Booz Allen Hamilton : How to Design Successful Social Marketing Campaigns

If you've ever tried to get a friend or a parent to change a harmful habit, you know it's tough.

You might succeed in convincing them that your advice will do them good, but that awareness is rarely enough to elicit a real commitment to change.

The same is true when an organization like the U.S. Department of Agriculture tries to change behavior at the public health level by, for example, persuading more Americans to improve their eating habits. Raising awareness may have value, but there's a serious gulf between knowing you should eat better and actually having a day-to-day plan to resist junk food and prepare healthy meals.

Social marketing combines commercial marketing tactics with theories from social and behavioral science to provide a rigorous framework for designing campaigns that bridge that gulf.

From partnering with the Navy to reduce binge drinking among sailors to helping the Army National Guard improve the physical fitness of its troops, Booz Allen's strategic communications experts often use social marketing to unlock their audience's core motivators and bring persistent results, even where other efforts have failed.

In our new white paper, Social Marketing 101, those same experts lay out the concepts and strategies that make social marketing such a powerful tool, as well as share industry insights from our colleagues at the National Social Marketing Centre, a UK-based international authority on the discipline. To show it in action, we also include several examples of successful social marketing campaigns.

Download Social Marketing 101 to learn how you can use social marketing techniques to design socially impactful campaigns that enhance people's capacity to change their own behaviors.

For an in-depth look at our social marketing work with the U.S. Navy, read our case study on the subject.