Impact Of Social Media Marketing On Business Growth In Australian Retail Industry

Research question

This study will identify the impact of social media marketing on business growth in the Australian retail industry. The growth of the retail industry in Australia is very rapid and competition in the retail industry is immense after the emergence of companies like ALDI. The major market players such as Coles and Woolworths still face threats face from companies like Myer’s (Hill, 2016). Therefore, it is imperative to understand the influence of social media marketing on business growth and the strategies that should be implemented to improve the social media marketing in Australian retail industry. The late 90s and the early millennia has been spent by majority of the companies by focusing on traditional marketing medium (Hill, 2016). However, the emergence of the different forms of digital marketing has been instrumental in developing communication techniques and tools that are scalable and highly accessible. Moreover, the reach, social interaction and market penetration of this form of media is much higher when compared to the traditional marketing tools.

The study will focus on social media aspect of digital marketing which is a free tool used by most of the companies to grab the attention of the consumers.  Therefore, the objective of the current study are as follows:

• To identify the different elements of social media marketing in Australian retail industry
• To investigate the impact of social media marketing on the business growth of the retail companies Australian retail industry
• To recommend suitable strategies required for improving business growth in the Australian retail industry

Research question

Primary question: What is the impact of social media marketing on the business growth of the retail companies’ Australian retail industry?

Secondary Question: What are the different elements of social media marketing in Australian retail industry?

Independent variable: Social media marketing

Dependent variable: Business growth

 As stated by Ahmad, Musa & Harun, (2016), assessing the impact of social media marketing on business growth will depend on few factors such as the brand and the product type.  Social media marketing has a deep impact on the brand and the social media presence of global business organizations is an area of focus for most of the companies as strong social media presence is crucial for sustainability in the modern market. According to Jones, Borgman & Ulusoy, (2015), social media has changed the way the process of modern business and both high end product companies and normal product companies have been using the social media platform for reaching out more to the consumers and maintain a level of transparency between the organizations and their respective consumers. On the contrary, Lamberton & Stephen, (2016) states that social media has negative impacts attached to it where data protection and negative publicity are possible risks that all organizations have to go through to implement successful social media marketing.

Primary question: What is the impact of social media marketing on the business growth of the retail companies’ Australian retail industry?

As stated by Ashley & Tuten, (2015), social media has been a means of communicating and staying with known and unknown personnel. The advent of web 2.0 have changed the scenario for the organizations as majority of the consumers had become active on the online platform and with the advancement of technology there has been significant change in use of social media platform. As opined by Felix, Rauschnabel & Hinsch, (2017), evolution of web has been unimaginable as there has been a massive transition from information retrieval to collaboration, interoperability and interactivity. Godey et al., (2016) states that social media is a platform for effective exchange of user content by basing it on technological foundations. Moreover, social media is one of the important tool for gaining knowledge about different companies and their respective offerings. Consumer tend to search of options on the social media platform when a need is being generated.  Therefore, social media has been used as a digital marketing tool by majority of the companies to gain competitive and manage their sustainability.

According to Felix, Rauschnabel & Hinsch (2017), there are different elements of social media marketing are content, relevancy timely interaction, suitability and prefereability. There are different platforms that are being used by the organization such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. The above mentioned factors are essential for engaging with the consumers and penetrating further into the market

There are different ways of attracting consumers but the best way is to attract them and pursue from reading the daily updates of different companies on the social media platform (Chang, Yu & Lu 2015). In order to do so, relevancy of the content is one of the most important aspect of social media marketing.

The interaction between the organization and their consumers have to be frequent so that they can develop a strong brand image on the social media platform. As stated by Stephen, (2016), timely engagement increases the level of engagement between the consumers and the organization. 

As opined by Keegan & Rowley, (2017), organizations will have to identify the most suitable social media platform that is suitable for promoting the offerings of the organization.

As stated by Herbes et al., (2017), business growth is referred to as the growth in all the aspects of the organization such as operation, finance and social responsibility.

 Operational performance refers to the effectiveness of the processes and policies of the supply chain management (Croom et al., 2018). This defines the cost price products and increase in organizational effectiveness.

Secondary Question: What are the different elements of social media marketing in Australian retail industry?

Financial performance refers to the revenue generation streams and the amount of profit gained in the financial year (Cull et al., 2014).

The organizations are social beings and it is the duty of the organizations to act a responsible citizen and contribute back to the society (Short et al., 2016). This performance of the organization is defined by the corporate social performance.

Research methodology is the systematic method of identifying the tools and techniques necessary for conducting the research. This study will use experimental method to provide explanation and description of behaviours regarding the relationship between social media marketing and organizational productivity (Flick, 2015). The cause and effect relationship between the variables will be identified using this research method.

The current study will use positivism philosophy to establish the relationship between social media marketing and organizational productivity (Saunders et al., 2015).  Positivism is generally objective in nature and based on facts developed from assumptions. Positivism will assist in quantification of the data obtained and conduct statistical analysis of the data.

The current study will use deductive approach to prove theories and paradigms that have discussed in the literature review section of the study (Sekaran & Bougie, 2016). Deductive approach will facilitate in developing a hypothesis based on the discussed literature review and will prove the already analysed theories in the literature review section. Deductive approach facilitates in conducting hypothesis testing and developing relevant results from quantitative data analysis.

The current study will use the conclusive research design which can further be divided into causal and descriptive research design (Meyers, Gamst & Guarino, 2016). The study will use descriptive research which will describe the phenomenon, causes and specific within the area of research.

The study will use secondary data collection method for collecting data. The secondary data will be collected from Australian Bureau of Statistics, annual reports, social media metrics, google open data and other statistical (Palinkas et al., 2015). The data collected will be analyzed using the quantitative data analysis technique.  MS Excel is the statistical tool that will be used for calculating the relationship between social media marketing and business growth. The statistical tool will analyse the data collected by conducting inferential statistical analysis. This will consist of conducting regression analysis to identify the degree of association between business growth and social media marketing.

Sampling is the method of choosing the participants of the study when the sample size is huge. In this case, the sample population is also quite huge, taking into consideration that there are large number of companies in the retail sector in Australia. Therefore, this study will use convenience sampling to select data that is relevant and can be used for establishing the relationship (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 2014). The sample population for the study will be 30 where data from 30 multinational companies including their return on assets, sustainability reports and other suitable data will be collected.

Independent variable: Social media marketing

The study will check for both reliability and validity of the data collected.  Reliability will check whether the precision of the instruments used are high or not while validity will check whether the results obtained are valid or not (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 2014). In case of reliability, the reproducibility of the data will be analyzed and in case of the validity, the relevancy of the used research methods are checked.

The study will collect authentic data from the different websites and no fake data will be used (Greenfield, 2016). The study will not exaggerate the result in the study and will derive significant and authentic conclusion.

Table 1: Research plan

Source: (As created by author)

The project is feasible and suitable timeline has been developed from conducting the research.  The time frame for each of the activity has also been developed and following the given path will provide valid results.

References

Ahmad, N. S., Musa, R., & Harun, M. H. M. (2016). The impact of social media content marketing (SMCM) towards brand health. Procedia Economics and Finance, 37, 331-336.

Ashley, C., & Tuten, T. (2015). Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1), 15-27.

Chang, Y. T., Yu, H., & Lu, H. P. (2015). Persuasive messages, popularity cohesion, and message diffusion in social media marketing. Journal of Business Research, 68(4), 777-782.

Croom, S., Vidal, N., Spetic, W., Marshall, D., & McCarthy, L. (2018). Impact of social sustainability orientation and supply chain practices on operational performance. International Journal of Operations & Production Management.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Larson, R. (2014). Validity and reliability of the experience-sampling method. In Flow and the foundations of positive psychology (pp. 35-54). Springer, Dordrecht.

Cull, R., Harten, S., Nishida, I., & Bull, G. (2014). Benchmarking the financial performance, growth, and outreach of greenfield microfinance institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. The World Bank.

Felix, R., Rauschnabel, P. A., & Hinsch, C. (2017). Elements of strategic social media marketing: A holistic framework. Journal of Business Research, 70, 118-126.

Flick, U. (2015). Introducing research methodology: A beginner’s guide to doing a research project. Sage.

Godey, B., Manthiou, A., Pederzoli, D., Rokka, J., Aiello, G., Donvito, R., & Singh, R. (2016). Social media marketing efforts of luxury brands: Influence on brand equity and consumer behavior. Journal of business research, 69(12), 5833-5841.

Greenfield, T. (2016). Ethics of research. Research Methods for Postgraduates, 46.

Herbes, C., Brummer, V., Rognli, J., Blazejewski, S., & Gericke, N. (2017). Responding to policy change: new business models for renewable energy cooperatives–barriers perceived by cooperatives’ members. Energy Policy, 109, 82-95.

Hill, T. (2016). How retail brands are using social media to improve performance – Mumbrella. Retrieved from https://mumbrella.com.au/how-retail-brands-are-using-social-media-to-improve-performance-412015

Jones, N., Borgman, R., & Ulusoy, E. (2015). Impact of social media on small businesses. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 22(4), 611-632.

Keegan, B. J., & Rowley, J. (2017). Evaluation and decision making in social media marketing. Management Decision, 55(1), 15-31.

Lamberton, C., & Stephen, A. T. (2016). A thematic exploration of digital, social media, and mobile marketing: Research evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an agenda for future inquiry. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 146-172.

Meyers, L. S., Gamst, G., & Guarino, A. J. (2016). Applied multivariate research: Design and interpretation. Sage publications.

Palinkas, L. A., Horwitz, S. M., Green, C. A., Wisdom, J. P., Duan, N., & Hoagwood, K. (2015). Purposeful sampling for qualitative data collection and analysis in mixed method implementation research. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 42(5), 533-544.

Saunders, M. N., Lewis, P., Thornhill, A., & Bristow, A. (2015). Understanding research philosophy and approaches to theory development.

Sekaran, U., & Bougie, R. (2016). Research methods for business: A skill building approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Short, J. C., McKenny, A. F., Ketchen, D. J., Snow, C. C., & Hult, G. T. M. (2016). An empirical examination of firm, industry, and temporal effects on corporate social performance. Business & Society, 55(8), 1122-1156.

Stephen, A. T. (2016). The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behavior. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, 17-21.

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