Marketing is the best way to reach out easily to the target audience and even to do good deeds the thoughts have to reach the desired audience. This is where social marketing plays a major role.
Social marketing is different from social media marketing. In social marketing, commercial marketing techniques are borrowed to change the social behavior of the target audience to benefit society.
The history of social marketing began when when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman published their article 'Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change' in the Journal of Marketing in 1971.
The primary cause of social marketing is doing some social good. Whether it’s trying to convince the public to stop smoking or encouraging men to use condoms, the focus is always on the public good first.
Social media marketing is that which uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These are collective groups of web properties that are published primarily by users for the purposes of building online communities. They can be used to generate publicity for social marketing campaigns, but that is not their primary purpose.
Sustainable marketing is that which is used by a company to demonstrate its corporate social responsibility and this does not qualify as social marketing.
According to the Institute for Social Marketing, these are the most important social marketing strategies and concepts:
The ultimate objective of marketing is to influence action and change behaviour.
Action is undertaken whenever target audiences believe that the benefits they receive will be greater than the costs they incur.
Programmes to influence action will be more effective if they are based on an understanding of the target audience’s own perceptions of the proposed exchange.
Target audiences are seldom uniform in their perceptions and and so should be partitioned into segments.
Recommended behaviours always have competition which must be understood and addressed.
Courtesy: www.richtopia.com
