Published on November 19th, 2019
When it comes to behaviour change marketing, the most valuable tool for any behaviour change company, alongside a slew of other digital agencies, is social media analytics.
Building social media campaigns is inherently different from advertising in other mediums, simply because you get immediate results on the efficacy of your work.
But the immediacy of these results is offset by the amount of research and planning required to even get a social media campaign off the ground. Read on if you’d like to learn how to approach using social media as a platform for behaviour change.
1. Identify The Scope Of Your Campaign
Whether you’re overseeing a public health initiative or operating an eCommerce venture, arguably the most important decision you’ll need to make is regarding the scope of your campaign.
It’s recommended that you identify your scope as soon as possible in order to greatly simplify the rest of this process.
In other words, your first step is to decide who you’re going to speaking to before you move on to what you’re going to be saying.
If you have a clear understanding of your target audience and primary demographics, setting the specific tone of your message and establishing the desired behavioural outcomes becomes child’s play.
2. Understand The Five Behaviour Basics
Now, it’s time to move on to building a foundation for your campaign, which entails chiselling around the marble block that is your scope and forming the crude outlines of your social media campaign.
This can be achieved by addressing the five pillars of behaviour change marketing, these being:
- Attitude
- Competences
- Environment
- Expectations from the messenger
- Triggers
Anybody who’s familiar with the five pillars would know that in the formation of any campaign, it’s vital that all five are addressed if you’re looking to adopt a whole-systems approach to ensuring your desired behaviour change is attained.
However, you’ll be happy to hear that unlike traditional marketing campaigns, social media marketing does not demand that all of the five pillars be addressed together.
In fact, due to the prolific and changeable nature of social media ads, the more small variations of your original message you have, the better.
This is simply due to the fact that the more variations you post, the higher the likelihood of any single one of those variations being recalled and acted upon by different audience members within your chosen demographic.
3. Apply The ‘New 4Ps’ Of Social Marketing
It wouldn’t be digital marketing if it didn’t come with multiple sets of the same rule. So you may not be surprised to hear that social media marketing does away with traditional marketing’s ‘4Ps’ (price, place, promotion, and product), and have opted to recreate the rule as it pertains to social marketing. These ‘new 4Ps’ are as follows:
- Population → what is the impact of the current behaviour on the population?
- Products → how does the design or marketing of your product or service impact your target audience?
- Place → where does your audience live, work, and play, and how will these places impact marketing?
- Political Structure → how does the current political climate impact current behaviour, and what alterations will need to be encouraged in order to attain the desired behaviour change?
These ‘4Ps’ should act as points of reference which you should continuously revisit during the development and delivery of your campaign. Keeping track of them will allow you to better evaluate the efficacy of your social marketing strategy.
Like all forms of marketing, social marketing naturally requires consistent collaboration and evaluation to ensure that your content stays relevant and up-to-date.
The particulars of your campaign will also need to be consistently revisited to ensure that its efficacy stays optimal.
If you’re willing to put in this extra work, you will be able to reap some powerful results in regards to changing audience behaviour.
