Mediaboss Marketing

byAlan R. Andreasen

Commercial marketing is a set of activities carried out by a commercial enterprise designed to influence others to act in ways that will maximize value for the owners of the enterprise over the long run[1]. Over 100-plus years of growth and development, commercial marketing has evolved practices and concepts that have the potential to make significant contributions to social change. On the practical side, commercial marketers have learned that promoting social change for example through cause-related marketing (CRM) partnerships is a tactic that can significantly impact shareholder value. CRM activities today generate over $3 billion in corporate revenues while contributing in important ways to challenges like breast cancer, drinking and driving, and smoking cessation.

However, it is the fields conceptual developments that stand to make the most profound and enduring contributions to social change. Bill Smith proposes four basic concepts as the essence of these contributions:

I would argue that there are three other major contributions and a number of other minor conceptual frameworks that also deserve close attention. Further, I will also argue that there is more to the idea of competition than Smith has adduced.

Major Contributions

A. The Centrality of a Customer Orientation

Behavior change is ultimately in the hands of the target audience. Laws can be passed, environments altered and communications campaigns put into place. But if individuals choosenotto act, social change will not happen. Commercial marketers know this because their success is measured in sales and revenues. They learned many years ago that they must place the individual consumer at the center of all they do not see the customer as a target to be somehow manipulated. They recognize that an understanding of the consumer and what make him or her act is theessentialfirst step in any strategic planning process. It is this understanding that leads successful marketers to craft desirable exchanges, a sound competitive positioning and an effective marketing mix. It is this understanding that also causes them to place heavy reliance on pretesting and monitoring as strategies are implemented.

A customer orientation also leads commercial marketers to the view that, if campaigns are not successful, the fault must lie with the campaign and its planners and not with target customers. Social marketers too often adopt an organization-centered mindset in part because of their own strong belief in the behaviors they are promoting.

B. Markets Must Be Segmented

Commercial marketers have long since abandoned the notion of mass marketing. Their fanatical attention to customer insight leads them to recognize that customers differ significantly in what they seek in life and how they would respond to change strategies and tactics that the marketer might put in place. An approach of developing the one best campaign is viewed as not responsive to the diversity of customer markets and inefficient in its use of limited resources. Many marketers today have gone to the opposite extreme of developing markets of one through data-mining research and crafting influence approaches that respond to and take advantage of each individuals uniqueness.

Direct mail, telemarketing and the internet make markets of one conceptually feasible. However, marketers also recognize that such a high degree of articulation often is not economically efficient and so they constantly seek segmentation frameworks that group audiences in ways that permit both effective and efficient strategies. In recent years, segmentation efforts have centered less on easily acquired demographic information and more on insights into consumer cognitions, personalities and lifestyles.

Although social marketers today often segment target audiences they typically use demographic bases. There have been attempts to develop more sophisticated approaches such Porter NovellisHealthstylesand AEDsGreenstylesframeworks. However, this is still an area that merits much more basic research and refinement.

C. The Need for Risk-Taking

Commercial marketers operate in chaotic environments with imperfect data. They recognize that whatever actions they take today will inevitably not work as planned because consumers and environments will change and their competitors will not stand still. In the face of this chaos, the typical marketers response is not to seek out perfect information or await clearer forecasts but to take actions that involve risk, recognizing that effective monitoring systems (as Smith recommends) will allow them to make the changes needed to gradually approximate their desired outcomes. Their mantra is Ready, Fire, Aim. Many others seeking social change seem to follow an approach that can be characterized as

Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Aim Fire(maybe).

Other Potentially Useful Concepts

1. Branding

Marketers from Coca-Cola to the Ritz-Carlton have long known that long term influence programs that involve products or services will be significantly enhanced by careful branding strategies. Branding strategies recognize that target audiences acquire things and patronize services that they like and trust and that have predictable, desirable qualities. Brand shorthand tells target audiences what they will be getting if they transact with the business and marketers spend vast sums perfecting their brands and the images associated with it. They are relentless in their stewardship of these brands to ensure that they consistently deliver on the value proposition that the brand has taught consumers to expect.

Brands make strategies more efficient because they become shorthand for many key properties and they help build repeat behaviors (brand loyalties) that would be essential to many social change programs long term success. Branding is common in commodity-based social marketing. However, its use in service-oriented or pure behavior programs is still in its infancy.

2. Franchising

Marketers often cannot reach vastly dispersed audiences through their own channels and staff. Thus, they have crafted partnership vehicles called franchises that allow them to extend their reach while, at the same time, controlling the content and delivery of their marketing strategies. This approach has proven particularly valuable as they have sought to reach geographically distant markets.

Many charities engaged in social marketing efforts (such as Habitat for Humanity) rely on elements of a franchise model. However, other multisite programs could well gain greater control and impact with this approach.

3. Consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

Marketers know that it easier and less costly to keep existing customers than it is to find new ones. Thus, they are slavishly attentive to the quality of customer experiences. They invest significant sums into systems to track consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction and complaining behavior and into mechanisms for redressing wrongs or imperfections in the system. A major insight from this focus has been to recognize the importance of customerexpectationsin evaluations of product or service encounters. Marketers have learned that unrealistic expectations that have been raised through exaggerated brand promises or overly enthusiastic promotions or sales presentations will not only discourage repeat patronage but also provoke negative word of mouth commentary that can reach 8-10 other target audience members.

Social marketers who must focus on maintaining long-term behavior change would benefit from more elaborate and sophisticated tracking of consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction and complaining behavior.

4. The Distinction Between Product and Services Marketing

Marketers have learned that there are important differences between products and services that make the challenges of marketing the latter more difficult. Services areintangiblein that customers cannot inspect or handle them before acquisition. They areperishablein that they cannot be stored unfilled airline seats on a departing flight cannot be warehoused to meet later demand. They arevariable a restaurant meal one night or a doctors visit one afternoon may not be the same as would be encountered the next time. Finally, they areinseparablefrom the customer who contracts for them the diner who savors the meal or the patient who is tested or who (accurately or inaccurately) reports symptoms.

Service marketers, therefore, put special effort to: (a) attaching tangible features to their offerings through logos, building atmospherics, and the appearances of staff; (b) manage demand to better match perishable supply; (c) invest huge sums and time in training staff to deliver consistent service at the quality level the marketer (or the brand) promises; and (d) pay close attention to personal interactions with customers to make sure that the latter derive the most benefit and satisfaction from every encounter with an organization staffer. Many social marketers are, in fact, in the service business and would benefit from addressing these unique dimensions.

5. Product/Service Life Cycle

Many years of experience have taught marketers that product or service innovations go through a predictable life cycle following their launch. They know they will be more effective if they plan ahead and tailor their strategies to these predictable stages. The first stage is theintroductionperiod where emphasis needs to be on building marketing systems, establishing the brand and its promise and seeking out innovators and early adopters as first patrons. Stage two isgrowthwhere (one hopes) product or service sales accelerate significantly and where attention must be paid to extending coverage, perhaps developing franchises, and beginning to plan follow-up product and service variations to capitalize on early success. Stage three ismaturitywhere competition is fierce, new organizations have appeared to challenge success and acquisition of further gains becomes harder and more expensive. Stage four ispotential declinewhen the venture has peaked and is replaced by superior alternatives. Here, attention must be paid to either milking the existing offering or finding innovative ways to rejuvenate it.

Anticipation of these natural progressions would leave prescient social marketers poised for each new challenge and less likely to waste valuable resources.

A Comment About Competition

As the exposition above suggests, commercial marketing offers concepts and tools that are potentially useful in (a) crafting strategies and tactics to influence people to bring about social change and (b) managing the organizations that create these strategeis and tactics. It is in the later regard that I wish to extend Bill Smiths comments about competition.

Consumer insight makes abundantly clear that every behavior we wish to influence has at least one competitor, even if that competitor is the status quo, and that effective strategies must address that competition. However,organizationsalso compete in commercial marketing. Commercial marketers live and breathemarket shareas their measure of corporate self worth. And this means that they constantly think about ways to beat out the other guy.

By contrast, most enterprises in the social sector reflect a culture in which inter-organizational competition is considered unseemly. Although such competition is grudgingly recognized in the domains of grant-getting and fund-raising, blatant attempts to be better than direct competitors is thought to be not nice. While I do not wish to recommend the adoption of unbridled cut-throat competition, I do believe that healthy inter-organizational competition can offer two major gains to social change programs:

[1]Some commercial marketers claim to achieve a double bottom line which adds social outcomes to financial performance.

More:
Commercial Marketing and Social Change - Center for Social Impact ...

Social media can help you reach billions of users throughout the world at a relatively low cost. Choosing the right platform for your social media campaign depends on your specific marketing goals and the kind of audience you are trying to reach.

A key factor to consider is how your social media presence shows up in Google Search. To make it easy for potential customers to find you online, you want your webpage to show up high in search results. As you build your online presence, you want to be able to leverage it to gain more visibility online by getting your content shared.

To create an effective social media campaign you should have a presence on at least three platforms. The social media ecosystem is constantly changing. More and more social media platforms are emerging all the time, each with their own features, audiences, and options. Here is a list of the most popular platforms to date:

Facebook is the largest social media site in the world. According to statistica.com, Facebook had 2.27 billion users in the third quarter of 2018. People of all ages make it part of their daily lives. If youre going to be on social media, Facebook is simply too large and too powerful of a platform to ignore.

More importantly for marketers, Facebook provides marketing analytics tools such as Facebook Audience Insights that provide information about your audiences preferences, behaviors, demographics, and interests so that you can better target them with your ads.

Owned by Facebook, Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social networking service. It is particularly appealing to a younger audience. Instagrams visual platform can help you establish a relationship with your followers with attention-getting photos.

LinkedIn is a business and employment social network, used by more than 65 million professionals worldwide. Its a valuable resource that can help you build your business and connect with other professionals. Companies can use the site to provide information, post job openings, share announcements and industry news, and publish articles and other relevant content.

Twitter is an online news and social networking site where people post and interact using 280-character messages called Tweets. With more than 336 million users, its one of the largest social networks. Marketers can use their Twitter profiles to build a following by tweeting out news and other content. Twitter is also a great source for real-time insight on how your brand, products, and competition are being perceived in the market. By simply listening in on Twitter, you can get instant feedback.

Owned by Google, YouTube is a free video-hosting website that allows members to store and share video content. With billions of users throughout the world watching billions of hours of video content, YouTube offers a lot opportunities to drive traffic to your website.

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site where users post multimedia and other content. The majority of Tumblr users are between the ages of 18-34. If your brand lends itself to a more visual message, Tumblr provides a unique platform to reach potential new customers.

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Social Media Marketing | Oracle

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The terms social media and social marketing are often used interchangeably, and while its easy to see how it happens, its important to understand that these two terms mean very different things. Certainly, social media and social marketing can work together, but grasping their differences will save you from having egg on your face in any marketing discussion.

Social media, by its simplest definition, is a communications platform. The most popular are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Its where you converse and network with friends, family, and others. Its a common tactic used by marketers and can also be used to help execute social marketing campaigns. But in and of itself, social media is simply a tool one that requires a strategy behind it to be used effectively. Thats where social marketing comes in.

Also referred to as behavior change marketing, social marketing aims to change or maintain a persons behavior for the benefit of the individual or community as a whole. Most people will remember click it or ticket campaigns for seatbelt use. Believe it or not there was a time when using a seat belt was not automatic. A national social marketing campaign conducted in the late 70s helped encourage generations of car drivers and riders to buckle up. That campaign used television, billboards, and the potential for a costly ticket as interventions. Today, social marketing campaigns continue to use a variety of communication channels that now include social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others.

Social marketing campaigns are typically organized into four stages: (1) deepening the understanding of the target audience including the barriers to change behavior and the motivations that can encourage behavior change; (2) message development and testing; (3) outreach and interventions; and (4) evaluation. During the target audience understanding phase, the goal is to identify with as much specificity as possible the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the target audience. Where do they live? What do they buy? How do they consume news, or media? What stands in the way of the behavior change? What might be motivational to change behavior? This information (whether inferred, or determined through research and focus groups) is used to build personas, or fictional character representations of the target audience. Often, these personas are given a name like Social Smoker Sally or Trying to Quit Tricia.

After the personas have been developed, the next step is to create and test messaging so you know what is going to resonate with the target audience. To make sure the messaging you use is on target and also appeals to your audience, focus groups are critical. When creating the messaging consider the barriers your target audience faces when trying to make the desired change. Your messaging should help them to lower those barriers. Another approach we use to develop campaign messaging is to frame the desired change as fun, easy and popular. Research in human psychology shows that people are more likely to adopt behaviors that they perceive to be fun (i.e. beneficial to them whats in it for me?), easy to accomplish (break it down into smaller steps) and popular (other people are doing it too). Using this information, we can create messaging that is more likely to change behavior.

Once the messaging has been tested and approved, its time to develop a plan to get the word out. Different audiences are reached in different ways. Tactics we commonly use are social media, traditional media (radio, television, print ads), environmental or experiential advertising, as well as events, media relations or public relations, and influencers.

While the final step in campaign development is evaluation the evaluation process should really be ongoing throughout the entire campaign. Ultimately, you will evaluate overall performance (i.e. how many people took the desired action) after the campaign concludes, or has had time to make an impact but you should measure smaller milestones as you go. For example, how many impressions and engagements are you getting on social media? Are people signing up for email or calling to inquire about services? Evaluating these intermediary steps or actions early and often will help you to further fine tune messaging and outreach methods and allow you to optimize your overall results.

While social media and social marketing sound the same, the tools and processes they refer to are distinctly different. However, by using social media to create effective social marketing campaigns your brand or organization can make a big difference in peoples lives, and the communities in which they live.

About Ethos

Ethos is amultiplatform branding agencythat develops and executes integrated marketing campaigns across multiple channels for companies inside and outside of Maine.

At Ethos, we believe that the most effective wayto set a companys marketing course is by findingitscore truth its ethos. We know that once wediscoverand communicatethat core truth,we can truly make a difference for each clients unique marketing and business objectives.

With Ethos, you get more than a behavior change marketing agency. You get a long-term partner whose goals are your goals.

Learn more about theEthos approachandthe workweve done for our clients. Want to have a conversation about your brands core truth?Contact us!

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Social Marketing vs. Social Media: Whats the Difference and Why It ...

Jan 7, 2020| by Lauren Hunt | Social Marketing

Civilian opened its doors in 1999. Back then, we called ourselves AdEase. We promoted local restaurant chains, residential developments, and insurance firms.

But soon our focus shifted. We began to use our marketing, advertising, and community outreach tools to promote public health, conservation, transportation equity and economic development. With the shift came a renewed passion for the work and a shared commitment to positive change. In 2015 we made the change official with a new brand and a strategic focus on prioritizing social change work for the common good.

We often get asked how were different from commercial marketing agencies and their in-house counterparts. Its tough to tell sometimes because social marketers use many of the same tools as commercial marketers. But social marketing is an inherently different discipline and must be approached in a unique way.

Commercial marketing and social marketing differ fundamentally in their purpose. Commercial marketers seek to influence purchasing decisions most often for financial gain. Social marketers seek to influence behavior usually for the good of community or society. (And yes we realize commercial marketing can have positive social effects, too, and Civilian helps businesses invest in corporate social marketing.)

Commercial and social marketing also differ in the way they approach their audiences. Commercial marketers target consumers while social marketers focus on people likely to make, influence, or encourage behavior change. Often the people who most need to change are the least likely to want to do it, as in the case of an anti-smoking campaigns. For this reason, social marketings intended audiences are typically broader, more diverse, and harder to reach.

Commercial and social marketers also have different priorities. Commercial marketers prioritize efficiency and time-to-impact measured by leads, sales or cost per acquisition. Social marketers must account for the often slower pace of behavior change and plan for social equity. A socially just campaign must work equally well for multiethnic, multilingual, low-income, or otherwise underserved audiences and success is often measured months or years later using metrics such as mortality rates, increased transit access and family-level economic impact to understand whether actual and sustainable change has occurred.

Another important difference relates to funding and the sharing of information. Commercial marketing campaigns are privately funded. Their strategies and results are proprietary. Most social marketing campaigns, however, are publicly funded, which leads to sharing of best practices and published results. Social marketers can benefit from this access to in-depth research but are also compelled to publicly share results of both their successes and failures.

Finally, although social marketing targets specific individuals, its highest aim is to effect a level of social change that transcends any single contribution. Achieving this goal often requires patience and the application of more marketing tools including community education, public advocacy, influencer engagement, and partnership building. Their success is often highly dependent upon cultural and political circumstances making it crucial for social marketing campaigns to have a realistic timeline, a multifaceted approach, political momentum, and the right partners to make lasting change.

These distinctions may seem subtle or abstract and we are in no way suggesting one is more valuable than the other. Social marketing is the work that gets us the most fired up and our specific focus continues to attract like-minded people. As social marketers who are equally fluent in commercial marketing, the Civilian team truly thrives tackling the most complex issues affecting our communities, determined to make a difference by doing work that matters.

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How Social Marketing Differs from Commercial Marketing - Civilian

Job Description

The Social Media Marketing Specialist is responsible for day-to-day management of the companys national and local social media platforms. The applicant should be an organized, creative type with an understanding of, and appreciation for, effective marketing and advertising. In this role, you will have the opportunity to create engaging social media strategies that turn followers into ambassadors. You will ensure the content is representative of a best-in-class healthcare provider to each of its unique audiences, including medical partners, job seekers, patients, families, and volunteers. You will collaborate with team members across our Employee Communications and Brand, Business Development, Recruitment, Field programs, and external agencies to identify business objectives and implement creative social campaigns to achieve those goals through compelling stories, videos, photos, infographics, polls, and more.

Experience:

Education:

Bachelors degree in communications, marketing, business or related field from an accredited college or university or the international equivalent required.

Certification & Licensure:

None required for this position.

Physical Requirements:

Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job.

About Us

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Spec Social Media Marketing Job in Cincinnati, OH - VITAS | CareerBuilder