Digital Marketing for Behaviour Change: A Practical Guide
Do you wonder how you can help people make better choices and lead healthier, happier and more positive lives? Digital marketing can do just that. We're surrounded by digital messages and advertising, and they’re not just about selling products. Powerful digital marketing can encourage people to take on new habits, change bad habits, and create real change in the way we live.
From telling engaging stories to using social media's incredible reach, we'll explore the methods that make digital marketing a powerful force for change. Here’s a guide to how a simple online interaction can lead to meaningful, lasting transformation.
What is behaviour change?
Put simply, behaviour change is the process of altering a person’s habits, actions, or decisions. Here’s how you should approach it:
Audience-Centric Approach: Understanding your target audience is paramount. Effective digital marketing for behaviour change requires knowing your audience's capabilities, opportunities, motivations, and pain points.
Clear Objectives: Define clear and measurable goals for your behaviour change campaign. These goals should reflect the specific actions or attitudes you aim to influence.
Data-Driven Insights: Leverage data analytics to gain insights into your audience's online behaviour and engagement with your content. This information can help refine your strategies.
Segmentation: Divide your audience into smaller segments based on their interests and behaviours. Tailor your marketing messages to each segment to increase relevance.
Engagement and Interactivity: Encourage two-way communication with your audience. Engage with them through comments, surveys, and interactive content to foster a sense of involvement.
The COM-B model
A successful framework used in the field of behaviour change is the COM-B model. It’s used to understand and analyse the factors that influence behaviour. COM-B stands for Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation, and it was developed as part of the broader behaviour change wheel, which is a practical guide for developing effective behaviour change strategies.
An explanation of the The COM-B model is a behaviour change framework that breaks down behaviour into three key components:
Capability: This refers to an individual's physical and psychological ability to perform a particular behaviour. It includes having the necessary knowledge and skills.
Opportunity: Opportunity factors encompass the external circumstances and environment that influence behaviour. This includes physical and social opportunities that make a behaviour more or less likely.
Motivation: Motivation is all about the individual's psychological and emotional drive to engage in a behaviour. It includes their desires, goals, and incentives.
COM-B works to provide a straightforward approach for developing behaviour change strategies. Here's how it works:
Step 1 - Define the Problem: The first step is to clearly define the behaviour you want to change and the specific problem you aim to address.
Step 2 - Understand the Behaviour: Using the COM-B model, analyse the behaviour to understand what's driving it. This involves assessing capability, opportunity, and motivation factors.
Step 3 - Design the strategy: Design a strategy (also referred to as an intervention) that incorporates the selected techniques, taking into account the target audience and the context.
Step 4 - Implementation and Evaluation: Implement the strategy and continually evaluate its effectiveness in changing the behaviour.
Digital marketing strategies for behaviour change
Here are 20 behaviour change techniques commonly used in digital marketing to influence and encourage desired actions:
Call-to-Action (CTA): Crafting compelling and action-oriented messages to prompt user engagement. Tell the user what you want them to do.
Social proof: Showcasing customer reviews, testimonials, and endorsements to build trust. This works on confirmation bias, as when people see others making a similar choice to the one they would like to make, it reinforces their belief that it's the right decision, leading to behaviour change.
Urgency and scarcity: Creating a sense of urgency or limited availability to drive immediate action.
Personalisation: Tailoring content and recommendations based on user preferences and behaviour. This is an extra prompt to take an action.
Gamification: Incorporating game-like elements, such as points, rewards, and challenges, to make interactions more engaging and therefore not as challenging a change to make.
Automated emails: Sending automated emails based on user actions to encourage further engagement and steer their journey.
A/B testing: Experiment with different design and content variations to find the most effective approach.
Social media advertising: Using paid ads on social platforms to target specific demographics.
Remarketing ads: Displaying ads to users who have previously interacted with your website.
Content marketing: Providing valuable, informative content to guide user decision-making.
Feedback and reviews: Encouraging users to leave feedback and reviews to influence others.
Storytelling: Narrating compelling stories that resonate with the audience's emotions and values.
Influencer marketing: Collaborating with influencers to reach and persuade their followers.
Data analytics: Analysing user data and behaviour to refine and personalise marketing strategies.
Landing page optimisation: Designing landing pages to focus on conversion goals.
Video marketing: Using engaging videos to capture attention and convey messages.
Interactive content: Creating quizzes, polls, and surveys to engage and inform the audience.
Measurement and evaluation
Now that you’ve worked through your tactics, have you To understand whether your tactics are working, you must set clear metrics and indicators to determine the success of your efforts. Has behaviour changed?
It’s important to bear in mind that behaviour change is long-term. You may see some short-term changes but true behaviour change is lasting and so it’s important to measure and evaluate data over a long-enough period to determine whether your activities have been truly effective.
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