retention.
FAQs
Is social media marketing a type of social marketing?
Yes, you can consider marketing on social media as a type of social marketing because you will have to analyse consumer behaviour on platforms.
Does social marketing inform digital marketing?
Yes, studying consumer behaviour can dictate what you will do with your SEO or search engine optimization, CRO or conversion rate optimization, email marketing, PPC, PR, and more.
Should I hire an agency or a freelancer to do my social marketing?
When you hire an agency like KAMG, you have an entire team of senior marketing specialists working for you. But with a freelancer, you might have one person stretched among many clients.
