Mediaboss Marketing

Social marketing is the application of the principles and techniques of commercial marketing to promote socially desirable goals. It has been applied extensively, and with considerable success, in efforts to encourage/discourage specific health behaviors, such as using seat belts, putting babies to sleep on their backs, getting exercise, eating right, and not smoking. A list of recommended reading on this topic is provided at the end of this page.

Applying social marketing to the promotion (and even the design) of comparative quality reports requires that you first identify specific behavioral objectives. That is, you have to know what you want consumers to do. In the context of commercial marketing, the objective is to get someone to buy a product or service. In the context of health behaviors, there is a defined behavior that is defined as desirable (getting regular exercise) or undesirable (smoking). But in the context of a quality report, you are not trying to drive consumers to choose a particular provider or plan; what you want is for them to be making their own informed decisions.

The behaviors you are trying to influence aresubtler:

The power and the challenge of social marketing is that it requires you to take your audiences perspective whenever you make a decision. If you do not adopt this perspective early in the process, you may well design a report that does not resonate with your audience. This is why you have to be clear on who your audience is, what their information needs are, and how they get and use information. Remember, too, that you audience may not be the public at large, or even all people who need a particular health service. To be effective, promotional efforts need to narrow down to a more manageable and specific audience.

Learn more about narrowing down your audience in Defining an Audience for Promotional Purposes.

Learn more about the role of audience research in a promotional campaign in Researching the Audience.

Focusing on the audience starts before promotion. You need to see your productyour comparative quality reportfrom the point of view of your audience. You are probably very excited about the report; they are not. You are sure it will be valuable and useful; they have no idea how or why it would even be relevant to them. Taking the audiences perspective requires a certain level of self-disciplinebut while it may be uncomfortable, it also allows you to be more effective than you are likely to be otherwise.

Applying the principles of social marketing requires you to:

Early research with your audience can give you the understanding you need in order to articulate the benefits your audience will find compelling and address the barriers people are likely to experience. It is fairly straightforward to highlight valued benefits in your messages. Addressing barriers, on the other hand, can be trickier.

Knowing about barriers can help you reduce them, either as you design your report or as you decide where to place your report so it is easy for people to access. But not all barriers are easy or inexpensive to overcome.

It can also be challenging to discuss barriers in promotional materials without drawing attention to why people may stay away. But you may be able to refer directly to a perceived barrier in promotional materials if you can make a compelling case that you have reduced or even eliminated the barrier in your report. For example, one perceived barrier for many people is that the report will be written in technical medical language and full of statistics. You can make it explicit that your report has been designed and tested to make sure it is user friendly for people who are not medical experts.

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Applying the Lessons of Social Marketing to a Quality Report

The key ingredient for doing social media marketing well is having a strategy.

Without a strategy, you might be posting on social media platforms for the sake of posting. Without understanding what your goals are, who your target audience is, and what they want, itll be hard to achieve results on social media.

Whether you want to grow your brand through social media or to level up as a social media marketer, developing a social media marketing strategy is essential.

Heres one way to do it.

Its interesting to note that a social media marketing strategy and a social media marketing plan have a lot of crossovers.

You can think of it this way: A strategy is where youre headed. A plan is how youll get there.

One of the simplest ways to create your social media marketing strategy is to ask yourself the 5Ws:

To help you create your strategy, I have made a simple social media marketing strategy template. Feel free to use, adapt, or modify it as you see fit (after making a copy of it).

Heres another interesting point about strategy (or strategies): You can also have a strategy for each of your social media channels, such as a Facebook marketing strategy, an Instagram marketing strategy, and so on, which all lead up to your overall social media marketing strategy.

But lets start with your overall strategy.

The very first question to answer is the Why.

This relates to your social media goals. Are you on social media to promote your products? To drive traffic to your website? Or to serve your customers?

In general, there are the nine social media goals you can have:

Youll likely have more than one social media goal, and thats fine.

Generally, its great to focus on just a handful of goals unless you have a team, where different people or groups within the team can take on different goals.

For example, at Buffer, the marketing team uses social media both to increase our brand awareness and drive traffic to our content while our Advocacy team uses social media to provide timely customer support.

Once you have figured out your Why, the next thing to consider is your target audience.

Understanding your target audience will help you more easily answer the following questions on what, where, and when you are going to share.

For instance, if a travel and lifestyle brand (like Away) knows that its target audience loves to read about new places and travel tips, it could share such content on its social media profiles.

A great exercise to try here is to build marketing personas.

There are many different ways of building marketing personas. My personal favorite approach is to, again, use the 5Ws and 1H.

You likely dont have to start from scratch. If your business has been running for a while, you most probably already have a good sense of your target audience. What might be helpful is to write it down so that you can share it with the team or use for your future reference.

To help you with developing your marketing persona, Kevan Lee, our Director of Marketing, have written a complete guide to marketing personas.

When you see this question, you might be thinking about the types of content to share. For example, do you want to share videos or images?

But hold on for a second!

Were talking about your social media marketing strategy here so lets take a step back and think on a higher level. Instead of the types of content to share, theme might be a better word.

Here are a few brands and their theme(s):

If you scroll through the social media profiles mentioned above, you might have noticed that the brands have more than one main theme. Having a handful of themes is perfectly fine as it gives you the space to share a range of content to keep your audience engaged without being seemingly unfocused.

This is where a good understanding of your target audience will be helpful. Look at your marketing personas and consider the following questions:

For a fitness apparel and accessories brand (like Gymshark), a goal of its target audience might be to stay up-to-date with the latest fitness gears. In that case, it can share its latest products on its social media profiles.

(Would that be too promotional? Maybe not. Investment bank Piper Jaffray surveyed more than 8,600 American teenagers and found that 70 percent of them preferred brands to contact them about new products through Instagram. The key goes back to understanding your target audience.)

The next step is to determine where you are going to share your content. In other words, which social media platforms does your brand want to be on?

(Related: Here are the top 21 social media sites to consider for your brand.)

Before we go any further, remember that your brand doesnt have to be on every social media platforms. We have made

Quick tip: That being said, itll be wise to at least have a complete profile on the Big Four Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn as they would often show up on the first page of Google search results when people search for your brand.

Again, your understanding of your target audience will come in handy here. Which platforms are your target audience most active on? What makes them visit that platform? For example, teenagers and young adults might like scrolling through Instagram when they are bored to see what their friends are doing or whether their favorite brands have new products.

Another, albeit smaller, thing to consider is, what is your brands X factor? Are you great at photography, videos, or writing? Certain platforms lend itself well to certain content types. For example, photos are great on Instagram, long-form videos on YouTube, articles on Medium. But this is a minor point because social media platforms are evolving to provide almost every type of content nowadays.

Finally, consider smaller, niche platforms, too. For example, Zwift, a multiplayer online cycling training software company, has started a club on Strava, a social network for athletes. Their club has more than 57,000 cyclists, and thousands engage with their posts on Strava.

The last key part of your strategy is figuring out when you want to share your content. You might be tempted to jump into a research for the best time(s) to post.

Pause. And breathe.

Lets take a step back and look at this from a higher level again. Before deciding exactly which time of the day and days of the week you want to post, consider the behaviors of your target audience.

When do they usually use social media to find the type of content that youll share?

Here are some examples to consider:

You might have inferred from these few examples that there might not be a universal best time to post. It really depends on your audience. So for this step, focus on the general behavior patterns of your target audience.

When you have created your social media marketing strategy, you can then find your brands best time to post through experimentation.

And there you have it your social media marketing strategy!

But thats not the end. As mentioned above, a strategy is where youre headed; a plan is how youll get there. You have decided where to head to; now you need a plan.

How should you fill out your social media profiles? What should your tone and voice be like? What posts type (i.e. image, link, video, etc.) should you use?

To help you with the next step and your social media success, we have a step-by-step guide for creating a social media marketing plan. Heres a sneak peek of the infographic youll find in that guide:

Developing a social media marketing strategy is probably one of the hardest things to do because it requires you to step back and look at the big picture. You have to shift your mindset away from your daily tasks like scheduling and replying to comments to higher-level thinking.

But its greatly rewarding and helpful to have a social media marketing strategy so that you arent just posting content just for the sake of posting content. Itll help you achieve your social media and business goals.

P.s. You might like these related resources:

Read this article:
Social Media Marketing Strategy: The Complete Guide for Marketers

Yes. Weve gone from static Social Media Tools to AI (Artificial Intelligence) helping Social Media Marketers to create more and better content.

AI is being used in Social Media marketing to create written content, video content, schedule, analyze, and more.

In this post, well dive deeper into how AI can help you create more and better Social Media content.

The reason were focusing just on how AI can help with the written content part of Social Media Marketing is because its essesial you learn every part of what AI has to offer in depth to really be successful at it.

We dont advise you to try out all means of improving your Social Media Marketing with AI at once. It will be overwhelming and you wont be able to really dive into the power of AI and get great results.

Social Media Marketers spend a lot of time on coming up with ideas on what to post next and creating content:

What if AI can help with that?

Would that be scary? Would you be happy?

We believe that AI is here to assist marketers and not to take away their jobs.

Humans want to connect with humans. So a human touch will always be crucial.

But lets have a look at how AI can help.

Lets say you know you want to create a couple of Social Media posts about AI Marketing but you just need some inspiration. Some angles to get you going to spark some creativity.

Simply go to StoryLab.ais Content Idea Generator and type in some context on AI Marketing.

Check out what we got in the first run below. You can re-run the tool as often as needed to get a nice list of potential new social post ideas.

The Content Idea Generator is powered by AI. There is no static list of words that are added before or after your keywords. The outputs are unique and oftentimes, very helpful.

We hope the AI Powered Content Idea Generator helped you speed up the process and helped you to create a nice list of social post ideas in minutes instead of hours.

Lets win some time by creating social media captions with the help of the AI powered Social Media Caption Generator.

I simply took one of the ideas the content idea generator gave me and pasted it into the Social Caption Generator and it gave me two solid caption ideas:

I now have the choice between saving them and adding my human touch or re-running the generator until I get results I like better.

Social Media Marketers often write multiple social captions for any given topic and schedule it for the coming weeks or months.

Its often difficult to come up with new variations of how to describe a given topic a fourth or fifth time.

With the AI Caption Generator, you can have a buddy 24/7 to help you out and spar whenever you need to.

We advise to create an account on StoryLab.ai and try out the idea and caption generator for yourself. You can sign up and get 15 free runs every month or upgrade for $7 and get 100 runs every month.

When sitting down to schedule your social posts, head over to our Social Caption Generator and see how much time and brain power you can save with the help of AI. And how creative your Social Captions will be by having instant access to very different angles of approaching a topic.

Be mindful that quality inputs will give you quality outputs. If you only insert one or two words, the AI wont always get the full context and you wont always get quality outputs. The same goes for Google for instance.

AI can help you become more creative and help you save time to invest in what matters most; learning about your audience and engaging with them on social media.

At the core of Social Media Marketing there is the people and community aspect.

The more you engage and learn about the pains and goals of your audience, the bigger your impact.

We understand that you might have a posting quota. Thus, posting regularly on social is a priority. AI can give you back valuable time to take on new, more impactful tasks.

AI has come a long way and it will keep becoming better. The role of AI in Social Media Marketing will increase in the future as it has in the past.

Social Media Marketers will embrace the power of AI content creation, predictable modeling, scheduling, and all other goodies more and more.

The time is now to start playing around with AI.

Take this step-by-step guide, create a StoryLab.ai account and start playing around with AI and learn how it can help you speed up content outputs.

The time to get on board is now.

Were here to help you along the way.

Link:
AI for Social Media Marketing. How to use Artificial Intelligence.

Symposium sessions feature three days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore todays most pressing topics. The Marketing Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium this June, in which well share experiences from across the industry, inspiring real-time conversations about best practices, innovation, and the future of marketing work. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to some of the most pressing topics and trends in the marketing field. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium on Tuesday, June 21 Thursday, June 23, 2022 1:00- 3:00 pm ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

See the article here:
Social Media Marketing Certificate Program - eCornell

byAlan R. Andreasen

Commercial marketing is a set of activities carried out by a commercial enterprise designed to influence others to act in ways that will maximize value for the owners of the enterprise over the long run[1]. Over 100-plus years of growth and development, commercial marketing has evolved practices and concepts that have the potential to make significant contributions to social change. On the practical side, commercial marketers have learned that promoting social change for example through cause-related marketing (CRM) partnerships is a tactic that can significantly impact shareholder value. CRM activities today generate over $3 billion in corporate revenues while contributing in important ways to challenges like breast cancer, drinking and driving, and smoking cessation.

However, it is the fields conceptual developments that stand to make the most profound and enduring contributions to social change. Bill Smith proposes four basic concepts as the essence of these contributions:

I would argue that there are three other major contributions and a number of other minor conceptual frameworks that also deserve close attention. Further, I will also argue that there is more to the idea of competition than Smith has adduced.

Major Contributions

A. The Centrality of a Customer Orientation

Behavior change is ultimately in the hands of the target audience. Laws can be passed, environments altered and communications campaigns put into place. But if individuals choosenotto act, social change will not happen. Commercial marketers know this because their success is measured in sales and revenues. They learned many years ago that they must place the individual consumer at the center of all they do not see the customer as a target to be somehow manipulated. They recognize that an understanding of the consumer and what make him or her act is theessentialfirst step in any strategic planning process. It is this understanding that leads successful marketers to craft desirable exchanges, a sound competitive positioning and an effective marketing mix. It is this understanding that also causes them to place heavy reliance on pretesting and monitoring as strategies are implemented.

A customer orientation also leads commercial marketers to the view that, if campaigns are not successful, the fault must lie with the campaign and its planners and not with target customers. Social marketers too often adopt an organization-centered mindset in part because of their own strong belief in the behaviors they are promoting.

B. Markets Must Be Segmented

Commercial marketers have long since abandoned the notion of mass marketing. Their fanatical attention to customer insight leads them to recognize that customers differ significantly in what they seek in life and how they would respond to change strategies and tactics that the marketer might put in place. An approach of developing the one best campaign is viewed as not responsive to the diversity of customer markets and inefficient in its use of limited resources. Many marketers today have gone to the opposite extreme of developing markets of one through data-mining research and crafting influence approaches that respond to and take advantage of each individuals uniqueness.

Direct mail, telemarketing and the internet make markets of one conceptually feasible. However, marketers also recognize that such a high degree of articulation often is not economically efficient and so they constantly seek segmentation frameworks that group audiences in ways that permit both effective and efficient strategies. In recent years, segmentation efforts have centered less on easily acquired demographic information and more on insights into consumer cognitions, personalities and lifestyles.

Although social marketers today often segment target audiences they typically use demographic bases. There have been attempts to develop more sophisticated approaches such Porter NovellisHealthstylesand AEDsGreenstylesframeworks. However, this is still an area that merits much more basic research and refinement.

C. The Need for Risk-Taking

Commercial marketers operate in chaotic environments with imperfect data. They recognize that whatever actions they take today will inevitably not work as planned because consumers and environments will change and their competitors will not stand still. In the face of this chaos, the typical marketers response is not to seek out perfect information or await clearer forecasts but to take actions that involve risk, recognizing that effective monitoring systems (as Smith recommends) will allow them to make the changes needed to gradually approximate their desired outcomes. Their mantra is Ready, Fire, Aim. Many others seeking social change seem to follow an approach that can be characterized as

Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Aim Fire(maybe).

Other Potentially Useful Concepts

1. Branding

Marketers from Coca-Cola to the Ritz-Carlton have long known that long term influence programs that involve products or services will be significantly enhanced by careful branding strategies. Branding strategies recognize that target audiences acquire things and patronize services that they like and trust and that have predictable, desirable qualities. Brand shorthand tells target audiences what they will be getting if they transact with the business and marketers spend vast sums perfecting their brands and the images associated with it. They are relentless in their stewardship of these brands to ensure that they consistently deliver on the value proposition that the brand has taught consumers to expect.

Brands make strategies more efficient because they become shorthand for many key properties and they help build repeat behaviors (brand loyalties) that would be essential to many social change programs long term success. Branding is common in commodity-based social marketing. However, its use in service-oriented or pure behavior programs is still in its infancy.

2. Franchising

Marketers often cannot reach vastly dispersed audiences through their own channels and staff. Thus, they have crafted partnership vehicles called franchises that allow them to extend their reach while, at the same time, controlling the content and delivery of their marketing strategies. This approach has proven particularly valuable as they have sought to reach geographically distant markets.

Many charities engaged in social marketing efforts (such as Habitat for Humanity) rely on elements of a franchise model. However, other multisite programs could well gain greater control and impact with this approach.

3. Consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

Marketers know that it easier and less costly to keep existing customers than it is to find new ones. Thus, they are slavishly attentive to the quality of customer experiences. They invest significant sums into systems to track consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction and complaining behavior and into mechanisms for redressing wrongs or imperfections in the system. A major insight from this focus has been to recognize the importance of customerexpectationsin evaluations of product or service encounters. Marketers have learned that unrealistic expectations that have been raised through exaggerated brand promises or overly enthusiastic promotions or sales presentations will not only discourage repeat patronage but also provoke negative word of mouth commentary that can reach 8-10 other target audience members.

Social marketers who must focus on maintaining long-term behavior change would benefit from more elaborate and sophisticated tracking of consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction and complaining behavior.

4. The Distinction Between Product and Services Marketing

Marketers have learned that there are important differences between products and services that make the challenges of marketing the latter more difficult. Services areintangiblein that customers cannot inspect or handle them before acquisition. They areperishablein that they cannot be stored unfilled airline seats on a departing flight cannot be warehoused to meet later demand. They arevariable a restaurant meal one night or a doctors visit one afternoon may not be the same as would be encountered the next time. Finally, they areinseparablefrom the customer who contracts for them the diner who savors the meal or the patient who is tested or who (accurately or inaccurately) reports symptoms.

Service marketers, therefore, put special effort to: (a) attaching tangible features to their offerings through logos, building atmospherics, and the appearances of staff; (b) manage demand to better match perishable supply; (c) invest huge sums and time in training staff to deliver consistent service at the quality level the marketer (or the brand) promises; and (d) pay close attention to personal interactions with customers to make sure that the latter derive the most benefit and satisfaction from every encounter with an organization staffer. Many social marketers are, in fact, in the service business and would benefit from addressing these unique dimensions.

5. Product/Service Life Cycle

Many years of experience have taught marketers that product or service innovations go through a predictable life cycle following their launch. They know they will be more effective if they plan ahead and tailor their strategies to these predictable stages. The first stage is theintroductionperiod where emphasis needs to be on building marketing systems, establishing the brand and its promise and seeking out innovators and early adopters as first patrons. Stage two isgrowthwhere (one hopes) product or service sales accelerate significantly and where attention must be paid to extending coverage, perhaps developing franchises, and beginning to plan follow-up product and service variations to capitalize on early success. Stage three ismaturitywhere competition is fierce, new organizations have appeared to challenge success and acquisition of further gains becomes harder and more expensive. Stage four ispotential declinewhen the venture has peaked and is replaced by superior alternatives. Here, attention must be paid to either milking the existing offering or finding innovative ways to rejuvenate it.

Anticipation of these natural progressions would leave prescient social marketers poised for each new challenge and less likely to waste valuable resources.

A Comment About Competition

As the exposition above suggests, commercial marketing offers concepts and tools that are potentially useful in (a) crafting strategies and tactics to influence people to bring about social change and (b) managing the organizations that create these strategeis and tactics. It is in the later regard that I wish to extend Bill Smiths comments about competition.

Consumer insight makes abundantly clear that every behavior we wish to influence has at least one competitor, even if that competitor is the status quo, and that effective strategies must address that competition. However,organizationsalso compete in commercial marketing. Commercial marketers live and breathemarket shareas their measure of corporate self worth. And this means that they constantly think about ways to beat out the other guy.

By contrast, most enterprises in the social sector reflect a culture in which inter-organizational competition is considered unseemly. Although such competition is grudgingly recognized in the domains of grant-getting and fund-raising, blatant attempts to be better than direct competitors is thought to be not nice. While I do not wish to recommend the adoption of unbridled cut-throat competition, I do believe that healthy inter-organizational competition can offer two major gains to social change programs:

[1]Some commercial marketers claim to achieve a double bottom line which adds social outcomes to financial performance.

More:
Commercial Marketing and Social Change - Center for Social Impact ...