Social marketing has become a buzz phrase among nonprofit organizations and government agencies. As a social marketing specialist, I applaud the attention and the increased use of this valuable set of tools. Unfortunately, not all consultants and organizations who say are involved in social marketing are not using it to its full extent. In some cases, groups engaged only in social advertising pass their programs off as social marketing efforts.

Of course, the basic definition of social marketing is that it uses marketing principles to bring about behavior changes that benefit individuals or society. The problem, I believe, is that not everyone who sets out to engage in social marketing fully understands all that is involved in marketing. Even some groups who believe they are using the four Ps—Product, Price, Place and Promotion—fall short of achieving the kind of integrated, research-based approach that is needed to sustain behavior change. Here are my thoughts about some of the minimum requirements of a true social marketing campaign:

Audience Research and Understanding—Audience research is a critical part of any successful social marketing campaign. When you are asking people to voluntarily change one or more behaviors, don’t assume you know what it will take to get them to change, let the audience members tell you. Audience research can help project sponsors:

• Understand why audience members are engaged in their current behavior,
• Determine the barriers to changing behavior,
• Pinpoint the reason(s) people would be willing to change (benefits),
• Choose the best delivery methods and media types,
• Test messages and concepts.

While audience research is critical to success, it doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. In future entries I will discuss methods for conducting inexpensive audience research.

Advertising, Plus Community-based Outreach and Public Relations—True social marketing, or at least truly successful social marketing requires multi-faceted campaigns that work on multiple scales simultaneously. Perhaps you’ve heard the term: Community Based Social Marketing? That’s just a fancy way of saying that your project uses interpersonal communications techniques to convince people to change their behavior. The most local, interpersonal levels are where real behavior change promotion and persuasion can best take place. On the other hand, community based approaches are not very effective at raising the awareness and interest levels of larger groups of audience members.

Advertising works on larger scales and can be very effective at raising awareness or interest in an issue or topic. Yet, advertising rarely has the depth to cause behavior change alone. In the government and nonprofit world, project sponsors often think of advertising as public service announcements, that are aired free of charge on radio and TV as part of the station’s Federal Communications Commission mandate. Newspapers will also often times run a public service advertisement for free if there is room. The big warning here is that if you rely on free airing and placement, you have no control over when it is aired or where it is placed. Always plan to buy advertising time or spots. Stations will almost always throw in some free airings as well.

Public relations, or earned media is the process of getting your story in the newspaper or on broadcast news programs. Some people also refer to promotional activities at community events or festivals as public relations, though I prefer to place those efforts into the community-based approaches category.

Evaluation and Adjustment—Often times evaluative measures use the same instruments used to assess awareness and set a baseline at the beginning of the project. Sometimes they are in the form of pre-tests and post tests. Other times they the same survey instrument that was used before the project started. Once again, as with audience assessment, evaluation measures don’t always have to be terribly expensive propositions.
As I finish this inaugural blog, I urge everyone to really think through and plan out your prospective social marketing efforts. It only takes one failed effort to sour funding organizations and supervisors on your methods. When done correctly, social marketing can be a very effective way to obtain behavior change among the public.