Social media marketing is a cheap, efficient way of advertising to prospective customers. Dr. Dave Chaffey writes, “57.6% of the world's population uses social media. The average daily usage is 2 hours and 27 minutes.” With over 4.5 billion users, social media is one of the largest potential marketing segments available to organizations.
Social media can provide marketing managers with data analytics that can help drive marketing efforts. Marketing managers are able to see age, demographics, and user preferences of people of social media. This information is vital when developing a marketing strategy. Marshall and Johnston write, “These data can be collected either through interactions a firm creates or engages in with a customer, or via interactions that customers have with each other without direct firm involvement” (2019, Chapter 13). This form of indirect feedback from customers is much more effective and cost efficient than traditional market research such as surveys or product reviews.
Once marketing managers have gathered and analyzed the information about their target market, they can develop a social media strategy that is tailored to the customer which will produce better return on investment than traditional advertising methods. Samuel (2017) writes, “Advertising through social media serves two distinct advantages: Consumers are not always aware they are being advertised to and can be more receptive to ads. A social media advertising base is concise, often niche and very targeted, unlike traditional advertising” (para. 1).
Traditional advertising is expensive and can offer little to know control over who interacts with the advertisement. For example, a billboard is expensive and exposure to the advertisement is limited to whomever happens to be driving down that particular road on that particular day and looks at the billboard. There is no interaction from the customer to the company and the company will struggle to measure the return on investment. Social media offers immediate measurements of the return on investment and there can be interaction between the customer and company. The customer can share a social media post with friends, post a question or comment on an advertisement and provide direct feedback on a product or service.
Companies can also gain indirect social media advertising from social media content creators. Youtube is filled with unlimited hours of content on product reviews. Content creators will create review videos on products which is free advertising for the company that created the product.
Application/example
Wendy’s is one of America’s top fast food chains. Their social media strategy has made news in recent years because of their unique approach. Wendy’s “saucy” (pun intended) tweets on twitter have gained them millions of new social media followers, as customers can’t wait to see their latest comments to their competitors. As more and more customers follow Wendy’s on twitter they are being exposed to additional advertisements of Wendy’s products. In 2019 Wendy’s, Popeyes and Chic-Fil-A started a three way social media battle over who had the best chicken sandwich. In the following weeks customers around the world started weighing in on who they thought had the best sandwich. This became free advertising for each fast food chain and increased sales. Wendy’s knows its audience and is leveraging social media to engage with its customers.
Question for classmates
How are product strategy, distribution and social media connected? Aside from selling products, what other uses does social media marketing have from a marketing perspective?
Sample Solution