Discussion
For the processing in this assignment, the small scale organization chosen is Memrise, a UK-based organization that helps its customers forget about heavy textbooks and dictionaries (Aminatun and Oktaviani 2019). The organization assists their users with higher technology for creating a path for the learning process. Thus, it helps track the student’s progress in their educational field (Aminatun and Oktaviani 2019). Their program allows the children to plan their course as per their individual choices to motivate them for their study and learning process, and they can access their service at their convenience (Paradhina and Laksman-Huntley 2021). The organization is small to medium-sized with a 50-250 employee base, and the company started operation in 2010 (Jäger, Falk and Lenz 2021). The service they are planning to launch in the next month is an online language learning course for the children age group between 8-15. In today’s world, children are more becoming addicted to electronic gadgets, so the planning for launching this service is to make the children utilize their time for good did. They can gain the opportunity to learn multiple languages at their convenient time (Hamer 2021).
This part of the study will focus on the social media marketing strategy for launching the new service for their targeted customer group. Their main consumers are the children, but the main customers here are the parents. They are more active in social networking sites, so the company will be focusing on those social media marketing platforms where their targeted potential customers are more active (Taebenu and Katemba 2021). The pain point identified from the customer’s perspective is that the children are more active with electronic gadgets rather than their subjective papers. And the parent wants their children to be engaged in a certain course that will be beneficial for the children shortly.
- Opportunities:
- Here the opportunities for the company is that most of the competing companies are coming up with a course for a subjective course not about language courses that too from the convenience of the customers.
- The changing market trend and customers attitude has changed due to the hit of Covid-19 in the current situation (Ulanova and Suoranta 2021).
- The business model characteristics give an added advantage to the organization over the industrial overview (Almansour 2019).
- The current education trend has increased, and everyone wants to study from their comfort zone.
- Threats:
- Busuu, Perlego, MangaHigh are the organization that has the potential to give sheer competition to the Memrise. The business model is more or less the same for these industries belonging to the edtech organization (Siranjeevi and Pattanwala 2020).
- Data privacy is the most required thing for a company like Memrise.
- Now people are unwilling to spend more money on online courses, so the course has to be affordable.
The government’s political rules are creating hindrance in the education industry. Even the curriculums have to be preapproved by the government, and also the U.K. government has taken steps to strengthen the educational industry (Spruin 2021). Cultural factors also play a positive and integral role in the educational industry. Different social media marketing strategies make the students learn about more new courses that influence them to study more about foreign languages and other crash courses that will benefit their future (Casañ, Alier and Llorens 2021). Most of the global organizations are heading toward online learning modules which help the students to make ease in their education system.
According to the government of the United Kingdom, the Edtech industry of the U.K. is the largest in Europe (Hinds 2019). And as per the data of the U.K. government that the schools in the U.K. have already spent £1bn on several digital technological tools (LANKA 2021). The investment of money in the U.K. edtech sector is expected to rise by approximately 205 million U.S. dollars (Appendix 1). And talking about the pandemic of Covid-19, it has accelerated the market growth of the Edtech industry is not the only U.K. but beyond that (Watermeyer et al. 2021). Most of the organizations are spending on the training of the employees through online mediums. According to Digital Economy Council, the EdTech industry is the fastest-growing sector in the U.K., and they are expected to grow by over £3.4bn in the next five years (Begum 2021).
External Environment Analysis
The company, Memrise, targets the parents as their customer base, and they are more active in social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google ad words (Fathi, Alipour and Saeedian 2018). Generally, the parents are more active in these mentioned sites, so it is the opportunity for the organization to launch their service in such sites to attract the customers’ base (Gao et al. 2018).
Social media marketing strategies can be divided into two parts: micro and macro theories (Dedeo?lu et al. 2020). According to Eckardt (2019), micro theory of social media marketing comprises of word of mouth theory where the loyal customers of the organization have created a positive word of mouth about the product and service of the organization; it is also known as buzz marketing (Maria et al. 2019). The macro theory of SMMS comprises McLuhan’s Media Theory which denotes that media is the message where the content has the power to change the social trends (Kent and Li 2020).
The trends in the existing social media marketing where organizations try to educate their customers and make them feel about the need of the particular products (Wali and Andy-Wali 2018). Regardless of the organization’s goals and mission, the company needs to educate its customers with valid information and practical advice that drives the potential customers to the organization’s official page and gradually become loyal customers (Reinhardt 2019).
Customers get more attracted to the immersive experience, and to solve this purpose, A.R. and V.R. technology is being more used tools to promote the new service on Instagram and Facebook (Wibowo et al. 2020). It creates more customers engagement (Carlson et al. 2019). Memrise can also launch a teaser of their course module that helps the customers to understand all about the course.
Chatbots are one of the main tools in social media marketing strategies (Hepziba and John 2020). It provides an instant customer service solution and assists the customers with query resolving (Cheng and Jiang 2021). Memrise can use campaign form format so that the interested customers can enrol themselves, and from the list, Memrise can contact the potential customers.
The following recommendation the company, Memrise can follow to market their new course within their limited budget.
- Memrise can post relevant content about their course topic with the proper hastag (#), which is an important mechanism for Facebook and Instagram posts to get a higher reach of the contents (Yang, Ren and Adomavicius 2019).
- They need to use proper keywords for Google image ads so that it appears in the organic ranking of the search engine result page (Szymanski and Lininski 2018).
- Memrise needs to build proper backlinks to bring more traffic to their websites (Bahri and Purba 2021).
Conclusion:
Thus, in conclusion, the organization needs to focus on their customer groups and identify the marketing channel for its launch, and the pricing of the service needs to be clear to its audience. The organization’s goal has to be aligned with the content on its social networking pages. Here Memrise is targeting the parents, and for that, they channelize their products into the platforms like Facebook, Instagram and others.
References
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Political and Cultural Policy Analysis
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