In the present era of digital communication, the social network gives a business more exposure to potential clients. Many companies would wish to use these online platforms to advertise their products and in return get customer feedback and even make sales. The aim of this paper is to give a highlight of the steps to be followed for a successful online marketing process. Here are highlighted the steps that should be followed for an effective marketing process: attract the customers, facilitate engagement, amplify response, create a community and finally selling the brand.
The first step is to attract people to access your product. This can be done through a variety of ways, which include: pop up messages in the social media platform, display advertisement or even through news feeds. Some social advertisements encourage members to interact in the social platform through participation in contests, win a voucher or even offer free services for successful referral of friends to the site. Solomon (2018) reasons that by running social media contest and offering a discount for the products purchased online can be another way of attracting people to participate in the program.
Furthermore, blog post an article to declare a contest between your products and follow through via social media platforms to acknowledge any posts made. This way, the clients know that you are tuned in. Beyers (2016) suggests that the way to maximise exposure is by keeping a steady flow of new social media posts advertising the blog article talking about the products.
The second step is creating involvement and facilitate engagement of online clients with the products. This can be achieved by displaying attractive pictures of the product or by posting an interesting detailed information about the product. This will encourage the audience to respond by giving their personal opinion concerning the product through a comment, suggestion or recommendations. Through these engagements, the developer can share links on how to get access to the product or services provided.
However, without successful engagement with clients, the marketing process will not facilitate an increase in sales as expected. Solomon (2018) suggests that there are alternative forms of engagement, which include: post photos of the company’s daily activities or events hosted, participate in discussions and set up polls for the online followers and also share news stories from other external sources. Beyers (2016), also argues that the more the clients become engaged with the company, they will automatically feel comfortable to do business.
The third step involved in the social marketing process is to amplify response. This means to encourage those who have accessed the information on the product to share the links and comments on their social media platform. Some social media networks that have sharing links include: Facebook likes and shares, Twitter retweets about the product, and Instagram picture display of the product. Therefore, through social media, the concept of amplification can reach a wider range of clientele in a cheap and more convenient channel. Furthermore, this can also be done by integrating a blog on the e-commerce site and use it to post company announcements, information for the customers and new product announcement.
The fourth step is the development of a community, these are the online group of friends especially in social media platforms where one can post about their product in the group timeline and all the members will be able to view the post. Some messaging applications like WhatsApp have the ability to broadcast messages to several chat- groups of close people. All these groups form a community and therefore the link to the product is able to reach more people. In addition, online marketers have a number of ways or growing these communities, example through detailed information on new products, discount available for loyal clients, points earned from referrals and gift awards for those who sample the products within a given time frame.
The last step in the social marketing process and the main objective of marketing is to build brand strength by making sales. Solomon (2018) argues that social media should work for the business by assisting to improve the product image and brand exposure. Furthermore, through partnership and mergers with other products, to mutually benefit from the exposure. This can be done through official announcements on social media or blog posts.
Moreover, it is true to know that of late businesses follow clients. Because of the high capacity of businesses offering similar products, there has been an increased competitive edge of undertaking into business and making the most sales. I would recommend that businesses have to be innovative so as to access a larger market share, this can be done through following potential clients in relevant social media platforms. For example, when targeting professionals, business will have to reach them via LinkedIn, and if the target market is the teenagers then the best platform to find them is through Facebook.
In conclusion, there is limited evidence of measuring the impact of social marketing process on the final purchase of the products. However, it is evident that sales will increase as the product information is spread further into different online communities. To prove these, many social media platforms have been in the process of adding social marketing features such as buy buttons to enable their users to make purchases online. In the recent past, we have experienced a constant increase in the projection of online marketing sites like Amazon, Alibaba, E-bay and Jumia. At least every state has a local online marketing platform and the international ones have been of great importance to facilitate an increase in purchase orders of a variety of products.
References
Beyers T. (2016) 5 Ways Social Marketing Can Improve Your Ecommerce Efforts, Social Media Marketing, Weebly Inspiration Centre. Retrieve from https://www.weebly.com/inspiration/5-ways-social-marketing-can-improve-your-ecommerce-efforts/.
Social Marketing Process. Social, Mobile and Local Marketing, Chapter 7, page 431-432
Solomon J. (2018) E-commerce Marketing: 5Tips for Effective Social Media Promotion, Chargebee blog. Retrieved from https://www.chargebee.com/blog/5-ways-social-media-marketing-promote-ecommerce-business/.
