SOCIAL MARKETING: AN OVERVIEW ON BEHAVIOR-CHANGE MARKETING AND HOW IT CAN BE PURPOSEFUL IN B2B MARKETING

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1 SOCIAL MARKETING: AN OVERVIEW ON BEHAVIOR-CHANGE MARKETING AND HOW IT CAN BE PURPOSEFUL IN B2B MARKETING

2 The term social marketing has been skewed in recent years due to its frequent confusion with social media marketing, such as posting content and advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook. Social marketing is a public health marketing methodology that uses commercial marketing techniques to promote the adoption of behaviors that will improve the health or well-being of the target audience or of society as a whole. Social Marketing Explained Social marketing uses the same methods that Kellogg s uses to sell cereal a focus on the audience, market research, and a strategic marketing plan but instead of asking consumers to buy a product, the target audience is encouraged to adopt a healthy behavior. Remember the this is your brain on drugs TV commercials from the 1980s? How about the Truth antismoking commercials from the 2000s? These are both examples of large-scale social marketing campaigns. Because of the highly targeted nature of social marketing and the difficulty measuring large-scale effectiveness, social marketing works best when implemented on a community level with a specifically defined target audience. Encouraging the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables to low-income minority residents of three underserved neighborhoods in Chicago would be an example of a social marketing effort. The World Health Organization and several countries with their own international agencies working in Africa and other impoverished nations began using social marketing principles in the 1960s. However, it wasn t until the 1970s that Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman s article in the Journal of Marketing defined social marketing as a discipline. Today, social marketing is used frequently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and similar government health organizations in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Social marketing has also been used by nonprofit organizations like PETA and American Legacy Foundation. The Social Marketing Process The social marketing process consists of five stages, each of which involves its own set of activities: 1. Formative evaluation and planning 2. Message and materials development 3. Pretesting and campaign adjustment 4. Implementation and materials dissemination 5. Impact evaluation and feedback

3 Research for Social Marketing Campaign Development One of the key components of a social marketing campaign, and what sets it apart from a PSA trying to raise public awareness, is the formative research conducted prior to and during the creative production process. Collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative research data will help you better understand the problem and its context; the audience affected by the problem and its knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs; and develop more effective messaging and audience outreach tactics. Quantitative research may be obtained through secondary research methods, such as reviewing academic articles, research studies, census data, and epidemiologic reports obtained from the health department. If a social marketing campaign is being implemented on a local level, it is also advised to distribute a survey directly to members of the target audience. Conducting your own primary quantitative research after reviewing the secondary research allows you to gather more specific information about the behaviors and needs of the precise people for whom the campaign is being developed. As important as quantitative research is the qualitative research in the formative research stage of social marketing. If a campaign is local, it is beneficial to visit the communities you want to target to conduct ethnographic observation. This is the process of observing how the target audience behaves in their own community and how the behavior you are trying to change is valued in that community. Interviewing community stakeholders or key informants, such as a minister, bartender, or hair stylist, can help glean valuable insight into a community from people who know the community well. Hosting focus groups or town-hall meetings with members of the target audience can also be particularly insightful. Audience Segmentation in Social Marketing Following a robust analysis of the data collected from both quantitative and qualitative research, the final step before developing campaign messages and design elements is to segment the audience. Social marketing often fails because the audience is too broad. By segmenting your audience, you can identify the groups more reachable by the campaign and potentially create different messages and campaign elements for different subgroups of your target audience. Segments of your audience may also be based on geographic location, demographics, psychographics, and attitudes or beliefs. Messaging, Materials, and Channel Selection As with any marketing campaign, the right messaging, materials, and tactics for implementation are essential to the success of a social marketing campaign. Similar to

4 selling a product or service, social marketing uses commercial marketing techniques to promote the adoption of behaviors that will improve the health or well-being of a specific target audience. After spending months collecting and analyzing the formative research and segmenting your target audience, you ll be eager to get to this next stage. Using the results of your quantitative and qualitative research and analysis, you ll develop compelling messages, create eye-catching materials, and select the most appropriate channels to develop a campaign that motivates your target audience to adopt the healthier behavior. Social Marketing Channels There are an unlimited number of channels that you can use to disseminate your message and campaign, and it is important to select the most effective and efficient methods of reaching each segment of your target audience. Using television commercials to reach a small target audience, such as parents of fifth graders in one school district, would be overkill. Direct mail would be more effective and efficient. Traditionally, social marketing campaigns have successfully reached their audiences by using targeted mass media and strategically placed outdoor ads in coordination with community-based events and outreach to distribute print materials. Today, social marketing campaigns are taking advantage of social media, viral videos, mobile apps, and other technology to reach targeted niche populations. In addition to selecting channels, social marketing campaigns should determine specific outlets within each channel. To reach college students using print ads, you would choose the weekly school paper over the local city-wide newspaper. To reach urban youth on the radio, a media buy on the local hip-hop station would work better than the oldies station. The formats you choose are also important. You may choose to supplement the print ads in the school newspaper by sponsoring the college football team, distributing flyers at the student union, or hosting a speaking event on campus. You may negotiate the radio-buy to include a guest appearance on the station s talk show or a remote broadcast from your community event. Messaging for Social Marketing Hey, hey, what do you say? Creating the right messages is crucial to the success of a social marketing campaign. If you want to change people s behavior, you ll need a strong call to action and to offer the audience a reward for their changed behavior. Antismoking

5 campaigns have encouraged users to stop smoking so that their second-hand smoke doesn t cause asthma in their children. To help develop messaging, use the analysis of the quantitative and qualitative research to answer the following six questions: 1. Who are the target audience and segmented subgroups and what are they like? 2. What action should the target consumer take as a direct result of the campaign? 3. What reward should the message promise the target consumer? 4. How can the promise be made credible? 5. What are the best methods (channels, outlets, and formats) to reach the target consumer? 6. What images or graphic elements will connect the target audience to the message? Changing an individual s behavior is not easy, but it s a cornerstone conundrum in all marketing, not just social marketing. However, because personal behavior-change involves complex emotional and intellectual thought processes and adopting healthy behaviors in exchange for old habits, many people are resistant to changing behaviors. Social scientists have studied behavior change for decades and have developed several behavior-change theories, including the Health Belief Model and the Stages of Change Theory. Understanding these theories and using them to guide your messaging will help make your campaign more successful at reaching your target audience. Developing Effective Social Marketing Materials The most creative part of the process is materials development. Whether it s a print campaign with ads, posters, billboards, and push cards or a series of online videos and a website, the visual part of your campaign should be eye-catching and attention-grabbing, and, most importantly, it should carry your message. The design you choose for social-marketing materials should be influenced by what you ve learned about your target audience through your research and should consider the capabilities and limitations of the channels and formats you ve selected. A birth control campaign to college-aged women might need to include a high-quality, professionally produced series of posters and push cards distributed on college campuses, at bars and nightclubs, and at beauty or nail salons. On the other hand, campaign materials encouraging homeless drug addicts to get tested for Hepatitis C may not need to be high-quality; simple flyers passed out at shelter or a testing referral list for case managers may do perfectly well for one of your tactics.

6 Graphic elements should be chosen carefully and tie-in with the messaging. Whether you chose stock photographs, illustrations, or your own videos, be sure these images are appealing to your target audience and do not inadvertently offend them. Again, using the research to help guide this process is critical, yet it is also essential to pretest the materials with the target audience which we ll cover in the next article in this series. Social Marketing Testing, Dissemination, and Evaluation So you ve researched your target audience and its attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors. You ve segmented your audience and crafted relevant messages you re sure will resonate. You ve developed a robust plan to spread your message to your target audience by using multiple channels and media outlets. And you ve created attention-grabbing, thoughtprovoking materials with a compelling call to action. You re ready to go, right? Not quite. Test Your Campaign Before you rush to disseminate your campaign, you should test it on representatives of your target audience. Focus groups are a common way to test materials, but you can also ask individuals in the communities where your target audience lives and plays to get first-hand testimonial input. Testing accomplishes the following: Ensure the audience comprehends the messages: Written copy may be too wordy or the voice on the radio spot may be too masculine to appeal to your audience. Detect other interpretations of your messages: Campaign slogans may be clever to some, yet offensive to others. Identify details that subvert the message: The background music may be too loud, the background images too distracting, or the colors too garish. Make the materials more appealing: Reactions to the look of your materials can help prompt you to brighten up or tone down colors, change a typeface, or remove an image. Catch costly mistakes: Finding an error or misinterpreted phrase during the testing phase can help you avoid completely redoing unusable materials after production. You may get lucky and find your audience loves everything you ve created, but usually there are a least a few learnings that prompt changes. If you receive a number of suggestions, you may need to test your revised materials to ensure the adjustments achieved your objectives.

7 While you won t be able to appeal to everyone in your target audience, you should make the changes that will give the campaign the greatest chance of success. Disseminate While the campaign dissemination phase of social marketing may feel like the time you can kick back and let everything work, this phase has some critical components to maximize effectiveness. Radio ads need to be tracked to determine if they re airing during the correct time slots to reach your audience. Posters, brochures, and other materials need to be counted, monitored, and tracked to ensure they are getting picked up and that distribution sites aren t running out. Channels and distribution locations should be evaluated during the campaign implementation phase to determine effectiveness. Many channels, such as radio stations, print publications, and billboard advertising, offer flexibility within a media buy, allowing you to change to a sister radio station, run ads in a different magazine, or use a billboard on another street. Campaign dissemination is also the phase when you should implement a public relations plan to try and garner some attention on your social marketing campaign and earned media. The topics of behavior change and healthier behaviors are interesting to reporters and editors and your social marketing campaign s unique approach may get your campaign media attention, which, in the social-media era, could give you a greater reach than you ever imagined. Evaluate Your Campaign The final step to a social marketing campaign is evaluation. Did you accomplish your goals and objectives? To effectively assess a social marketing campaign, you should evaluate the outcomes, process, and impact: Process evaluation helps you gain a greater understanding of what actually happened during the course of implementation and can help you improve implementation during the campaign and for future campaigns.

8 Outcome evaluation identifies the extent of attitude and behavior change in the target audience and correlates it with individual exposure to the campaign. If you administered surveys to your target audience during your formative research, administer the same surveys to your target audience and compare the results to determine attitude or behavior change. Impact evaluation makes the leap from behavior change to health and social outcomes. This type of evaluation determines whether the people who adopt the behavior promoted by the social marketing program experience a subsequent reduction in morbidity or mortality (or improvement in quality of life) related to the overall goal of the program. Unfortunately, the actual impact of the campaign is often difficult to assess accurately and in a timely fashion, as some of the problems that are tackled in social marketing will not appear for many years (such as lung cancer or heart disease). Applying Social Marketing to B2B Marketing Social marketing is a public-health marketing methodology that uses commercial marketing techniques to promote behaviors that will improve the health and well-being of target audiences. Whether encouraging the adoption of healthy eating habits or promoting a medical device to hospitals, people make decisions based on whether the message and accompanying images appeal to them, so there is much to learn from the field of social marketing when conducting B2B marketing. Formative Evaluation and Planning Formative evaluation and planning is akin to audience analysis and marketing strategy. Effective marketing requires deep audience and market knowledge to craft and disseminate effective messaging. Research will help you understand and plan: Who is your target audience really? If the CEO is merely a figurehead and most decisions are made by the COO, then your target audience should be the COO. What tactic will engage your audience most? If they re too busy to open their own mail, a direct mail campaign may be ineffective. When should they get your message? If the target audience slows down purchasing in the summer, then a fall or spring campaign may work better.

9 Message and Materials Development Once you know your audience, your competition, and the market landscape, you can craft effective materials to use in your campaign. After all, you know the mindset of your target and what he or she deals with on a daily basis. Also, you understand how and when to reach out to your target to ensure receptivity. Use the knowledge you ve gained from your research to develop compelling messaging and effective materials. Your research will help you determine what type of materials and activities will work best, what they need to say and involve, and how they need to look and feel. Pretesting and Campaign Adjustment Many marketers especially ones marketing businesses to other businesses skip campaign pretesting due to time and budget constraints. Further, the C-suite s impression that it knows its audience best through direct, anecdotal experience can play a factor in skipping testing and adjustment and can result in materials and messages that miss their targets. Comments from your target audience on materials you ve created from your research will help you see whether you ve effectively translated your findings. Making adjustments to your materials and methods before a full-on campaign launch can save time and budget over the long run. Implementation and Materials Dissemination Often, marketers measure the dissemination of a campaign, rather than its impact on sales or whether it generated leads. Just delivering a message doesn t tell you whether it worked. Okay you sent 1,000 directmail pieces to C-suite executives. Great. But if only five people opened the piece and only one responded, then it wasn t successful. Implementation should follow a finely tuned marketing plan that aligns with a strategy, and it should include multiple channels and appropriate frequency. Carefully implementing multiple messages in different formats and at different times, while measuring continually, makes more successful current and future campaigns.

10 Impact Evaluation and Feedback Because it is borne out of the government-funded public-health industry, social marketing must be measured, its effects analyzed, and reports generated. All marketers should assume this level of evaluation as best practice. What worked? What flopped? How many people clicked on the call to action and followed the steps? Did people call for more information or ask to speak to sales? Best of all: Did they purchase the product or service? Conclusion Social marketing is a marketing methodology that uses commercial marketing techniques to promote behaviors that will improve the health and well-being of target audiences. Commonly used by government agencies and nonprofits stop smoking, get vaccinated, or eat healthy foods social marketing directly involves the target audience in development and testing of the campaign. Campaigns are highly targeted to a specific audience and heavily monitored to ensure frequency of the campaign messages to the target audience. While this specific type of marketing is exclusive to health related behavior change, B2B marketers can gain valuable insight into their customers by using some or all of the components of social marketing to better understand their target audience. Behavioral theories can also help to define how B2B marketers plan to change their target audience s opinion about one company compared to another. Finally, methodologies for testing the impact of the campaign on the target audience can be useful in measuring any type of marketing campaign.