Facebook and YouTube as a marketing tool
This is a report on British Petroleum, which is a multinational company and is one of the largest companies dealing in oil and gas (bp.com 2017). The company structure is integrated vertically and the operates in all the markets of the energy industry. The report evaluates the usage of the YouTube and Facebook as a tool for marketing, how the company can make use of the video marketing and online marketing to improve the awareness of their brand. The second part of the report deals with the online privacy and security. The second part illustrates how the organization can make the usage of the technology, government laws and the organization policies to enhance customer security and privacy.
The usage of the inbound marketing is becoming more and more popular in the present era and the usage of the blogs, events, content and social media has increased significantly. The companies are now focusing on inbound marketing so that they can create more awareness of the brand (Halligan and Shah 2014). However, inbound marketing is difficult to execute and it will be difficult for the company to create a pull strategy for their products. Big data has changed the scenario of the whole world and there has been abundance in the information that has been created. The availability of information has also increased and the buyers are more and more aware of the products available in the market. Inbound marketing can be used to give power in the hands of the consumers. The information about all the products in the market is readily available and the consumers can gather all the information when it is required (Fishkin and Høgenhaven 2013).
The companies are changing the marketing strategies and they are using the pull marketing strategy where the customers will try to find the product and the company when the need arises. The advertising pattern has changed to one on one and is focused on the behavioral segmentation of the market. The companies have their own big data, which will facilitate the customers to find all the necessary information required by the customers (Bleoju et al. 2016). British petroleum will have to do the same thing and will have to create a reputation in the market, which will make the customers approach the company. Content marketing and video marketing have become the methods, which are being used by the companies so that the customers become more aware of the brand and access it at times of need. Facebook and YouTube has become one of the most important tool which is popularly being used on of the main tools for promoting inbound marketing. Inbound marketing has become the most important tool, for the survival of the company (Nelson 2016). The inbound marketing of the product will influence the consumers when future purchases being made. The inbound marketing is cheaper than the traditional marketing and can reach more people. This also helps the company to improve their search engine optimization and creates awareness in the social media.
Protection of customer privacy and security
YouTube and Facebook officials are adding more and more features so that companies of all scale can utilize the platform draw more customers towards their product and the company. The You tube is one of the most popular social media channels which is being used by the companies to promote their product and the officials working in YouTube are proving support to these companies (Mariani et al. 2016). Similarly, Facebook is also being used by the companies to create ads, which will promote the products of the companies. The companies are also using slideshows that is trying to portray the story of the brand and the product they are offering. The creation of video is quite easy and usage of stills in these videos makes sure that the video reaches all the targeted customers in the developing countries. The usage of inbound marketing is a little tough for companies which are of large scale but the advantage of Facebook and YouTube is that it can used for both inbound and outbound marketing (Reino and Hay 2016). Statistics show that people spend more time on online media than any other activity, which creates an opening for big companies to make use of the online media to grab the attention of the customers in the market. British petroleum can make use of the outbound marketing to make explicit advertisements and at the same time make use of the inbound marketing, which is a subtle way of drawing the customers (Yadav 2017).
The advancement of technology also has some side effects and the hacking of data from the online database has become one of the most serious problems, which the present companies are facing. However, most of the companies have become more and more reluctant about protection of privacy and security of the consumers (Martin, Borah and Palmatier 2017). There have been many incidents where millions of customer data has been breached due to the loopholes in the security of the company. The customers are also at fault and they do not maintain an updated security system that will protect the customers from spam and malware. The awareness about the hacking methods has to be increased which will make sure that the customers are able to differentiate between dangerous files. The employees of the company will have to be educated about the suspicious files and report to the team handling the information technology (Ramachandran and Chang 2016). The company will have to use tools for patch assessment that will ensure that the applications and the operating systems are updated and contain all the latest security features. The company should also use a gateway for web security that will stop the exploit kits from infection the database of the system. The hackers try to access all the confidential data that is available in the database of the company so the company will have to segregate the network by protecting with a firewall that is of next generation. This firewall will consider the internet department of the company to be hostile, which will make sure that no hackers, is able to get in to the database of the company.
Conclusion
The usage of data storage drives will have to be restricted in the company so that the company can make sure that the any unidentified data cannot enter the database of the company. The data that has been stored in the cloud has to be encrypted so that it cannot be accessed by any outside party (Kude et al. 2017). Identity theft has become phenomenon and stricter government policies have to executed which will help protect the personal data of the consumers. eTHeThe awareness about the data privacy is increasing but the companies are very much reluctant and they will have to spent more amounts on protecting the data of the consumers. The company will have to take help from government so that they can gather more resources. There are companies who have big data base and store a lot of data which includes the personal data of the customers and there was data breach in such companies.
The companies in the modern world is more focused on promoting their products but in order to build a trust the company will have to make sure that they provide assurance to the customers that their data is safe. The customers are losing confidence in the companies, as they are not aware of the amount of details the companies have on them (Chae et al. 2016). British petroleum will have to make sure that the company is doing its best maintain the privacy of the data they have on the customers personal details. This will act as a tool for competitive advantage for the company that will help them to retain more and more customers.
Conclusion
This is a report, which throws a light on the aspect of online marketing methods and protection of privacy of the consumers. The first part of the report describes the usage of inbound and outbound marketing methods to push and pull the products. Outbound marketing is the conventional way of marketing, which big multinational companies have used for many years. YouTube and Facebook are social mediums, which can be used for outbound and inbound marketing at the same time. The scope of social media is huge and the company has the opportunity to make proper usage of this market. The company can give bold advertisements where they will be pushing their products. However, at the same time they can use the subtle method inbound marketing which will draw the customers towards the company. Identity theft and data breach has become a common phenomenon so the company will have to take measures that will help to protect customer privacy and data. The company will have to make sure that the customers have confidence, which will help to retain the customers. Thus, it can be concluded that British petroleum can gain a competitive advantage by using innovative marketing policies and improving the security of the company.
Reference
bp.com 2017. Cite a Website – [online] bp.com. Available at: https://www.bp.com/ [Accessed 17 Jul. 2017].
Halligan, B. and Shah, D., 2014. Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online. John Wiley & Sons.
Fishkin, R. and Høgenhaven, T., 2013. Inbound marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog. John Wiley & Sons.
Bleoju, G., Capatina, A., Rancati, E. and Lesca, N., 2016. Exploring organizational propensity toward inbound–outbound marketing techniques adoption: The case of pure players and click and mortar companies. Journal of Business Research, 69(11), pp.5524-5528.
Nelson, R., 2016. Marketing firm CEO tutors engineers. EE-Evaluation Engineering, 55(10), pp.4-5.
Mariani, M.M., Di Felice, M. and Mura, M., 2016. Facebook as a destination marketing tool: Evidence from Italian regional Destination Management Organizations. Tourism Management, 54, pp.321-343.
Reino, D. and Hay, B., 2016. The use of YouTube as a tourism marketing tool.
Yadav, M., 2017. Social Media as a Marketing Tool: Opportunities and Challenges. Indian Journal of Marketing, 47(3), pp.16-28.
Martin, K.D., Borah, A. and Palmatier, R.W., 2017. Data privacy: Effects on customer and firm performance. Journal of Marketing, 81(1), pp.36-58.
Ramachandran, M. and Chang, V., 2016. Towards performance evaluation of cloud service providers for cloud data security. International Journal of Information Management, 36(4), pp.618-625.
Kude, T., Kude, T., Hoehle, H., Hoehle, H., Sykes, T.A. and Sykes, T.A., 2017. Big data breaches and customer compensation strategies: Personality traits and social influence as antecedents of perceived compensation. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 37(1), pp.56-74.
Chae, C.J., Shin, Y., Choi, K., Kim, K.B. and Choi, K.N., 2016. A privacy data leakage prevention method in P2P networks. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 9(3), pp.508-519.
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