Ten Tips for Effective Social Marketing

Hello guys,

I want to share the below article from Squidoo on social marketing. Happy reading people.

1. Talk to your customers.
   The key to effective social marketing is talking (and listening!) to the people you are trying to reach. Social marketing is a customer-driven process. All aspects of your program must be developed with the wants and needs of the target audience as the central focus. In order to learn what your customers want, you must ask them!
2. Segment your audience.
   Good marketers know that there is no such thing as selling to the general public. To be most effective, you need to segment your target audiences into groups that are as similar to each other as possible in terms of demographics, attitudes and behaviors and to create messages specifically for each segment.
3. Position your product.
   Your product positioning determines how the people in your target audience think about your product as compared to the competition. Social marketing products are usually behaviors, attitudes or ideas. What benefits do people get from using your product? How do you make it easy for people to adopt the product?
4. Know your competition.
   Social marketers need to be aware of the competing messages and behaviors pulling on their target audiences. Your product's competition may be another product, such as french fries versus fruit, or it may be other behaviors that someone has chosen to do instead. Your product must be more attractive than the alternatives to be accepted.
5. Go to where your audience is.
   People will not go out of their way to find your message. You will need to put your message in places your target audience spends its time.
6. Utilize a variety of approaches.
   Social marketing involves much more than television advertising campaigns. The most effective programs use a combination of mass media, community, small group and individual activities. You also need to think beyond communications and look at how you are distributing the product, how to reduce the price (whether monetary, physical or emotional), and how you can change the environment to support behavior change.
7. Use models that work.
   As with any field, social marketers design programs using the most effective and useful models available to them. In one model particularly useful to social marketers, the Transtheoretical Model, people must move through several steps in a continuum before adopting a new behavior. You can segment by a particular stage of behavior change or target people in each stage sequentially with different messages.
8. Test, test, test.
   All of the products, promotional materials, and services you develop for your program should be tested with your target audience to gauge their potential effectiveness. The customers are the experts on what works best for them, and they can help you make sure that the materials are attention-getting and accomplish your objectives.
9. Build partnerships with key allies.
   By pooling resources with other organizations working toward the same goal, you can have a greater impact as well as access to new audiences.
10. See what you can do better next time.
    Evaluation occurs throughout the social marketing process, gathering data so you can use that information to improve your program both during and after implementation.