Communication objectives
Discuss about the Social Media and Contemporary Activism.
Integrated marketing communication is beneficial for any business to promote their product in the consumer domain. This communication strategy ensures that all types of communications are properly liked with each other (Camilleri 2018). In the recent years, data integration is popular in an integrated marketing communication process. Advertising through the digital media is helpful to give shape the integrated marketing communication process. However, the business organizations use integrated communication to create brand awareness and to increase their sales. Social media campaign is a big part of the integrated marketing. This study deals with the social media campaign in the context of Circles Life’s referral building campaign.
Circles Life is the eminent digital telecommunication operator in Singapore. They have launched in 2016 and offer post-paid mobile service in Singapore. However, this organization has no physical distribution channel and they carry out their business based on the online (Pages.Circles.Life 2018). They are the popular online retailer in Singapore. However, they rely on the social media and word of mouth in order to spread their offering among the consumer domain. The customers can register via online and get their SIM card from this organization. They provide monthly based plan to the customers.
Data savvy market is their main target audience. In the recent years they have offering circles care mobile application through which the customers can customize their plan via a personalized dashboard. This application enables the customers to track their cost and data usage. Circles Life aims to eliminate the hidden cost of telecoms. At present Circles, Life has conducted a campaign to promote their newly launched $20 for 20 GB adds on plan. This plan highlights that the customers need to pay $20 a month and they will get 20 GB mobile data per month. In previous, the customers have to pay $48 to get 20 GB data for one month. Hence, this new offering will lead lower income group to access this service easily. However, in the recent years, many telecom service organization offer good amount high-speed data at a low price (Hu et al. 2018). On the other hand, people are modern in the recent years and they use mobile rapidly. At present, the people want high-speed data at a low price. This is the current market demand. Therefore, quick and accessible customer service from the telecom industry is another demand of the market (Cross et al. Westley 2017). The motto of this campaign is to allow the customers to understand the product offering in a few seconds and to meet the demand of the current market. Circles Life has implemented a FIND OUT MORE button on their website, which enables them to track the conversation rate and the HELP button allows the customers to get real-time customer service. Their current target market is data savvy market and they aim to cover 18 to 45 years people by offering their service. Such referral building campaign of Circles Life through using social media, gratification, and word of mouth is helpful to promote their brand in a large consumer domain.
Media used as the part of campaign
Communication is the major part of the campaign. In order to promote the product in a customer, domain communication is required (Blakeman 2018). In the context of Circles Life, they have conducted a referral building campaign in Singapore to promote their new offering $20 for 20 GB add-on plan. In order to give shape this approach, they need to communicate with the customers in a proper way. Their main purpose is to make the information easy for the customers through this campaign. Some specific communication objectives are selected to carry out this promotional campaign. The objectives are as follow:
- To create awareness among the target audience
- To share product information quickly in a large consumer domain
- To achieve a strong brand recognition
- To increase the sales revenue
In the context of Circles Life, it is a new telecommunication service provider in Singapore. Hence, they have set such objectives to conduct their campaign in a proper way. Their campaign is helpful to improve the brand image in the customer domain as the social media campaign is helpful for the customer to understand the messages clearly.
In order to carry out a campaign a media is required for every organization. In the recent years, maximum organization focuses on the digital media especially to the social media (Gerbaudo 2018). Circles Life has used social media to give shape their new campaign. They have launched $20 for 20 GB add plan. In order to promote this offer they have conducted a referral building campaign by using the social media. They have used YouTube and Facebook to carry out the campaign. However, YouTube is a popular media to promote the new product among the large customer domain. Video is the integral part of the internet users. According to the statistical data more than 3 billion videos are watched via YouTube. YouTube gives an excellent place to the marketers to find their customers (Youtube.com 2018). Marketers use YouTube video as it is the home of viral video. YouTube allows the organization to host their channel and to centralize an online location for product related video (Youtube.com 2018). Circles Life has created a video with detailed information of their $20 for 20 GB add plan (Youtube.com 2018). Therefore, they have created pictures within the video to make it creative to attract the customers. However, the customers can go through the Circles Life app via mobile and they need to click on the “add” option to access this plan.
Apart from the YouTube advertising, they have used Facebook to conduct their campaign. Facebook is a popular social media site, where people spend a lot of time. Based on this concept the marketers use this social media site to promote their product (Perera et al. 2018). People do not use facebook for their entertainment only but they use to search new products or service via this site. Therefore, facebook acts as the good referral media as people often share their preferred brand through facebook. This organization has given detailed information about their new product on their facebook page, which is effective to gain the customer attention easily (Facebook.com 2018).
Strength and weakness of the media
YouTube is a free advertising method. However, the marketers do not have to pay while they are putting their video in YouTube (Turban et al. 2018). This provides an opportunity to the organization to test their own creative way and the response of the market. On the other hand, YouTube allows Circles Life to associate their Google Adsense account. As a result, they can get money from their uploaded video. In the context of product promotion, YouTube doubles the traffic number. By using YouTube an organization is able to promote their product at a cheaper rate. Therefore, they can stay up to date with new product videos. Circles Life has conducted their campaign via YouTube, which saved money. One of the major disadvantages of YouTube advertisement is the costly video editing program (Dwivedi et al. 2018). In the context of Circles Life, they need to hire skilled employees and costly instrument to edit video on YouTube, which will increase the cost of the campaign. On the other hand, YouTube is public site thus; anyone can see the video and upload the video. This can cause copyright infringement issue in the context of Circles Life.
Maximum business organizations are involved in facebook advertising. To implement the campaign activity successfully Circles Life has used facebook advertising for their new service. One of the major strengths of facebook advertising is to gain a lot of users (Kasemsap 2018). Circles Life is a new telecom service providers in Singapore, thus they need more customers. Hence, online customers are their potential customers. Facebook allows them to cover a large population by making a click. Therefore, facebook is a cheaper advertising process and allows this organization to filter the clients. Such filtering process enables this organization to share their add those people who are living nearest area of their business. However, negative comment on the post is the biggest disadvantages of the facebook advertising (Thacker et al. 2018). If the people give negative comment on the service of Circles Life on the facebook then it will hamper their service. Therefore, facebook is used by a lot of users as a result, if Circles Life post a new add and after a while numerous adds will come from the competitors. This is another weakness of facebook advertising.
Use of social media to conduct a campaign is an effective approach as it not only covers a large range of customers but also retail the existing customers (Kasemsap 2018). In the context of Circles Life by using the YouTube advertising they are able to share their product information easily in an attractive form. Therefore, You Tube advertising allows Circles Life to achieve brand popularity in the local and global market. Facebook advertising allows this organization to gain long placement at the cheaper rate. Therefore, Circles Life is an online retailer and they do not have any physical stores. In order to sale, their service their one and only way is the online marketing. Hence, facebook gives them the platform to promote their product via online and to sale them. They are able to achieve good contacts from the facebook advertisement.
In order to improve the IMC Circles Life needs to adopt a cohesive strategy. However, Circles Life has used social media and other channels to improve their integrated marketing communication for their new product. One of the biggest problems with IMC is the lack of knowledge about IMC. The marketers think that if they use various channels then they are doing integrated marketing. This concept is not right. This creates problem. However, IMC is used to reach to the target customers and it can be possible if the use of IMC is done properly. Use of every channel in integrated marketing is not a good idea as it is limiting the brand message. Hence, by adopting cohesive strategy an organization can implement its integrated marketing communication properly (Thacker et al. 2018). Through using cohesive strategy Circles Life can identify which channel has the major impact on their target audience. Then this strategy will allow them to deliver their product message clearly and consistently to the target customers.
In order to deal with the negative comment Circles, Life needs to set a public comment policy on a separate tab of their facebook page. This policy includes certain rules and if any individual posts a negative comment that warrants removal. Use of info-graphics will be helpful to make the content more creative on facebook (Kasemsap 2018). However, users prefer info-graphics. Hence, by using this Circles Life will be able to make creative content and give clear information to the users. This will help them to deal with the high competition on social media sites.
Creation of clear and creative blog is useful to maximize the social media campaign. Therefore, Circles Life needs to share their updated blog on the social media. This will help them to bring people in their WebPages. Any product-related video can spread quickly to a large audience via creating excellent blog. In the context of Circles Life, they need to launch their new product in the consumer domain by using creative content. Therefore, it will be helpful for Circles Life to repurpose the old comments. However, in order to reduce the high cost video editing this organization can repurpose their old content to the customer domain (Turban et al. 2018). This will be effective to gain attention of the new as well as the old customers.
It is important for an organization to make sure that each element of their marketing campaign is working effectively. An organization needs to ensure that their messaging is integrated properly. In the context of Circles Life they need to observe the effectiveness of their each marketing element in communicating with the target audience. Often the organization just implements the marketing communication but fail to use all elements of the marketing campaign effectively. Hence, Circles Life needs to ensure that their IMC channels are driving traffic to their ultimate target. This will help them to introduce their new service in target market domain. On the other hand, incorporation of the audio into the content is an effective approach to gain competitive advantages in social media advertising. It has been received from the previous analysis that high completion is a big challenge of the facebook advertising. Hence, use of audio into the content will enable this organization to make their content more creative and attractive. This will help this organization to gain competitive advantages in the social media marketing campaign (Cross et al. Westley 2017). Therefore, use of content calendar in the social media is another effective approach to improve the content of social media campaign. This will allow Circles Life to organize all the contents that they want to generate and publish.
Conclusion
The above piece of work deals with the digital campaign of Circles Life. They have launched $20 for 20 GB plan. In order to make this campaign popular they have used social media. However, facebook and YouTube are the two popular advertising tools that are used by this organization. It has been received that such media is helpful to increase the traffic numbers and to reduce the advertising cost. Negative comment and high cost of video editing in YouTube are the major drawbacks of the social media advertising. These often hamper the effectiveness of the campaign.
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