Social Media Marketing Strategy Course Project Final Essay.

During this course, you have either planned, executed, and performed ongoing analysis of a social media marketing strategy for the company you own or work for, and its brands (Course Project and Final Paper Alternative #1), OR you have observed a company of your choice on social media to assess their social media marketing strategy and success/failure (Course Project and Final Paper Alternative #2). You have also conducted competitor research, paying particular attention to companies whose social media campaigns have yielded impressive in-market results.

Throughout this 8-Module course, you should have developed your Course Project and Final Paper as follows:

Phase 1: In each module, you submitted progress updates and written analyses of your social media activities. (For those students who opted to do Course Project and Final Paper Alternative #2, these progress update/analytics reports pertained to the progress made by the company you chose to observe.) These written summations of your/your chosen company’s progress will serve as the basis for your final analysis in Phase 3 (see below). (You previously submitted these progress reports and analyses via the drop boxes set up in each Module. Now, you will incorporate them into your final analysis in the Course Project Final Paper (see Phase 3 below) and will make recommendations for the future. 

Phase 2: In the final part of your Course Project Final Paper, you will use the data you gathered via social media analytics tools to provide a final analysis of your social media marketing strategies and tactics and come to a conclusion about the success of your/your chosen company’s social media marketing and public relations efforts. Be sure to discuss any weaknesses you uncovered (if any) or anything you would change, if you could, with regards to the strategy you/your chosen company planned and implemented. Support your conclusions with research about other companies' social media strategies and in-market results. Also, discuss the three most important things you learned in this course and how these things will enable you to better market products/services via social media going forward.

Phase 1

As indicated in the appendix 1 (Company’s Positioning Kapferer Model), the Kusmi Company has positioned itself a premium tea-brand currently. To the company, this positive progress is defined through its artisanal and secret tea ingredients. The current ambience that surrounds the company is a subtle and successful association of secret, privileged and ancient French Empire and Russian Tsars. Moreover, the company has a trendy, modern and strategized positioning strategy that led to the company’s overall success in the tea sector. The company highlights is first-degree produce that has artisanal fabric characteristics, which is attractive to the company and the clients. This is the most fundamental asset of the company, which it had maintained over the centuries from its launch. This progress makes potential clients to have an ‘executive’ feeling during purchase. Moreover, consumers are also aware on how important they are when it comes to contributing to the overall economic growth.

The major objective of the Kusmi Tea Company's social media strategy is to focus on another market portion and statistic gathering. Internet-based social advertising, the board, arranging, examination, control, and usage are basic while distinguishing the executive's issues, setting up the market blend and understanding answers to concerning consumer satisfaction. For the organization to achieve this justification, it needs to examine the current key issues by assessing the present performance and revenue status. The organization has a huge notoriety on their production streams, which mirrors their mostly more prominent commercial center brand. Achieving the ideal market section additionally requires critical planning, independent of their constrained spending plan. Vital arranging is essential particularly when the organization needs to change their situating and targets (Ang, 2011). The Kusmi Company has utilized applicable internet-based social media methodologies to apply the essentials of the market blend to accomplish revamping. Concentrating on the production of positive client commitment and relationship, the organization is persistently going for participating in internet-based social media crusades to upgrade cost productivity and viability.

Assessing vital promoting and advertising procedures is key to Kusmi's redesign. According to Aronson, Spetner, and Amos (2007), the familiarity with internet-based social media methodology is basic and ought to intensely be taken into greatest thought by organizations. At the point when the correct key measures are not consolidated, the organization will understand some potential dangers that are brought by the use of incapable web-based social media techniques and strategies. Hence, the organization focuses on beneficial methodologies and errands for the general enthusiasm of the organization. Essential systems are likewise pertinent when admonishing of issues, which may significantly affect the creation of the organization (Atwong, 2015). Negative outcomes because of insufficient utilization of internet-based social media displaying techniques may cause numerous methodologies issues e.g. loss of generation and over the top utilization of budgetary assets without a gainful rate of profitability.

Summations of Company's Progress

In such manner, it is major to look into and apply valuable internet-based social media advertising techniques that are all around customized to the association's objectives and targets (Aula, 2010). For example, the organization needs to settle the best web-based social networking organizations to buy in to, including membership recurrence and assessing which substance should be posted in the pertinent stages. The Kusmi Tea Company has aced the pertinence of online social media highlighting procedures in revamping and boosting its generation. Powerful utilization of these techniques is delineated with the incorporation of crucial achievement factors and important methodologies: content re-conveyance, exchange commitment, and influencer showcasing. Organizations have additionally strategized on assessing what works best for them, which probably won't work a similar path for different organizations.

In the company, the strategies’ application is a collective responsibility of the entire workforce and not a mandate of a one individual. Thus, strategic procedures and policies have to be formulated and implemented to regulated the workers and avoid any forms of delays while executing the plans. The strategic plans illustrate the relevance of conversation/communication, the significance of transparency during communication, message frequency, customer relationship and trust building. The strategies and tactics used by the company illustrate the potential outcomes, measurement techniques and overall expenditure of the resources in executing the strategies. To enhance the success of the strategies, the company integrated a mode of communication that is twofold: valuing customers’ opinions and collaborating with workers. Moreover, the company considers it pivotal to assimilate marketing techniques with online social media strategies and content sharing with potential clients in a friendly manner. According to Chandy (2014), effective provision of customers’ value and collaboration with workers plays a fundamental role in determining the success of relevant strategies and improving public relations (PR).

PR is incorporates fundamental initiatives formulated to enhance and maintain the brand image of the company and products/services offered. Efficacious implementation of PR strategies is useful when launching a market plan (Stefanone, Yue & Toh, 2018). Social media and PR strategies are critical when evaluating the company’s promotional tactics, which are premeditated approaches to leveraging opportunities, sales promotions and advertising tactics. These strategic measures are fundamental techniques to related and communicate to new market segments. The fulfillment of social media strategies and PR plans is evident through the company since this has executed the strategies as a pivotal focus for promotional techniques.

Strategy #1: Content Re-distribution – The main objective of this strategy is to make all the recent posts to be available to all the potential users in new market segments. Moreover, this strategy is aimed at exploiting the relevance of recent posts. This strategy has led to attainment of more new market segments by keeping a running list of the posts and content pages, which are re-posted occasionally. This strategy and tactic has enables the company to maintain its social media profiles to facilitate effective and regular updates that will enhance the long-lasting value of the tea production posts. According to Kalsnes (2016), this methodology focusses on the post frames and time to enable the followers to read newer posts and avoid seeing the same posts always.

Phase 2

Strategy #2: Consumer Discussion Engagement – This strategy is relevant to attract potential consumers to the brand for long-term cooperation. The company used this strategy to introduce newsfeeds that are purposed to give the new market segment (unfamiliar consumers) to participate and feel that they are part of the company’s community. Resultantly, this strategy led to generation of more conversions and traffic to the business. The fulfillment of the strategic goal of achieving a new market segment varied according to the company-related discussions and opinions posted concerning the market mix.

Strategy #3: Influencer Marketing – The main objective of this strategic measure is to evaluate consumer satisfaction in a particular market segment. Moreover, influencer marketing functions in a manner that engages to the consumers in many different forms, tapping their level of product visibility and improves consumer satisfaction (Clampitt, 2018). The company has incorporated this technique by involving celebrity followers from different media associations. Resultantly, the company aims at achieving more than one hundred thousand followers to the brand, which can potentially influence new market segments. To target more potential clients, the company focusses on sharing and replying to relevant questions concerning the company and enhancing brand visibility.

The company’s social media plans are executed and promoted by a small team of marketing experts. The team obtained a significant level of consumer engagement through the application of effective social media strategies. The plan it built by the company as part of its market mix, a critical aspect of promotion and advertising. Likewise, the management of the company has created a center of consumer attention, which attracts a significant amount of website traffic to the relevant fan pages through heave promotional and advertising tactics. In reference to Wiiniewski (2017), companies need to take advantage of the great amount of natural touchlines in the physical world. In that case, the company’s goal of reaching a new market segment is stressed in the company’s vision on social media marketing. In other words, the company focusses on maintaining consumer relationship to achieve a competitive advantage.

The pricing plan also includes special discounts, offers, sapling and coupons, which are displayed in various social media platforms e.g. Facebook and website. These are the main platforms that the company use to target a wider segment Various promotional campaigns and events conducted by the company allow Facebook users to access and print their own versions of coupon codes as a complementary item with a drink order (Heller & Parasnis, 2011).. Apart from getting more fans in a short time, the social media team also focusses on the ‘taste challenge’, which is more inclined on determining the general opinions of the users. This activity is accomplished by offering free tea products to voluntary participants to collect their views and use them to improve the product’s quality.

The product option of the company involves the ‘push’ of relevant information using different marketing frameworks to target the new market segments (Thomas & Barlow, 2013). The rationale behind the push technique and social media marketing theory is twofold: push advertising initiative with multiple versions of discounts and coupons on the purchase of products and the ‘flow’ technique by push social media marketing on various platforms to enable the transmission of relevant messages to the targeted audience. According to Rishi & Bandyopadhyay (2018), the fundamental aim of product promotion is to achieve immediate sales and actual time promotion of the fan pages as a social media strategy.

The company successfully created a significant level of consumer attention throughout the promotion of the products on Facebook. Ramsay (2010) argues that promotion through Facebook, including direct marketing strategies like promotion and discount offering is fundaments when establishing a long-lasting consumer relationship with the brand. The company has the obligation to manage and charge it store, which includes the running a consistent marketing campaign on social media.

The distribution of relevant content, that a company creates, helps to reach potential clients and can be used as an integral fragment of content marketing (Ems & Gonzales, 2016).  The company has implemented an effective content distribution strategy to strengthen and build relations with targeted audience. This eventually leads the company to undertake relevant strategic actions like introducing sign up forms or downloading a useful eBook. First, the company created the distribution strategy by acknowledging and understanding the initial goal of the content distribution strategy. The strategy enables the company to evaluate the new segment’s insight since it knows the relevant content channels preferred and the most contents most searched.

The second strategy of discussion engagement with the consumers and workers stresses on content listing. The inclusion of more listings and mediums in engagement will aid the clients to view and interact with the content more easily since it attracts a broad dimension of viewers. The company utilizes both written posts and videos, whereby most potential clients prefer video content to written texts. Moreover, the organization cycles different forms of content using the social media strategies and offering different pieces of various mediums included. With this strategy, it is relevant if the company considers a rewarding system to engage the users (Headworth, 2016).  Thus, relevant feedback and allowing full user engagement is fundamental to determine consumer satisfaction reaching new market segments. With active participation in the discussion threads, the company is able to determine the level of consumer participation in social media usage.

Considering the third strategy on influencer marketing, it is evident that users do not trust the adverts, but consider the actual people behind the adverts (Holloman, 2013).  Thus, the company applies this strategy by using an authentic voice, which is mostly regarded by users. The tea firm collaborates with public organizations, journalists, personalities, brand fans and celebrities to transform them to potential company advocates. The partnership of a particular brand with an individual greatly influences the business to connect to new customers organically and directly to an extensive scale (Pujawan & Er, 2014). Practically, the company embraces this strategy by choosing the best representatives that will reach the best clients for the brand. Resultantly, both the brand and the new market segment are bonded into a strategic relationship that is strategically for brand reorganization and expansion.

The tea brand also develops its influencer market plan by focusing of the best influencers. This strategic implementation is significant since it develops the progressive relationship to ensure that the company reaches the targeted audience through a fruitful influencers’ participation. According to Heller & Parasnis (2011), the company might assure maximum return on its investment through the provision of detailed reports of how the influencers affect the performance of brand. Moreover, the social media strategies are useful when determining the sales, conversion and click-through rates.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, considering the social media strategies used by the Kusmi Tea Company, including how the tea giant fully applies the changes that the social media platforms give, gaining consumer satisfaction in new market segments in possible. Potential consumers interact and engage with the brand the like through social media platforms and webpages. Therefore, the company needs to apply relevant social media strategies that will assure the success and reorganization of the company. The main challenge identified in the management of the company is how the company will effectively assure an on-going and long-lasting relationship with all its users. However, the company has formulated a strategic plan that will focus on brand-user engagement to illustrate the fundamentals of different management levels of different social media customers. The company invests its effort in post their products in various social media sites and webpages to interact with its new market segments and achieve a competitive advantage. Other companies like Coca-Cola and Starbucks apply social media marketing plans to enhance sustainability despite the current global recession on the economy, which has significantly shaken the end users. Thus, the companies are able to stay relevant in the market and enhance their sustainability for the future. For instance, the Starbucks continues to focus, innovate and improve its positions and production, which strengthens their relations with potential clients.

Thus, the lessons learned concerning effective use of social media strategies are

• The application of social media marketing techniques is fundamental for the reorganization of any company, as long as the strategies are well managed and applied. Moreover, there strategies can potential lead to long-term production sustainability and limit any challenge brought by recession.
• Social media strategies are fundamental to enhancing the return on investment and reducing the potential risks associated with supply and management of production. Thus, companies are encourages to formulated a comprehensive strategy that covers a wide range of business factors and needs.
• The use of social media campaigns also correlates with the evaluation of financial performance, which also determines the reward systems that a company uses to reap of its gains.

References:

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