Introduction
Defining SMMS
Dimension | Social media | Marketing strategy | Social media marketing strategy |
---|---|---|---|
Core | Interaction and connectedness | Long-term customer relationship building | Customer engagement |
Orientation | Passive actor versus active actor | Transactional-oriented versus relational-oriented | Transactional-oriented versus engagement-oriented |
Resource | Resource integrator | Basic resources and high-order resources | In exchange with customer-owned resources |
Purpose | To interact and connect | To achieve competitive advantage | To generate, integrate, and reconfigure social media resources to achieve specific marketing objectives |
Premise | To recognize different customer motivations of social media brand-related activities | To enhance long-lasting customer relationships by delivering superior value | To capitalize on social media interactions and customer engagement so as to generate marketing resources |
Social media
Marketing strategy
SMMS
Conceptualizing the process of developing SMMSs
Drivers
Inputs
Throughputs
Outputs
Taxonomy of SMMSs
Classification criteria of SMMSs
Types of SMMSs
Type of SMMSs | Primary motivations | Key activities | Capabilities/resources | Major outcomes | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Firm | Customer | Firm | Customer | Firm | Customer | Firm | Customer | |
Social commerce strategy | To promote and sell | Utilitarian reasons (e.g., incentives, promotions) | Sales; Promotion | Observing; Lurking | Selling capability | Monetary resources | Product selling; Promotion | Promotional offerings |
Social content strategy | To connect and collaborate | Informational, entertainment reasons | Viral marketing; Influential marketing | Likes; Shares; Comments | Marketing communication capability | Network assets; Persuasion capital | WOM | Entertainment |
Social monitoring strategy | To listen and learn | Information, service response | Social listening; Responding | Complaints; Feedbacks; Suggestions | Market sensing and responding capability | Knowledge stores | Market knowledge | Satisfaction with firm service/product |
Social CRM Strategy | To empower and engage | Identification, relationship bonds | Engage and empower customers | Speak for firms; Co-creation | Social CRM capability | Network assets; Persuasion capital; Knowledge stores; Creativity | Customer engagement; Co-creation | Experience personalized offerings |
Validation of proposed SMMSs
SMMSs | Key empirical insights | Resulting managerial lessons |
---|---|---|
Social commerce strategy | • Social media as selling, promotion, and advertising platform has a positive impact on customer purchase intentions and financial performance. | ► Use social media carefully and sensibly for the purpose of selling and promoting products/services and this in turn will help increase your customer base and generate more sales. |
• Interactiveness, informativeness, entertainment, and credibility of social media advertising positively affect customer behavior and purchase intention. | ► Make sure that your social media ads are exciting, informative, and believable to gain customer trust and stimulate interest to buy your products/services. | |
• Social networks and interactions have a strong influence on social media commerce. | ► Leverage social networks and interactions to motivate and engage customers to make purchases through, for example, monetization of social networks. | |
• Social media and traditional marketing have synergistic impact on company’s sales. | ► While using social media as marketing tools, it is advisable to combine them with traditional marketing tools to achieve superior results. | |
• Perceived privacy risk and the intrusiveness of social media advertising negatively impact on customer attitudes and purchase intentions. | ► In using social media ads, be sensitive and respectful to issues related to customer privacy and intrusiveness to avoid negative feelings by customers. | |
Social content strategy | Content popularity and vitality are influenced by: | |
• Social message strategy (e.g., brand names, functional and emotional appeals, vividness and interactivity, inspirational knowledge and trending topics, content-user fit) | ► To attract customer attention and spread favorable news make your messages lively and attractive, focus on contemporary issues, adjust the content to target customers’ interests, and stress the strengths of your products/services. | |
• Seeding strategy (e.g., use of highly connected people, different characteristics of relationships, influential) | ► Increase virality of your messages in social media by seeking the assistance of influential individuals who have an extensive network, are opinion leaders, and have the ability to attract and easily connect with other people. | |
• Context (e.g., B2B, B2C), product characteristics (e.g., low-utilitarian and high-utilitarian), organizational processes and IT tools | ► Be aware that the popularity impact of your social media content becomes stronger when you have proper design processes in place and use the right automation tools. Your viral marketing approach should be also carefully adapted according to your specific product characteristics. | |
Social monitoring strategy | • Social monitoring strategy emphasizes the importance of social listening and responding to customer needs. | ► Listen carefully to the discussions and comments made by customers in social media, identify specific needs and preferences from these, and respond accordingly and quickly with the right company offering. |
• Social media have become “listening tools” to observe and analyze customers and firms should adopt different techniques to analyze social media data. | ► In addition to traditional marketing research methods, make sure you also invest adequate time and effort in using social media as a means to gather useful, reliable, and fresh information about customer attitudes/behaviors. | |
• Firms’ active interactions with customers influence customer behaviors. | ► Actively interacting with customers using social media should be a never-ending process, which, with proper monitoring and right incentives, can help favorably influence customer behavior. | |
• Different types of responses (e.g., volume and speed), voices (e.g., human and impersonal voice), and styles (e.g., formal and informal) affect customer reactions. | ► To effectively stimulate positive customer reactions in social media, it is important to respond swiftly and frequently, use different voices/tones, and adapt styles to fit specifically each communication context. | |
• Firm response strategies (e.g., public apology, problem-solving responses, and accommodative strategies) were found useful in dealing with negative e-WOM. | ► Although negative e-WOM should be avoided by all means, in case this appears you can use an array of tools, ranging from corporate acknowledgment and public apology to recovery actions and compensation. | |
Social CRM strategy | • Customer engagement and social CRM capabilities affect the core of social CRM strategy, which positively affects competitive advantage and performance. | ► Put continuous emphasis on engaging your customers in social media in a systematic and consistent way, because this is likely to yield favorable financial and non-financial results. |
• Customer resource integration, customer knowledge sharing, and learning are the key foundational customer engagement processes. | ► Take initiatives to enhance the engagement of customers in social media by integrating resources with them, exchanging knowledge, and learning as much as possible about their characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors. | |
• Although the firm’s customer engagement initiatives play an important role in motivating customers’ voluntary contributions, their effectiveness may vary across market contexts. | ► Be wary of encouraging customers to use social media postings (especially for luxury and identity-relevant products), because this may harm customers’ perceptions of premium brand image. | |
• Social CRM capability is a firm-level capability that helps generate, integrate, and respond to social media information and enhance customer engagement. | ► Develop specific capabilities (e.g., those anchored on operational excellence, information technology, and specific employee skills/knowledge) to systematically collect, analyze, and act on data derived from interactions with customers in social media. |
Future research directions
Broad thematic areas | Specific topical areas | Focal issues |
---|---|---|
Preparation and implementation of SMMSs | SMMS situation analysis | • Specific firm strengths required to support SMMSs • The role of artificial intelligence and big data to identify social media (SM) marketing opportunities • Challenges encountered in SMMSs (e.g., data security) • Analysis of competitors using similar or different SMMSs |
SM target marketing | • Using big data extracted from SM to identify suitable market segments • Using SM to identify and serve niche markets • Key network characteristics (e.g., centrality, density) to segment the SM market • Managing effectively multiple target groups on SM • Changes in SM targeting strategy over different stages of the product life-cycle • Measuring the online value proposition in SM content • The role of SM in brand differentiation and positioning | |
Implementing SMMSs | • Adjustments in organizational structure to accommodate needs of SMMSs • Changes in organizational culture required to support SMMSs • Integrating existing firm systems with SMMS requirements • HR requirements (e.g., skills, training) to support SMMSs • How will leadership/management style influence SMMS implementation? • How do SM technologies relate to different firm capabilities and performance outcomes? | |
Social commerce strategy | SM and sales | • How do SM impact on sales across different products, platforms, and devices? • The role of SM as a means to improve existing products and/or develop new products • Selecting the right pricing strategy in different SM platforms to yield higher sales • Defining the optimal number of SM channels to achieve superior sales performance • The impact of SM channel addition/deletion on sales • Linking SM platform selection with distribution intensity to increase sales • How do various types of SM (owned, earned, paid) correlate to marketing outcomes? • How do SM and traditional marketing impact synergistically on sales/advertising effectiveness? |
SM and promotion/ advertising | • SM marketing, customer analytics, and location awareness • How to integrate SM with traditional media to improve effectiveness • The role of SM in the firm’s pull versus push communication strategies • Measuring effectiveness of different types of SM ads • How do SM interactions impact on advertisement effectiveness? • What is the dark side of the use of SM as a promotional tool? | |
Social content strategy | Message strategy | • What is the most effective content with regard to different devices, platforms, and industries? • Which SM messages/content can help improve branding outcomes (e.g., brand loyalty)? • Whether customer co-creation leads to less negative inferences and more valuable virality • What specific message strategies are needed to initiate C2C interactions to help the brand? • Consumer reactions if learned that C2C social messages are incentivized by the firm? • Ethical implications involved in viral marketing activity • How to measure social content marketing performance regarding customer outcomes? • Coping with competitors’ social content strategies • What are the implications of an effective social content strategy on the firm’s resource allocation? |
Seeding strategy | • Determinants of finding the most effective social influencers • Customer reactions to seeding programs and their interaction with marketing mix elements • What type of product/service and customer characteristics impact on seeding success? • What price levels will make the influencer to engage in SM promotions and in which way? | |
Social monitoring strategy | Listening | • The role of different predictive analytics (e.g., machine learning) to get customer insights • What are the reasons for driving firms to start with customer engagement initiatives? • What is the best way for firms to engage and how does this impact customer engagement? • How do customer sentiments observed in different SM venues affect performance? • Which social listening approach (i.e., manual, fully automated, hybrid) is the most appropriate? |
Responding | • Does SM ease of use and pervasiveness elicit higher customer complaints? • How SM responding promotes WOM and enhances market/financial performance? • Using SM to stimulate positive publicity and minimize negative publicity • Ethical and legal considerations in firm responding • How do individual traits, cultural factors and brand perceptions affect responding strategies? | |
Social CRM strategy | Customer engagement | • Do various types of SM have different impact on CRM and customer engagement? • To what degree customer engagement strength affects the performance of SM platforms? • Customer engagement effects on product perceptions (e.g., quality, satisfaction) • How do specific types of digital engagement practices contribute differently to brand equity? • How do differences in modality, self-disclosure, and privacy translate to digital engagement? • What are the most effective strategies to gain deeper and long-lasting customer engagement? |
CRM capabilities | • Capabilities needed to generate/integrate/reconfigure SM resources to achieve advantages • Determinants of SM capabilities (e.g., data analysis, data synthesis, data interpretation) • How can SM interactions be transformed into valuable marketing resources? • How can SM data/tools be leveraged to generate customer insights and help in new product development? • How do social CRM strategies differ in inexperienced and experienced firms using SM? • How do different strategic decision-making styles influence social CRM strategy outcomes? • What resources/capabilities are needed to implement an effective social CRM strategy? | |
Miscellaneous | Relationship marketing aspects | • How does trust and commitment in a SM context facilitate marketing strategies? • What kind of relational resources can be strategically used in SM? • How is value co-created between sellers and buyers in a SM context? • How does the intensity of SM interaction improve the quality of customer relationships? |
Service marketing aspects | • How is service both positioned and delivered in SM? • How is customer service experience on SM different from the traditional service provider? • How do service providers cope with multi-channel environments in SM? | |
International marketing aspects | • The role of country institutional and regulatory effects on SMMS • Variations in SMMS in SM platforms used solely in certain regions • Factors influencing foreign customer preferences for global versus local SM channels • Differences in international branding through SM channels versus traditional channels • Drivers and performance outcomes of SMMS adaptation in foreign markets • SM content localization versus globalization • How do cultural factors moderate SM customer behaviors across different countries? • What are the key factors influencing SM sales in different nations? |