Kotler Social Marketing
The other day, I was doing a bit of research on Kotler Social Marketing, and chanced upon some interesting information. Here, I thought the idea of ’social marketing’ was a relatively new term and applied to social media… Come to find out, it’s not!
Phillip Kotler wrote a book called Social Marketing back in 1989!
A quick trip to Amazon and a few days later, I started going through it so that I could understand the similarities of social media marketing and how our new digital world might apply.
Here’s what I found:
Social marketing was “born” as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realized that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to “sell” ideas, attitudes and behaviors.
This is not unlike social media marketing, where ideas and thoughts are streamed through status updates and tweets. Those thoughts and ideas are usually accompanied by a link that let us know where we can go for more information.
Kotler then defines social marketing as “differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organization. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society.”
In social media, you can’t pound someone over the head with your marketing message. It can’t be blatantly spammy because your are technically marketing to friends and fans rather than people off the street. In that way, it’s better to ‘influence behaviors and actions’ as in the Kotler Social Marketing method.
Like commercial marketing, the primary focus is on the consumer–on learning what people want and need rather than trying to persuade them to buy what we happen to be producing. Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. The planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the “marketing mix.”
As we travel down the path to Internet businesses, you’re going to see more and more of a focus being put on asking clients what they want or ‘would buy’ if it was produced. In the Internet marketing world, the most popular tactic is to survey someone’s following or reader base and learn what issues they’re having. Then, that’s grounds to develop a product that will sell from day one.
The social marketing “product” is not necessarily a physical offering. A continuum of products exists, ranging from tangible, physical products to services, practices and finally, more intangible ideas.
In order to have a viable product, people must first perceive that they have a genuine problem, and that the product offering is a good solution for that problem. The role of research here is to discover the consumers’ perceptions of the problem and the product, and to determine how important they feel it is to take action against the problem.
The deeper the need or want, the more likely consumers will take action when it’s needed!
For more tips on how Kotler Social Marketing can influence your success through social media marketing, make sure you sign up for the free social media marketing video in the upper right hand sidebar!
The Social Media Marketing Hour
Social marketing is an interesting thing. Not only can you get massive traffic and exposure on the Internet, you can also use it to rank for keywords, find new clients and close sales! The problem, it takes a lot of time…
We all know that it’s easy to get sucked into social media. First it’s checking out the Twitter feeds. Then it’s commenting on your friends Facebook pics. Then FarmVille gets a hold of you. Before you know it, the day is over and you’ve done nothing!
Realistically, you should spend max one hour in social media. In fact, when we first started this system, we set aside a block of time called the ‘Social Media Marketing Hour’ everyday. It was perfectly excusable to be answering questions in Linkedin or holding intense Twitter conversations.
Then, as we started seeing a need for a similar system in our clients’ businesses, we started teaching the concepts to them! First you build a hub, then the social sites. Follow that up with some automation and your done!
Now, automation in social media is a touchy subject. After all, the whole idea behind social networking is ’social,’ right? That’s not something you can fake. You’ve got to be true to your friends and your followers or else they’ll leave!
So we went ahead and figured out a way to get the best of both worlds, while still driving traffic to the sites we wanted to target. All while catering to our followers and friends and letting them know we were around!
The four major elements of the ‘Social Media Marketing Hour System’ are:
Defining a Hub
Anyone who is serious about social media marketing needs to have one central location for all their stuff. It might be a blog or a business website, but it needs to be social in nature. You can’t just send traffic from Twitter or Facebook to any product page, right?
So, picking out or building a hub is key. It’s were all your promotions and content live.
Setting Up Your Social Media Profiles
Next up, we set up all of our social media profiles. All the profiles we set up are designed to deliver a unified message. There again, nothing too salesy – just consistent. All our avatars are our own personal picture and all the links drive back to the central hub.
Getting Started With Automation
After everything is set up, we start using social media tools to send our updates to all the social media networks at once. If someone retweets our message, gives us a thumbs up, or interacts with us in any way – we respond in kind.
The beauty is that there are tools for massively distributing video, bookmarked content and everything else you can imagine!
Tweaking The System
Admittedly, not all things are created equal. Just because the social media marketing hour system works for us, it might not work for your organization perfectly! That’s why we threw in this fourth step.
In the tweaking stage, we take all the metrics and data we’ve accumulated into consideration. We analyze things like clickthroughs, unique visitors, follower engagement and other things to assess how effective the overall system is working.
Then we modify it to suit our client’s needs better!
Summary
Now, I know the Social Media Marketing Hour System needs more explanation that what I’ve provided here. So what we actually did was put together a video that shows you one integral piece of the puzzle. It’s a free tool that lets you update all your social media sites at once!
All you have to do to get the video is sign up in the upper, right sidebar. You’ll be taken straight to it!
