Reply to the below post with a minimum of 300 words using at least two scholarly articles.

 Your replies must do the following:

a. Answer the question posed by the classmate. b. Respond to the practical example in the classmate’s post with a practical example that differs from the one in the classmate’s post. c. Reference at least 1 scholarly source in addition to the course textbook. Note about Responses: Seek to understand your classmates’ posts (including the marketing management theory, the facts presented in their posts, their points of view, and their real-world examples). Aim to communicate your own understanding of relevant facts, your values, and your perspective of the topic.

Defending the practice of social media marketing

Concept – In today’s world, social media marketing is essential to a firm’s success and the best way to communicate your value offering that engages, informs and persuades your customers with your latest and greatest promotion is on social media. Digital and social media marketing promotes through interactive advertising that enables customers to connect directly with a company using their smart devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops (Marshall & Johnston, 2019). We live in a very technological nation where having a smart device is the norm and is expected even in elementary school.

As technology keeps evolving into a more instantly gratified lifestyle, social media marketing a great way to reach a larger target market, improve brand awareness and create an interactive brand identity. Since this method of marketing is so impactful and has the potential to reach many more customers than it would if a company opted to just send out mailers, in many marketing planning situations the promotional budget is the largest share of the overall marketing budget, typically surpassing other marketing elements by a wide margin (Marshall & Johnston, 2019). Think about the impact that social media has when you see a trending topic or the new trending product. As a society, we rely on our devices to keep us informed, conduct research, pay bills, and stay in touch with our families. Our devices are always at our fingertips and social media apps are great marketing tools for businesses.

Integrating social media into a company’s strategy is a great promotional vehicle for all businesses. When social media is not integrated with the firm’s strategy, the effectiveness and efficiency of social media will suffer (Moorman, 2011). But, while social media marketing is a great channel, Duboff (2010) points out that “everyone needs to monitor brand reputation in social media and be ready to respond as needed.” Negative engagement can be a deterrent to many companies when they start social media campaigns. I’ve seen startup companies on Instagram make attempts to advertise a new product and get completely derailed. If companies are not quick at responding to their customer’s inquiries, feedback or comments, they can risk their brand reputation. There is a balance that needs to be mastered, but social media marketing is the wave of the future.

Application/Example – Companies like Coca Cola have capitalized on social media marketing over the years. They’ve created a strategy for each social media vehicle as a way to reach and address the different promotional mix elements, that collectively provide a great deal of information and have a great level of influence to their customers. Pratap (2021) shares that Coca-Cola is not just one of the best-selling brands in the world but also the most popular and highest selling soft drink in history. They know their target audience and share fun, high energy, happy, feel-good videos on YouTube to attract the millennials. Their YouTube marketing strategy places emphasis on the cool, hip, artsy videos that are ethnically diverse and forms emotional attachments to their customers. This is a smart focus strategy to target millennials. As a millennial myself, I can attest that we like to interact on social media and watch a lot of video content on our devices.  

The Twitter strategy is a little different. Although all their marketing has the same end goal, Twitter focuses on influencing customer behavior and provides some tactical benefits in terms of brand marketing (Pratap, 2021). The Twitter posts influences behavior with suggestive campaigns and hashtags that create an experience for their customers. This type of engagement is seen more frequently and is welcomed by their target audience.

The Facebook social media strategy increases the brand localization in every nation and deepens the connections with their audience by teaming up with local celebrities (Pratap, 2021). Coca-Cola doesn’t have store fronts to push their customers to, so all their social media strategies are focused on boosting and maintaining their brand by raising awareness with their campaigns. This is powerful and they’ve managed to dominate in this area.

Question for classmates – Given what you’ve just read about Coca Cola and what you’ve personally experienced, can you share one of the best social media promotional campaigns that you’ve seen lately? 

________

References

Greg W. Marshall & Mark W. Johnston. (2019). Marketing Management (3e). McGraw-Hill Education

Abhijeet Pratap. (2021). Coca Cola Social Media Marketing. Coca Cola Social Media Marketing – notesmatic (Links to an external site.)

Moorman, C. (2011). Integrating Social Media. Marketing Management, 20(4), 16. http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Fintegrating-social-media%2Fdocview%2F916559607%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D12085

By Robert Duboff, Scott Wilkerson. (Winter 2010). Social MediaROi; Marketers are seeking to answer the “greatest question.”. Marketing Management. https://advance-lexis-com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:520M-3851-DYRW-V27J-00000-00&context=1516831