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Using Social Marketing
Social marketing can be used to build more engaging and memorable communication campaigns, with the goal of encouraging positive behaviour change in your audience.
Social marketing can be used to build more engaging and memorable communication campaigns, with the goal of encouraging positive behaviour change in your audience.
Key Tips
Key Tips
IMPACT - Make it count. Utilise social marketing to have an impact for the greater social good via behaviour changes at the individual or community level.
COMMIT - Social marketing takes a lot of time in planning, production and implementation, and should be used for long term changes to behaviour. If you plan on creating a social marketing campaign or intervention from scratch, plan to put the time and resources behind it.
READY-MADE RESOURCES - There’s no need to reinvent the wheel! Use social marketing health campaigns or interventions that have already been created by government, health promotion agencies and peak organisations.
What is Social Marketing?
What is Social Marketing?
Chances are that you have been the target of, or participated in, multiple social marketing campaigns throughout your life. You have probably come across multiple campaigns about safe driving from bodies like the Transport Accident Commission , seen campaigns to stop smoking or donned a red nose for Red Nose Day. Check out more campaign examples in the links section below.
Social marketing aims to influence behaviours in individuals and communities for the greater social good. Essentially, it uses the tools that commercial marketers use to sell you products but uses them to promote behaviours that bring about a social benefit.
In health, social marketing is particularly effective for changing behaviours to improve people’s lives.
Much like client-centred practise, an in-depth understanding of a person’s life and experiences is critical to social marketing. This means more effective communication can be developed.
Going beyond the individual, understanding how societal, community and local factors influence their behaviours and choices will result in a much better-informed campaign.
With the audience at its centre, social marketing leverages social settings and communication to affect behaviour change in individuals and potentially in communities.
The 7 Ps of Social Marketing
The 7 Ps of Social Marketing
A helpful tool for planning your social marketing campaign are these 7Ps of Social Marketing.
Product
What is the desired behaviour, response or social change?
Price
What are the costs to your audience of adopting this product? Costs are not just monetary and could include time, effort and consequences.
Place
Where can individuals (clients) that will take up the product be reached or engaged? This goes beyond geographic location and logistics and emphasises the product placement and positioning.
[Place is distinct from commercial marketing in that it emphasises the relationship between messages and products, which blurs the traditional boundaries between promotion and place. While other models associate place with locational decisions and logistical considerations, such as moving physical products to ensure access by consumer markets, this model highlights the significance of message positioning and media placement of products]
Promotion
How will you reach your audience with the communication messages?
People
What people and services need to be engaged to support the successful delivery of the product?
Policy
What upstream activities are needed to facilitate a favourable environment for social marketing programmes?
Partnership
Who are the stakeholders associated with the product? What are the relationships between different stakeholders and the product? Who is willing to be part of an integrated social marketing effort?
Download the handy template that gives you the 7 Ps in an editable file that you can fill in to make it relevant for you.
Twelve Step Social Marketing Process
Twelve Step Social Marketing Process
While the 7Ps is a great starting tool, even more insight can be gained with the 12 step Social Marketing Planning Process.
Where to next? - Health Behaviour Theories or Audience or Social Media or to helpful resources linked below
Where to next? - Health Behaviour Theories or Audience or Social Media or to helpful resources linked below
Links & Resources
Links & Resources
Ready-made Resources
Ready-made Resources
Many government, health promotion agencies and peak organisations have created health social marketing campaigns that need the support of health professionals.
Instead of creating your own content, you can use these campaigns as an easy way to engage your audience with ready-made content.
These include:
Cancer Council/Rethink Sugar Drink ad - https://vimeo.com/284842351
Slip, Slop, Slap skin cancer campaign
Teen Vaping (This is a ready made campaign that is available to purchase. It is aimed at larger health organisations, however the preliminary information might be helpful for your planning.)
'The World’s Best Public Health Social Media Campaigns' (this is a blog post listing some successful campaigns. Some links unfortunately no longer work as the campaigns finished, but there are still plenty of good ones!)
Department of Health resources (The Department of Health has a collection of ready-made resources that can be used by health professionals for a number of key health focuses for government including COVID-19, immunisation programs and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health.)
Links
Links
Social Marketing Services - https://www.socialmarketingservice.com/
Printable Social Marketing Quick Reference Guides (PDFs) from 'Marketing Primers'
7Ps editable template
Publications
Publications
Social Marketing & Advertising in the Age of Social Media (book) - by Parker, L. & Brennan, L. (eds) (2020)
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