


A marketing strategist's job is to help you assess and improve your current digital marketing strategy. Key job responsibilities for online marketing consultants include creating marketing plans, segmenting your target audience, helping refine marketing campaigns, and deciding on the best marketing tactics and digital channels to help you reach your audience so you get traffic, raise awareness, and increase sales. This can include designing a content marketing strategy, running social media and email marketing campaigns or implementing marketing automation strategies. Digital marketing strategists also track and measure landing page and google Adwords campaigns performances with analytics tools.

Essentially the Advertising and Promotion section of the marketing plan describes how you're going to deliver your Unique Selling Proposition to your prospective customers. While there are literally thousands of different promotion avenues available to you, what distinguishes a successful plan from an unsuccessful one is the focus - and that's what your Unique Selling Proposition provides.

Price -- How much will it cost a person to stop (or take on) a certain behavior? In social marketing, price isn't just a question of dollars and cents. It can also be a question of time (i.e., how long will it take me to find a trash can?), or how much of an effort a behavior change will take. A life-long smoker may be the first person to admit that smoking is an extremely expensive habit, but may still say the costs--in terms of effort, or possible weight gain, or nicotine withdrawal--are too high. He just can't quit.

Budgeting may be the most important term in marketing planning when it comes to execution. Often, in order to secure funds from top management or banks, sufficient proof of your advertising plan’s success is needed. It requires accurate forecasting of return generated for individual advertising expenditures. It is important that returns are not overestimated to avoid spending too much and running out of money early on.

Focus groups are woefully inadequate as a means to understand any audience, but given the rapid changes in teen attitudes and the impact of peer influence, they are particularly inadequate. A wide variety of alternative research tools have emerged, including: ethnographies; small panels during which teens are given assignments and tracked over time; immersion hikes, where research is embedded in day‐long activities; computer assisted telephone focus groups; and “up to fives”, where clients can listen in to telephone interviews with up to five respondents and direct cueing questions to interviewers secretly. Doer/non‐doer studies compare trendsetters and early adopter segments to identify determinants that predict behavior. Room shopping gets permission from teens to search their rooms to identify the variety of items that may be used for motivational purposes. There are a plethora of information and information systems directed at understanding youth. One interesting system is called TRU, Teenage Research Unlimited. They provide an updated subscription service based on a 2000 plus, nationally representative survey of 12–19 year olds in six‐month waves on the behavior and changing motivational attitudes of US teens.
Social norming programs such as Montana's “2 out of 3” reported a slight reduction in impaired driving by university teens. Other social norming programs showed effects in multiple university settings in reducing alcohol abuse among college age students—Florida State University reported a 15% reduction in high risk drinking among male students and 5% among females; Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York reported a 32% reduction in student athletes drinking more than once per week.5
Social Marketing combines the best elements of the traditional approaches to social change in an integrated planning and action framework, and utilizes advances in communication technology and marketing skills. It uses marketing techniques to generate discussion and promote information, attitudes, values and behaviours. By doing so, it helps to create a climate conducive to social and behavioral change.
Motivate people to want to change their behavior. The recipient has to form an intention to act on the basis of that attitude. It's not enough to just convince people that something is a good idea. A leap needs to be made from thinking something is a "good idea" to the stage of "I will do that." Think about it--how many of us think it would be a really good idea to cut down on our fat intake, or get up at 5:00 a.m. to exercise? Social marketing helps people move from attitude to intention, and beyond. For African women, this might mean taking the leap to find out about birth control or planning to postpone intercourse.
5. Mine is better than his. People have choices. Therefore, almost all behaviors compete with other behaviors to provide benefit to the individual. Coke competes with Pepsi; condom use among teens competes with the fear of “losing an erection if I use a condom”, and driving safely competes with “I have to take this cell phone call, it's from my date”. Any benefits we offer to “drive carefully” must not only be appealing to the individual teen, but must also compete effectively with benefits offered by alternative behaviors.
Publics--Social marketers often have many different audiences that their program has to address in order to be successful. "Publics" refers to both the external and internal groups involved in the program. External publics include the target audience, secondary audiences, policymakers, and gatekeepers, while the internal publics are those who are involved in some way with either approval or implementation of the program.


It's also important to understand exactly what motivates customers to buy. Are your clients looking for savings or a way to simplify their lives, for example, or are they just shopping for pleasure? Ask yourself why they would buy your product or service. In the same vein, you may want to know what keeps customers away from your competitors’ products or services. Are they too costly? Do they lack something unique? These insights will help you develop a product or service that outshines the competition.