SOSTAC Model Example for Social Media Marketing

Dive into a SOSTAC Model Example showcasing its application in a social media campaign for a charity, illustrating the effective use of the SOSTAC model in marketing.

Heartfelt Hands Charity provides residential accommodation and support for families that are homeless, or at risk of becoming homeless, and who have multiple and complex needs. While creating this Social Media Campaign for Heartfelt Hands Charity the model which will be used will be the SOSTAC Model, which stand for: Situational Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action, and Control (Smith P. R., 2011).

Social media is a great platform for charities as they can interact with individuals in order to create a relationship where the individuals could become ongoing donators (Kanter & Fine, 2010). With the increase of popularity in Social Media, charities have been able to communicate with their stakeholders (Lovejoy & Saxton. 2012; Waters et al., 2007), therefore Social media is very important for Heartfelt Hands because they want to increase awareness of the charity in their local area.

Please note that Heartfelt Hands Charity is just a generated name, and this blog has nothing to do with any charities with that name.

Target Market

The target audience for Heartfelt Hands Charity is Females between the ages of 35 and 44, and Males between the aged of 25 and 54. The Audience interacts with Heartfelt Hands via Social Media and the website, to aim to persuade people to donate to the charity. Even though According to Wallace, et al. (2017), Young people donations accounts for 43% of all charitable giving, there is currently no young people who are liking the Social media accounts of Heartfelt Hands, therefore Heartfelt Hands would like to build on their current audience instead of appealing to a new audience, this will also help to keep their current audience and also help to increase awareness in the age ranges.

Situational Analysis

SWOT Analysis of Heartfelt Hands’ current use of Social Media

Strengths

The strengths of Heartfelt Hands’ current use of Social media are that they are having good engagement and have many followers and likes.

Another strength of Heartfelt Hands’ use of Social Media is that they are becoming more efficient and effective with their social media posts

Weaknesses

Due to Heartfelt Hands being a non-profit organisation they don’t have the money to invest in using Social media advertising, therefore, the Social media campaign which will be created will have to use organic posts and free methods to increase awareness and to increase donations.

Due to Heartfelt Hands being a non-profit organisation they currently have two people sorting out the social media, one person being off-site who helps with posting content on the social media. Therefore, it is hard for one person to keep on top of the social media so that they can engage with followers on the social media in order to develop a relationship in order to persuade people to share content and to donate to help support the charity, therefore Heartfelt Hands could spread the running of the Social Media for the charity between a number of their staff in order to be more efficient on social media.

Even though there are many weaknesses to the current use of Social Media at Heartfelt Hands, in the non-profit sector the introduction of technology to help charities has been slower than that of the implementation of technology in the corporate sector (Goldkind, 2015).

Opportunities

Facebook has made it easier for charities to generate donations from their current Facebook followers with the ‘Donate Now’ button which can be placed on Heartfelt Hands’ Facebook page and can also be integrated into its adverts that show up in timelines of users (Facebook Donate button makes charity easier, 2015). Currently Heartfelt Hands don’t implement this tool into their Facebook page which could help to increase donations to the charity.

Threats

Competition from other similar charities for example; Shelter, Aid the Homeless, and Share Shop that have been using Social Media effectively for a while, which means that they are more well known in the local area than Heartfelt Hands is.

Furthermore, another threat to Heartfelt Hands’ social media campaign is staff limitations as the person who is sorting out the Social media for the charity has others responsibilities in their job, therefore for Heartfelt Hands to effectively use social media and to engage with followers they need someone who is experienced on using social media and someone who can always be on social media to check up on how the social media is going and also looking at how to post more engaging posts.

Analysis of Competitors current use of Social Media

Heartfelt Hands’ engagement compared to Shelter is very little, however, Shelter is a national charity therefore it is expected that the engagement and page likes is very much bigger than the current following of Heartfelt Hands on Facebook.

Objectives

According to Smith (2011), Objectives are very important as you must decide where you want to go with this Social Media Campaign. Objectives for a Social Media Campaign should be SMART; Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely (Doran, 1981).

Heartfelt Hands’ Objectives for this social media campaign are:

• Increase Awareness of the Charity in the local area by 2% each year until 2022
• Increase Personal Donations to the Charity by 5% each year until 2022

Strategy and Tactics

Heartfelt Hands should continue to use Facebook as a marketing tool as there are potentially a large number of people who are on Facebook who Heartfelt Hands could target in order to increase their donations, Furthermore, According to Gulyas (2016), who conducted a survey about how small non-profits use their social media, the two post popular social media platforms used by charities was Facebook and Twitter, therefore the best social media platforms for Heartfelt Hands to use would be these platforms. Heartfelt Hands has found out that posts that talk about getting donations of items required to help the families at Heartfelt Hands get the most reach.

The audience which Heartfelt Hands want to target with this Social Media Campaign, According to Smith & Anderson (2018), are the largest age range of users on Facebook compared to other platform, there is a large number of people between the ages of 18 and 64 which includes the range of ages in which Heartfelt Hands want to target. Therefore, Facebook would be the best Social Media platform for Heartfelt Hands to use, in order to increase donations and increase awareness of the Charity. In order to target their audience, Heartfelt Hands should increase their presence on Facebook and focus on Facebook as their main Social Media channel as this is where most of their target audience are active on. Furthermore, according to Facebook Donate button makes charity easier (2015), Facebook would be a great platform to help collect donations using Facebook’s Donation button which Heartfelt Hands could use in order to increase donations.

Twitter is another Social Media Platform which can help increase awareness even though less of Heartfelt Hands’ target audience are using Twitter it would still help to increase awareness of the charity to the target market in which Heartfelt Hands want to target with this social media campaign. According to Smith & Anderson (2018), the audience in which Heartfelt Hands want to target that are between the ages of 25 and 54 are less active on Twitter than they are on Facebook, however, they still are active on Twitter therefore Twitter would still be a good platform for Heartfelt Hands to use. 

There are a range of Tactics which Heartfelt Hands could use in order to achieve their objectives of the social media campaign. According to Harber & Cohen (2005), Emotional Broadcaster Theory predicts that stories posted on social media that carry greater emotional impact are more likely to be shared. Therefore, an opportunity for Heartfelt Hands would be social media posts which tell educate people about the stories of the families which the charity supports, with different names for safeguarding reasons. Competitors like Shelter have posted content like this which has been very successful, therefore posting about people who Heartfelt Hands are helping would be great content for Heartfelt Hands to post on social media. Furthermore, another piece of content which could be posted on social media by Heartfelt Hands could be links to their blog posts in order to increase traffic to their website, which would help increase donations as Heartfelt Hands have a donate button on their website.

References

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