Write Reflective Journal on Leadership and Management.
Marketing forms the backbone of every business. Effective marketing management helps organizations reach out to their customers and build long term relationships with them. Traditional marketing strategies including television advertisements, print ads, hoardings, billboards and email marketing have now taken a back seat. Instead, marketing has taken a digital form. Since its inception, social media has been playing a significant role in our daily lives. Businesses use social media for several purposes. This includes promoting products and services offered by the business, establishing long term and sustainable relationships with them and receiving as well as evaluating consumer feedback. This report highlights upon several resources that throw light on the invention, acceptance and growth of social media as a marketing tool within businesses. For improved understanding, a restaurant business has been considered.
Restaurant business is a part of service industry. Service industries are often highly competitive and marketing becomes a highly important aspect of the business. Social media helps businesses in setting the right positioning in the minds of consumers. He, Zha & Li (2013) state that several businesses in the service industry are using social media as a channel to provide these services to customers. They are using various platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or Pinterest. The restaurant can provide a link to the menu as well as telephone contact number on their Facebook page. Customers could be given an option to book a table through the restaurant’s social media platform.
Social media pages of a restaurant can help the business in spreading a positive word of mouth by sharing relevant content on its social media pages. There are five perceived constructs of social media marketing strategies. These include entertainment, trendiness, customization, interaction and word of mouth (Kim & KO, 2012). The content shared across social media platforms is very critical to the success of the social media strategy adopted by a business. Therefore it is imperative that the content that the restaurant shares on its social media platforms is creative, relevant, authentic and attractive. This will make sure that customers can relate to the content shared on social media platforms and at the same time the content shared can attract customers to visit the restaurant.
One of the most critical features of any successful social media platform of any business is the activeness of these social media pages. The restaurant must ensure that its Facebook and Instagram pages are consistently updated. All the events taking place at the restaurant must be proficiently covered in its social media platforms. The quality of the pictures shared must be high. The idea must be to create a positive look and feel of the restaurant. Social media can be used as a tool to set the right positioning of a particular brand in the minds of its customers (Vries et. al., 2011). However, in order to achieve this organizations must take the right step in the direction of customer relationship building. Several customers post queries regarding the restaurant. The business must be proactive enough to respond to these queries in an effective manner. Similarly if customers post a positive or negative review, they must be acknowledged.
Social media also helps businesses in gaining a transparent feedback from customers. For a restaurant business, there are several other platforms as well like Zomato wherein customers can effectively write a review for any restaurant they visit, they can provide a feedback and even rate the restaurant. These reviews are essentially public and can be viewed by all the users. Zomato is frequently used as a tool for customers to gain an honest feedback about a restaurant before visiting it. Feedbacks shared by customers on social media platforms are honest and should be effectively addressed by businesses in order to deliver improved customer service (Fisher, 2009).
A new organizations aims to gain a large number of followers on several of its social media platform in order to make the platform efficient enough to reach out to a large number of customer through this platform. The reach of social media is very high and this is exactly what makes it a proficient tool used by marketers to conduct their business (Lipsman et. al., 2012). The creativity of the content shared on social media by a business largely defines the number of followers that the brand will gain. Therefore, businesses must keep a sincere focus on ensuring that a large number of people actually follow these social media pages in order to make sure that they have a large impact and that the strategies adopted are successful.
Social media marketing can also be branched out into better forms of marketing. For example, social media platforms can be used as a tool for influencer marketing. Influencer marketing refers to the process of marketing a product or service with a help of an influencing personality (Kumar & Mirchandani, 2012). These may include famous actors, standup comedians, singers or more such public personalities. A new restaurant launched can be promoted by inviting well known celebrities at the restaurant or delivering goodies to them. The role of social media begins when these influencers share their experience on social media and hence the brand is able to capture the reach of these influencers leading to increased brand awareness.
Social media platforms take precedence over various forms of traditional marketing because these platforms enable businesses to share a large amount of information with customers over a single platform. If we compare, social media marketing strategies of any business by any forms of traditional marketing then it can be noticed that social media marketing is a lot more effective (Trusov et. al., 2009). A television advertisement is expensive and a single ad reach out to customer over and over again. On the other hand, a newspaper advertisement reaches customer only once in a day. The billboards and hoardings placed physically in a geographic location cannot be altered frequently owing to the time and resources it entails to curate such an ad. Magazine ads will reach customers once a fortnight or on a monthly basis.
On the other hand, Social media marketing requires organizations to build a Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and a Pinterest page. Once the pages are in place, different advertisements and different information can be shared as frequently as the organization needs. This leads to multiple targeting among the same customer segments and hence results in deeper impact (Neti, 2011). Moreover social media aims to form a two way communication between organizations and its customers. Unlike traditional forms of marketing, social media does not simply convey information to its audience but rather aims to build a long term relationship with them through effective communication (Castronovo & Huang, 2012).
Since the purpose of social media is to establish better communication with customers, it is recommended that businesses make their social media pages including Facebook and Instagram highly interactive (Heller & Parasnis, 2011). The restaurant could provide links to book table, speak to customer service executive or order food for delivery at home on their social media platforms. Important events like live music evenings or treasure hunts must be conducted at the restaurants to keep customers engaged. A live footage of the same could be shared on social media pages of the restaurant. Currently, social media tools provide an option to go live and share an absolute and current update with their followers. These tools must be used to lure customers by sharing footage from of these fun events.
An important strategy for effective marketing is enabling customer engagement. Businesses who are able to engage customers on their social media platforms have a higher chance of building a positive connection with them. Social platforms can be used to engage customers and hence grabbing their attention (Sashi, 2012). Live quizzes can be conducted where everyone can participate, customers could be offered discounts at the restaurant for actively sharing media content related to the restaurant and referral discounts should also be given to customers if other customers visit the restaurant with their recommendation. Various such strategies would assist in keeping customers engage on a daily basis and hence will help the firm in building a better relationship with them.
Social media platforms have evolved over a period of time. From being a channel for building personal relationships and staying in touch with friends, social media has grown into a mammoth tool. These platforms are now being used as marketing tools by various businesses in order to reach out to their customers in a digital manner. These social media marketing have taken precedence over various traditional marketing channels. This is because of the high reach of the social media. These strategies aim to engage customers, deliver them creatively curated content, grab their attention and help in establishing the right positioning of the brand in the minds of its customers. Effective use of these strategies by any business can make a large difference by creating enhanced level of brand awareness and increased customer engagement.
References
De Vries, L., Gensler, S., & Leeflang, P. S. (2012). Popularity of brand posts on brand fan pages: An investigation of the effects of social media marketing. Journal of interactive marketing, 26(2), 83-91.
Fisher, T. (2009). ROI in social media: A look at the arguments. Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 16(3), 189-195.
He, W., Zha, S., & Li, L. (2013). Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry. International Journal of Information Management, 33(3), 464-472.
Heller B. C., & Parasnis, G. (2011). From social media to social customer relationship management. Strategy & leadership, 39(5), 30-37.
Kim, A. J., & Ko, E. (2012). Do social media marketing activities enhance customer equity? An empirical study of luxury fashion brand. Journal of Business Research, 65(10), 1480-1486.
Kumar, V., & Mirchandani, R. (2012). Increasing the ROI of social media marketing. MIT sloan management review, 54(1), 55.
Lipsman, A., Mudd, G., Rich, M., & Bruich, S. (2012). The power of “like”: How brands reach (and influence) fans through social-media marketing. Journal of Advertising research, 52(1), 40-52.
Neti, S. (2011). Social media and its role in marketing. International Journal of Enterprise Computing and Business Systems, 1(2), 1-15.
Sashi, C. M. (2012). Customer engagement, buyer-seller relationships, and social media. Management decision, 50(2), 253-272.
Trusov, M., Bucklin, R. E., & Pauwels, K. (2009). Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: findings from an internet social networking site. Journal of marketing, 73(5), 90-102.
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