Summary

Anchored in your broader health promotion program, social marketing serves as a tool within your overall strategy. Ideally, it should work in synergy with other programs.

Audience analyses are essential to the success of all social marketing plans. Furthermore, decisionsrelating to objectives, message positioning and delivery are all based on your audience analysis.

Organizational and environmental considerations play an important role in the overall context of your plan. They also should have a strong influence on the partnerships you form.

Social marketing activities should include more than promotional activities. You may need to adjust your program, products, services or the desired behaviour to make it easier for audiences to change. As far as promotional activities are concerned, consider events and interpersonal communication in addition to media activities and promotional material. Remember to "go where the traffic is" because it's easier to go to your audience than have it come to you.

The more realistic and measurable your objectives, the more successful your plan will be. Objectives provide you with focus and simplify the evaluation stage of your social marketing plan. Since this is an introductory-level tutorial, it does not include in-depth evaluation techniques. However, this aspect of social marketing may be covered in a future Health Canada tutorial.