The Role Of Social Media Marketing In Promoting Contemporary Brands

In the last decade, a new form of social interaction developed in the online space – social networking platforms. Clearly, brands took advantage of the constant networking and flow of information in order to stay connected to their customers online, through social media marketing (SMM) activities. This article aims to assemble a general overview of the role social media marketing has in promoting contemporary brands by addressing existent research on the topic. Social networking platforms are channels offering information about the brand profile and its products, creating a brand-customer relationship and actively involving customers in the creation and innovation process. Moreover, such platforms make data analytics and statistics available for personal use, so social media has also become a reliant tool in marketing research and strategizing.

Introduction

In an era of technology, where most of the offline space and activities moved online, many important human activities moved there too. Social interactions can now be done without actually leaving one’s house, all virtually available for everyone. The business world spotted the trend and “social networking sites, being virtual platforms where people of similar interests may gather to communicate, share and discuss ideas, represent an interesting cluster of digital products”. Branded content has infiltrated all social networking websites, in a variety of ways, shaping a new form of approach: social media marketing.

Main Body

According to Ananda et al. (2016), there are three main categories of SMM actions: representation, engagement, and listening-in. Representation focuses on delivering marketing communications associated to the brand image and product information. Engagement means interacting with customers and creating a brand-customer relationship through one-to-one marketing, customer empowerment and support, personalization of information, product customization, or customer loyalty programs. Listening-in aims at market research, for instance analytics and statistics, spotting trends, opportunities, as well as identifying influencers that could share their brand image and values. First of all, SMM implies that a brand-customer relationship must exist both in the real and virtual worlds. Customers associate celebrities to their own identities, so influencers play an important role in creating a relationship between a brand and customers. Thus, celebrity endorsement is used to transmit a set of values for customers to associate with the brand. Duffett (2007) conducted a study in South Africa, where 13000 teenagers took a survey meant to observe usage and demographic variables and their effects on the young consumer’s buying decisions and receptiveness to social media marketing. The findings show that communicating through social media had positive effects on cognitive, affective and behavioral buying attitudes of the participants. There was a positive correlation between time spent on social media daily and favorable attitudes toward marketing communications. Moreover, participants who constantly updated their profiles were found most likely to engage with marketing content on social networks. Thus, brands should encourage customers to spend more time online, increase engagement through activities such as branded apps, games and competitions and use interactive promotional media to nurture positive attitudinal responses. Moreover, SMM activities can be used by brands in order to enhance customer equity and purchase intention. This premise is relevant to the hospitality industry: Ibrahim and Aljarah (2018) collected data from 5 five-star hotels in Cyprus by asking customers who engaged with their Facebook pages to complete a questionnaire on social media marketing related topics such as entertainment, interaction, trendiness, customization and word of mouth. They were meant to measure brand trust, revisit intention and brand loyalty. The conclusion drawn was that, indeed, SMM activities have an active role in enhancing brand loyalty and increasing the customer’s revisit intention. Using SMM tools can be beneficial for brands. Requiring a minimum budget compared to other marketing forms, it can be used to influence buying decisions. Moreover, a deep brand-customer relationship is created by allowing buyers to customize their online experience and directly involve them with the production and innovation process. Moreover, “global social media data offers a way to compare your brand’s performance in real-time, helping to benchmark your success and share of voice”, so it is really easy to follow analytics and statistics of marketing campaigns, offering companies free, automated market research. However, there are downsides to using social media as a way to communicate with customers. Problems arise from technology anxiety or skepticism, trouble understanding the task or lack of offline meeting. Sometimes, there are some barriers between online and offline that cannot be passed, and virtual customer engagement fails.

Conclusion

To conclude, social media marketing, a new generation marketing tool, is very powerful in today’s technologized society. This trend ascended quickly, the market is changing very fast too, and new social media networking platforms appear every day. However, it is not enough to just be present on social media. The most important is to create active engagement with the customers through this kind of platforms, by “building your network, sharing content, asking your audience to share content, participating in conversations, and responding to comments”. Also, brands can take advantage of automated market research done directly by the platform in order to adapt their strategy to the forever changing trends of the online space. Undoubtedly, this kind of marketing will evolve even more in the years to come, as it is proven to have many advantages for businesses that choose to use it to connect with their customers and position themselves on the market.