In commercial marketing, the ultimate aim is to increase profit or brand recognition for a company and it’s important to understand how marketing is used in the commercial world.

In social marketing, the aim is to change the behavior of people to their benefit or to the benefit of society as a whole. Social marketing uses the same marketing techniques as commercial sector marketing:

1. following a staged planning process
2. Identification of the target segment
3. Conducting market research to understand the customer
4. Consideration of the marketing mix – product, price, place, and promotion.

 

Despite these similarities, there are several important differences between commercial and social marketing.

The FOUR “P’s”

Like mentioned above, the 4 “P’s” are part of an important part of your marketing creation.

Product:

          This is a marketing process. You are asking your audience to adopt to change or maintain behavior and to adapt to their needs. In other words, your product needs to be a tangible object or services that support or facilitate adoption of the desired behavior – a stop smoking kit , or How to stop smoking.

 

Price:

This is the cost and barriers that prevent or hinder the target audience from adopting the desired behavior. They can be non-monetary; for example, physical, emotional or psychological. Your price needs to be at market value to attract and change the behavior of your costumers needs.

 

Place:

This is where the target audience will perform the desired behavior, or where the product or service is made available like your website.

 

Promotion:

This is how the product or service, cost, proposition and place are made known to the target segment. This can be any social media, forum or website.

 

Our Customers

You must be clear on what you’re offering and where your audience can access it before you can communicate any benefits they will value. For example, in the commercial world, a fast food chain would never advertise a new burger for $1.00 if you could not buy it at their outlets for the stated price.

Nor would they simply promote the message ‘eat burgers’. They would advertise: ‘go to our shops and for $1.00 you can have this great tasting burger which will be served fast. It will satisfy your hunger and all your friends will enjoy eating one with you’. How to present the product is a form of social marketing. If the promotion isn’t presented directly to the customer’s behavior, then the promotion isn’t performing.

So the first consideration in successfully delivering on a social strategy is investing in content creation and community management. Before paid advertising is activated to grow and engage a brand’s audience on or off Facebook, a strategy needs to be crafted to deliver on the brand’s social goals that align back to overall business objectives.

Modern Marketers like yourself, need to drive brand awareness, advocacy, loyalty, and sales. Customers who are engaged with brands can be great ambassadors as well as great customers. Encourage loyalty and invite two-way conversations using personalized offers and free incentives.

Marketers can even consult with the customer community for marketing business, such as new product ideas and testing. With Wealthy Affiliates, you can easily create content, select social streams, schedule the post, create new ideas, learn new ways and publish engaging content to the right audience at the right time using their platform.

 

The essence of a social marketing approach

• Do I really understand my target audience and see things from their perspective?
• Am I clear on what I would like my target audience to do?
• For my target audience, do the benefits of doing what I would like them to do outweigh the costs or barriers to doing it?
• Am I using a combination of activities in order to encourage people to achieve the desired action?

Even if you don’t take social marketing any further, just considering these four questions will add value to your projects and policies.

Social marketing is a different approach to the way things are and not the way things were due to strong behavior on how people are now prospecting for products.

 

I found this brief article talking about how GM pulled from Facebook:

On May 15 General Motors (GM) announced that the company was pulling advertising spend from Facebook this year.

This news caused a large stir among advertisers currently invested in Facebook’s advertising and has brands debating the effectiveness of paid media on Facebook.

In response to GM’s decision to cut advertising spend, one of GM’s largest competitors, Ford, stated via Twitter “It’s all about the execution.

Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Ford further states that the company has, “…found Facebook ads to be very effective when strategically combined with engagement, great content and innovative ways of storytelling, rather than treating them as a straight media buy”.

This should be a good eye opener on how you promote your product and how you brand yourself.

 

To some this up:

Social media effectiveness doesn’t depend solely on a platform like Facebook, rather, a clearly defined plan of your own. Facebook paid advertising is most effective when leveraged as part of an overall media and social strategy just like all of the other social media sites.

While you plan and measure your framework, this will continue to evolve with the channel you create, it will:

1. Develope engaging content
2. Create a measurable goal
3. Implementing the appropriate tracking

 

This will ensure that marketing dollars are effectively utilized and optimized to drive value for a brand and creating a brand is the key part to driving customers to your site.

Remember, the customer has more power in the marketing relationship than ever before. They want to hear from you on their terms, when and where they want. And increasingly, the where is social media.

It’s just marketing after all, and if you understand who your audience is, what content or message will resonate with them, what action you want them to take, and how you will measure your success, you will make great social strides in this digital world. Read how to listen, engage, publish, and analyze as part of your orchestrated and integrated marketing machine.

A food for thought; Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. How would you read and evaluate a product and how will it change your behavior in wanting to purchase the product you are looking at or how you would become a member of a marketing company like Wealthy Affiliates?

 

To your success

 

Kayton Scarboro