Advantages of Social Media Marketing
Marketing is all about creating and retaining the customers of the business through various business activities like buying, selling, advertising or after sales service (Morgan, 2012). This report is about Clark Automotive which is a new business of mechanical servicing and sells parts. The partnership business caters the businesses and owners of vans and cars. The business uses traditional low cost marketing methods like local newspaper advertisements, advertisement in newsletters, local notice boards and flyers which are not so effective for the business. The report aims at reviewing and recommending the marketing strategies so that the concern areas of the business can be addressed.
With the advent of social media, marketing has evolved. It is rightly experienced by many of the businesses irrespective of their sizes or location that social media enhanced their sales without spending much on paid advertising. Social media gives a chance to businesses to meet or to be in touch with the people. It offers vast exposure for business (Hajli, 2014). As per Brogan&Partners (2018), the platforms like YouTube has more than one billion users which are generating billions of views every day. The platform like Snapchat providing access to more than 100 million users. Vine also letting millions of users to share videos and these numbers are growing day by day. This is turning into sales for the company.
Evolution of Social Media Marketing
Source: Mahajan (2014)
Clark Automotive can have access to various social media marketing strategies which depends on their goals, budget, content and time for marketing strategies. The key concerns of Clark Automotive are limited budget, little knowledge and experience, little expertise of technology and low confidence of partners in social media strategies. The company can use Twitter to Drive sales of the auto parts. Twitter helped in driving millions of sales by using key hashtags. The current sentiments of the buyers are noticed and hashtags are used in order to drive their sentiments. The customers who shows interest in the business can be targeted. LinkedIn is another platform which can be used for focusing on the B2B business. It helps in generating leads, drives the website traffic and build brand awareness. LinkedIn helps in proving the powerful results for the businesses (Raychale, 2018).
Twitter is one of the available social media marketing tools which are used by business nowadays. It is used by over 313 million users these days. Clark Automotive can use Twitter for fulfilling its purpose. The platform has certain advantages and disadvantages for the business (Jackson, 2017)
Limitations of Clark Automotive’s current marketing methods
Whenever a company releases new product, it can send tweets to increase the followers. This will bring an increase in the brand awareness. It helps in interacting with the target audience and drives engagement for the promotional activities for the business. It helps in building reputation of the company and increases networking in lower costs than paid advertising (Kaushik, 2012).
Twitter presence has to be unique otherwise it will be lost like all the other twitter accounts on the platform. The company need to have a specialist who can make the company active on Twitter which is very important for generating maximum impact on the target audiences. The content shared is short which does not help the company to share detailed content.
LinkedIn is the platform which is mainly uses by businesses to build awareness among the other businesses. It offers a great opportunity to connect with the customers but depends on the aims of the business that it’s a right channel or not (Witzig, Spencer & Galvin, 2012).
The platform helps in reaching high value audiences in low prices. The audiences can be filtered according to geographical location, demographics, job titles, companies or industries of the audiences. The platform has second highest active users which is over 100 million.
The channel includes premium pricing because it caters high value audience which is not easy to afford for Clark Automotive. Per click price can be as high as $10 while it is $.50 in case of Facebook. It is not necessary that the active users are the target users, they can be the ones who are hunting for job because it’s a career advancement network.
According to Hofacker & Belanche (2016), social media is an emerging field and it has many administrative issues and challenges to face. It is not easy to administer the content on social media 24*7. There are certain social media policies which are followed by every organisation. For e.g. the biggest multinational corporation in America, Best Buy follows clear cut policies. It does not use content which harms the racial, ethnic, sexual or religious sentiments of audience. Employees are not allowed to disclose the information. Another example can be taken of GAP. It handed over the brochures which contains the social media policies and guidelines to follow. These include the respect for religious and political sentiments of people, connecting with social media team and not disclosing the vital information outside.
It can be recommended to Clark Automotive that it should use Twitter in order various guides are available which can easily let the company to use this platform for advertising. Experience does not count much. The number of visitors can be measured and the results can make the Michael’s partner sure about the real effect of the use of social media for the business. Twitter is an ideal platform for engagement with the target audience because of the use of photos, hashtags, links, videos and numerals which helps in getting more engagement from people. The clicks on links account for 92% of the all user interaction with tweets. It is also found that 785 of the users who posts their queries gets response within an hour. This shows that Twitter is an ideal platform for the company to use (Balachandran, 2013). [Refer Appendix 1].
Conclusion:
It can be concluded that the social media marketing is the need of the hour for the businesses and this will help Clark Automotive to engage with its customers in the lower costs and in the much better way. The report discussed the use of various social media platforms but ultimately it has been analysed that given certain concerns, Twitter is the best platform for Clark Automotive to use for addressing its issues and to advertise its business among target audiences.
Balachandran, V (2013). Is Twitter part of your product launch strategy?. Retrieved from https://medium.com/design-of-a-technology-business/is-twitter-part-of-your-product-launch-strategy-abd42720b167.
Brogan&Partners (2018). Social media evolution. Retrieved from https://www.brogan.com/files/Social-Media-Evolution-Whitepaper.pdf.
Hajli, M. N. (2014). A study of the impact of social media on consumers. International Journal of Market Research, 56(3), 387-404.
Hofacker, C. F., & Belanche, D. (2016). Eight social media challenges for marketing managers. Spanish Journal of Marketing-ESIC, 20(2), 73-80.
Jackson, D (2017). The Complete Guide to Twitter Marketing. SproutSocial. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-marketing/.
Kaushik, R. (2012). Impact of social media on marketing. International Journal of Computational Engineering & Management, 15(2), 91-95.
Mahajan, A C (2014). The Evolution of Social Media 2004 – 2014: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly Of It !. Daze Info. Retrieved from https://dazeinfo.com/2014/12/12/evolution-social-media-2004-2014-good-bad-ugly/.
Morgan, N. A. (2012). Marketing and business performance. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40(1), 102-119.
Raychale (2018). 3 Steps to B2B Social Media Marketing Success For Your Business. Retreived from https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/b2b-social-media-marketing/
Witzig, L., Spencer, J., & Galvin, M. A. R. I. N. (2012). Organizations’ use of LinkedIn: An analysis of nonprofits, large corporations and small businesses. Marketing Management Journal, 22(1), 113-121.
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