In the previous article that discusses social goals in the marketing goals, I have explained the importance of social goals in supporting financial goals. This time, I will explain the stages of social marketing or social activities in marketing.

Below are steps of social marketing for making your company sustainable in the long term:
 

1.       Developing a community
Community can be formed via online or offline. There are several steps to form community. I'm not going to deepen this discussion, you can learn from the experts in this field. I'll give a simple example of how you can develop a community.

The most important of these activities is to collect  all your customers’ data, such as name, address, telephone number, email. These data can be obtained from the guest book when they visit your company, users who sign up on your website, customers who complain via telephone, warranty card which they send, and so on.

After getting the data, you can create offline media communities such as customer gathering, or online media such as Google+ page or pages on Facebook, mailing list groups, social media for two-way communication like twitter.

Invite them to interact in the community media that you have built.

2.     Social listening
It's time for you to listen more empathy to the aspirations of community members. Listen carefully to their comments. Respond them with good manner. React patiently to their complaints. You have to perform it all, before complaints escalate and negative image about your products is widespread.

In this community you can also hear what your competitor do. So you can do the preventive actions in order to win the competition. You can open a thread about the other products, and asked opinion to community members. Things to remember here that do not start a thread about black campaign against competitor products.

Last, The most important thing you should do at this stage is to listen to what people say on your product.

3.       Social content
Actually you have to execute parallel activities between form a community and design a content. So that once community is formed, you can disseminate the content to members of the community immediately.

What content that should be broadcasted to the community? The answer are the following:

- Valuable and trusted Content
- Content that truly makes members want to read and spread to other communities.

The thing to remember is the content should be relevant to your product or your business, but you can vary a content with another topic so members do not get bored.

After you create valuable content, start spreading that content in your community. Do not forget to ask for feedback from them.


4.       Engagement
Create an respectable atmosphere so that community member feel special. For example, involve them in the committee for each event. Engage them in all activities together. Lastly, always help them, give them a solution when they are needed. As the time goes by, these activities will lead to a stronger engagement.


5.       Customer loyalty program
Once a strong engagement is formed, you will be able to easily execute customer loyalty program. You can search my article about the customer loyalty program for further information.


6.       Result
As I mentioned before in previous articles, the main investment for this is an investment of time. Why? Because you have to be patient in the track. If you act consistently, in the future you will get:

- Members will automatically spread your message to other communities.
- Member without being asked will perform on a peer to peer recommend your product.
- You can perform word of mouth marketing easily.

And when that time comes, your business will grow and sustainable in the long run.