Social marketing pulls from both traditional marketing and social science to change people’s behaviors for social good. The slideshow shares some social marketing best practices. These tips will have you creating communications that are persuasive and influential in no time flat.

1. Best Practices in
Creating
Social Change

2. Want to change the
world for the better?
(who doesn’t?)
You need to communicate with force,
intelligence and inspiration.
Check out the following tips for
communicating with persuasion and
influence.

3. Harness the power of social proof.
Seeing others doing something makes it
the norm and makes us want to do it as
well.
How can you show lots of people
repeatedly taking the actions you want to
encourage?
harness social proof

4. You can establish new
behaviours by increasing
their status.
Make them trendy and
sought-after or just an
accepted part of normal
behavior.
give
it status

5. engage
emotions
Rational messages are useful, but they don’t change behavior.
Emotion tells us something important is happening. It gets our
attention.
We only care about things we have feelings about.
You won’t inspire behavior change without engaging emotions.

6. emotions aren’t equal
Use emotions like amazement, wonder,
surprise, awe, triumph and joy to your
heart’s content.
Use anger and fear judiciously.
Avoid sadness, guilt and gloom.
They make people tune-out and
become apathetic.

7. Emotions alone are
not enough to
persuade and
influence. Use a
balance of emotions
and logic in your
communications.
use emotion + logic

8. Aristotle claimed that to persuade, one must employ
three types of argument: ethical appeal (ethos),
emotional appeal (pathos), and logical appeal (logos).
Facts alone are not sufficient to persuade. They need to
be complemented with just the right balance of credibility
and content that tugs at the heartstrings.
Nancy Duarte
"Aristotle (384-322 BC)" by
Tilemahos Efthimiadis; Flickr CC2.0

9. stand out
Be unusual to stand out (but base it on
being yourself, on your values and your
ideals).

10. establish limited time
Show people we’re at a fork in the road
and there’s limited time to choose.
The other leads to an
undesirable future.
One fork leads to
your positive
vision.
Time to
choose…

11. Inspiration is good. Lead with a positive view
of the future that gets people excited to make
change.
Create positive feelings about the behaviours
you want to inspire.
inspire

12. demonstrate
evolution
For people to want something, they
have to believe it’s better than what
they currently have.
So to get them excited about your
vision, show them how and why it’s
better than their current reality. Make
your vision come alive.

13. People share stories,
not data.
We process new information by slotting it
into what we already know. People can
make quick sense of very complex
information when conveyed as story.
Stories also engage people’s emotions.
Research shows that people tend to
better remember information that triggers
emotion over the same information that
doesn’t.

14. visualize
That thing about a picture being
worth a 1000 words is true.
Images engage imagination and
are retained longer.
So examine your text - where you
can replace it with images?

15. Ask for the change you want.
People say, ‘we’re telling them about
ourselves or giving them information.
Isn’t it obvious what we’re asking?’
The simple answer is no. It’s not
enough to explain why an action is
important, you also need to ask
people to do it and remove obstacles
to them taking action.
ask
for
action

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