The dramatic rise of social media has opened up new possibilities for marketers to connect with their customers (Lamberton & Stephen, 2016).
FIgure 1:(Philipp Rauschnabel, 2019)
“ What ’s the latest trend nowadays?” “ What’s the hottest product?”
Well, all these can be found through social media. There are a lot of social media platforms which are free such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and etc which you could promote your products. It’s so easy to gain publicity for a company if the company is promoted through social media where viewers can be potential buyers. Everyone can get access on the internet easily. Therefore, social media is the key to publicity as you can sell your product easily or even buy products by just a click.
Figure 3: (H&M, 2019)In order to attract viewers, companies should promote social media campaigns. This is a type of customer engagement which it will be further discuss below. Social media campaigns are useful digital marketing channels which can inspire audiences. For example, H&M recently launched a “ My Style” and #HMxME campaign which is a tool that provides inspiring visual contents on social media and items displayed can be bought directly from the app (About.hm.com, 2019). H&M encourages customers to share bought items on their Instagram platform and hashtag “ #HMxME”. This can be a free publicity for H&M where influencers can promote H&M’s items to everyone.
Figure 2:(Cite This For Me, 2019)
Additionally, if you realised that whenever you look up for an item online it will appear on your Facebook account, Instagram or even on the ads on google page. For example in Figure 2, it shows the product which I recently searched online and it will appear on other websites which I go on to. This is the power of digital market and the key to it is data. Most of the company will analyse customers’ data and will make personalisations to it. Personalisation is the best way to attract customers.The company can tackle customers preference by making searched items appear on the specific customer’s social media platform. Customers might not buy at first sight but customers will be tempted to buy it if it keeps appearing at sight.
Figure 3,4 :(Instagram.com, 2019)
Figure 5:(Instagram.com, 2019)
Next, companies can work together with people who are famous with high publicity such as celebrities or even influencers. Looking at Figure 5, Kylie Jenner gets sponsorships from different companies and it is definitely due to her high publicity as she has 127million followers on Instagram. The amount of audience she has is incredible! Companies who work with her will definitely get publicity as she is a famous influencer. If she promotes an item on social media, her audience will be inspired and will want to dress the same as her. Therefore, company’s sales will keep growing by working with influencers as this is a great tactic to attract existing and new customers.
List of influencers : https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-social-media-influencers-instagram-15879359
The journal article that was chosen :
Implementing social media marketing strategically: an empirical assessment
Implementing social media is a process where firms employ social media strategically, for customer purposes, by updating content regularly, continuous customer engagement and generating analytics and customer insights to drive strategic marketing actions (Wondwesen Tafesse & Anders Wien,2018). Thus, social media performance captures customer data through social media outcomes that result from customers’ preferences, towards firms’ activities on social media. This helps companies to obtain data based on their customer-based market to create personalisation by acknowledging customers’ preferences from customers’ purchase and post-purchase behaviors facilitated by social media.
In order for marketing to gain success on social media, customer engagment is crucial. Customer engagement is a concept where customers’ behavior and emotions response with a firm’s focus (Dessart et al.,2016). Customers must feel engaged and valued by the firm to create brand loyalty. Personalisation is also a great tactic to gain customers attention as every customers wants to feel valued. Additionally, social media performance is highly incorporated with marketing performance. According Effing & Spil (2016), Social media strategy is important to support social media with firms’ strategic marketing goals. It also acts as an important role in underlining goal commitment and enabling optimal resource allocation decisions (Felix et al., 2017). Therefore, social media strategy is crucial to organising companies’ social media strategy.
However, companies who are overly active on social media might be overwhelming for its customers who will be facing time pressure on social media. Second, social media algorithms prioritises and serve content to users based primarily on engagement levels. If a company’s content cannot gather some initial level of engagement, its chances of reaching a wider range of audiences will be limited. Therefore, high level of social media activity with little engagement can be hard to obtain positive results.
Social media performance represents customer-based social media results that arise from customers’ preferences towards firms’ activities on social media, while marketing performance represents customer-based market outcomes that arise from customers’ purchase and post-purchase behavior facilitated by social media (Wondwesen Tafesse & Anders Wien,2018).In conclusion, the combination between both aspects will definitely be the most favorable outcome and the company who implements social media strategy will definitely gain success.
How to start social media marketing:
Source: (YouTube, 2019)
References:
About.hm.com. (2018). H&M group | About. [online] Available at: https://about.hm.com/en/about-us.html [Accessed 23 FEB. 2019].
Cite This For Me. (2019). Save Time and Improve your Marks with CiteThisForMe, The No. 1 Citation Tool. [online] Available at: http://www.citethisforme.com/ [Accessed 24 Feb. 2019].
Dessart, L., Veloutsou, C., & Morgan-Thomas, A. (2016). Capturing consumer engagement: Duality, dimensionality and measurement. Journal of Marketing Management, 33(5–6), 399–426.
Effing, R., & Spil, A. A. M. (2016). The social strategy cone: Towards a framework for evaluating social media strategies. International Journal of Information Management, 36(1), 1–8.
Felix, R., Rauschnabel, P. A., & Hinsch, C. (2017). Elements of a strategic social media marketing: A holistic perspective. Journal of Business Research, 70, 118–126.
Lamberton, C., & Stephen, A. T. (2016). A thematic exploration of digital, social media, and mobile marketing: research evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an agenda for future inquiry. Journal of Marketing, 80, 146–172
Philipp Rauschnabel. (2019). research: WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?. [online] Available at: http://www.philipprauschnabel.com/2016/05/strategic-definition-of-social-media-marketing/ [Accessed 24 Feb. 2019].
Wondwesen Tafesse & Anders Wien (2018) Implementing social media marketing strategically: an empirical assessment, Journal of Marketing Management, 34:9-10, 732-749, DOI: 10.1080/0267257X.2018.1482365
YouTube. (2019). How To Start Social Media Marketing As A Beginner In 2019 – STEP BY STEP. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94K-CxKNVk0 [Accessed 24 Feb.