Viral Marketing Strategies Assignment: Reaching Customers Through Social Media and Word of Mouth

Introduction of Social Media & Viral Marketing Assignment

Social media and Viral Marketing seek to lay out pieces of information about a particular product or service from person to person by word of mouth or by spreading via social media platforms. The target of a viral marketing strategy is to influence individuals to share a message of marketing to their family members, friends and other known and unknown individuals to build an exponential widening in the number of its recipients. All viral marketing samples can be two type - deliberate and accidental which then include three main parts- message, messenger and atmosphere, that must be used to build a successful viral marketing campaign.

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PART ONE: Identify Problems by evaluating social media marketing startegies

Evaluation of social media strategy

Social media (SM) marketing has the advantage over traditional communication channels as it generates a wealth of data that is helpful in evaluating strategies. SM analytics is present covering every aspect of social media performance in marketing. The information of analytics may be used to evaluate the performance of any organisation. Many marketing and social media teams do not research this level of detail. The senior management team get the simple metrics according to the number of likes, shares and followers. SKC England needs detailed scrutiny of analytics like other marketing and customer service activities. SKC England needs to move beyond likes (trm-marketing.com, 2022). Followers and likes do not count in the actual performance. Tracking down the growth of followers is needed. SKC England with its social media content can connect with its followers. The company can highlight their business through its social media content. SKC England needs to make sure its posts reach more and more people.

SKC England has to determine its objectives. The best metrics can be taken after determining its objectives. The process of mapping social media metrics to its objectives helps to grow its business through SM and viral marketing. SM platforms can be used to increase brand awareness. SKC England can use SM to drive sales through their website by measuring the number of clicks, shares and retweets. Organisations must act quickly in response to the SM queries of customers. Metrics related to the average time of response of the team can quantify the team’s speed. Building relationship with the followers is a vital component in generating leads. These leads can convert into sales. Companies should use SM platforms for their benefit by utilizing these platforms totally (Varagi?, 2019). SKC England can integrate its marketing across multiple channels to reach a broader audience. A company’s brand image somewhat depends on its SM presence in today’s world.

The target of the organization with social media posts or aspect

Social media targets a particular group of people that they have identified as appealing. These targets can depend on various figures like age category, education, level of income online searches and preferences and others. The targeted people on social media include the people who are likely to be fascinated by their products. Desired marketing targets for social media usually move around consumer engagement, creating more revenue, developing the buyer's experience and taking the company as a thought leader (Brown et al. 2022). Making and improving a website is a very important part of any business in this modern world.

Figure 1: Social Media Post 1

(Source: Shureidokarate.com 2022)

Figure 2: Social Media Post 2

(Source: Shureidokarate.com 2022)

As per the above 4 social media posts few things can be noticed. The selected organisation is Shureidokarate and the above posts have been released by the company in the social media platforms. They are doing their advertisement for promoting their brands. Along with this, one must need focus on expanding the online outreach to social media platforms. Nowadays online media can transform any business landscape in a vast way. It has now become one of the significant aspects of digital marketing, that provides extraordinary profits which help any company to touch millions of customers worldwide. If someone is a CEO or owner of a small business, it is quite important for them to know why he or she needs to be on social online platforms and how it will be going to left a great impact on their business (Fakunle, 2020). Various networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others are very important for surviving the industrial battle in the market. Companies which do not have active social media platforms accounts have a vast chance of risk missing great marketing opportunities.

This useful post for achieving the target

One of the largest focusing point that any company face as a marketer is achieving the desired targeted customers effectively. In fact, the chief goal of online marketing is to spread the right message to the right person. And for doing that one need to understand how to the targeted market effectively. If the marketed product goes to the wrong set of people, the company will face ending up wasting their time and money as well (Bn.co, 2020). To touch their targeted consumers an organisation must first define their pointed audiences and for this, they need to understand the need of their customers. An organisation in the industrial market need to focus on reaching its real customers effectively through adopting various kinds of strategies like sponsoring the influencers on social media, posting different post and advertisement relating to their respective products and others. Then only a company can m, market its products only to those people who are genuinely interested in them.

The post achieving this strategy

Strategies only work when implemented successfully. Brands did not give much importance to SM platforms for their business development. Dependency on social media needs expert SM marketing teams otherwise growth of the organisation can take a full flourish. Identifying the right SM platform is necessary. Only the right platform can help to connect with more people. Superficial engagement with any online platform cannot give any advantage to its business (Keles, 2022). Lack of connection among departments of a company can act negatively on any organisation. SM engagement cannot always target the right audience. The right audience choice is important to grow through SM platforms and viral marketing.

SFC England must meet consumer expectations. Strategies only cannot develop the brand image. Brands need to give right service according to the expectations which they miss sometimes. Mapping strategies need to be structured carefully otherwise useful metrics using SM will not work properly. Organic social media posts are reaching fewer people. SM platforms are trying to give personalized customer service. SFC needs to analyse its performance beyond likes. Likes and follow numbers cannot justify performance. Performance can only grow through right content. The right content will attract people who are more interested in the business. SFC can only grow by planning strategies and solving problems.

Critical evaluation of the post achieving this strategy

SKC England can evaluate the effectiveness of its viral marketing strategy by following five simple steps.

• It could be a stroke of luck for the company to get millions of views in one social media post but for making it viral every time it must choose the appropriate social media. SKC England has to constantly keep a track of its social post engagements and when its target audience is most active. Once they evaluate and analyze this information, it needs to post its content accordingly.
• The company must also be active constantly so that its target audience does not lose interest in the content. However, it should not have too much activity that becomes annoying for its audience (sproutsocial.com, 2022). SKC has to find the proper balance so that it becomes easier for the company to retain its target audience. Some posts and stories need to be time sensitive and this would tap into the follows’ fear of missing out. This would bring the viewers back who sometimes become inactive.
• The quality of the post must be as per the need of the audience. The modern audience mostly likes short-form videos and images in comparison to other content. The engagement percentages for short videos and images are 66% and 61% respectively. The company also needs to connect with the human side of its target audience. This would help the company to sustain more followers rather than simply asking for likes and clicks. The posts must be properly spellchecked and they should add value to the target audience. SKC England has to constantly analyze the engagement level of its audience while the company is using the following three methods. Viral marketing would require little trial and error at the beginning along with using boosts and advertisements for the post. The company would understand which method is working with these experiments.The last but not least step is to track the ROI for these social media marketing investments. Content marketing will become more fun when the company starts generating the ROI from the investments it has made. The usage of a tracking system depending on the goals of the company would help it to track the ROI. The knowledge of this result would help the company to set its future campaign strategies.

PART TWO: Provide solutions to the problems you’ve identified

Recommendations

Recommendation 1: To improve the lack of communication across various departments

To improve communication across various departments in SKC England it is recommended to practice hiring new talent so that the core team can adjust to the challenges faced by social media (Chen et al. 2018). It is recommended to invest in other departments as well so that they can contribute to planning different strategies.

Recommendation 2: To improve the performance of the team

The analytic reports of the gained by different business organizations are not followed completely. Therefore, it is recommended to follow the reports care so that it can help in the SM Marketing for the SKC England organization.

Recommendation 3: To help identify the correct platform

It is very important to understand the importance of every SM platform and also be able to analyse which SM platform is suitable to launch a particular advertisement. During the Covid-19 pandemic, 51% of the organization’s consumers have been seen using YouTube to discover various brands launched in the market.

Recommendation 4: To understand the target audience

It is recommended to get the personal data of their consumers so that it can module their business in such a way that it can cater to their consumers efficiently. It is also recommended to use different social listening tools to get the personalized preferences of the consumers.

Identified challenges

There are several challenges SKC England would face while doing viral marketing for the company. The awareness regarding the importance and benefits of Karate is not clear and popular among the people of England. The people of England have various other physical activities and sports that they are interested in. No one in the country has previously tried to advertise Karate there and therefore it is not clear who could be the target audience of the company. It would be a big hustle to find the proper coaches in England can train the target audience properly and it is important. The company needs to understand which platform would be most suitable for the teaching produce. They also have to be thoughtful regarding the time duration of each session. The constant analysis of the viral marketing data is required and only professional SEO and SM analyzers will be able to help in this process. The company lacks a face that can promote the services of the company to its customers.

The person who would be promoting the services needs to be someone who is highly aware of Karate and its benefits. The accurate choice for this promotion would be someone who is already linked with Karate and is a citizen of England. However, the company may not be able to find such a person since Karate is not much popular in the country (socialmediatoday.com, 2022). The company may face a problem regarding the practice space, as Karate practice would require a lot of space. They have to book a large hall room if they are planning to teach it physically and it would create an effect on its budget. Tariff planning is another important factor that guides to improvement the promotional position through digital platforms. It also enhances the website transparency that guides making the organisation stable in the competitive business market. Apart from that, evaluating the market trend can easily be made through digital media or social media platforms that guide to improve the business structure as well as internal performances of the organisation.

Best suggestions for the identified problems

The key finding of the study is that the main constraint of the company SKC England, an organization of Karate practitioners is the unpopularity of Karate in England. Not only in England, but Karate also is not so popular except in some parts of Asia. this has been found that the company is struggling in the aspect of digital and viral marketing. The best possible suggestions are provided s follows.

• As there is a lack of self-awareness regarding Karate in the country, the organization may look into the basic facts that are to promote Karate itself throughout the country. Extension of governmental help can be fruitful in such a situation (Tang et al. 2020). The company can seek help from the sports department of the government. SKC England can arrange different events and can cover them through its social media handle. This will at least increase the regularity of the social media handle of the company.
• As Karate is not that popular it is difficult to find any case studies. The company can hire professional experts in this context to do the research work on how to popularize Karate regarding the data from the places where it is popular enough.
• SKC England needed to assign a social media (SM) handle team and needed to reinforce them to increase their efficiency. The organization is needed to document all the events that are organized and post these on several social media platforms. The SM team is required to update with the contemporary trends in the different SM platforms (influencermarketinghub.com, 2022). Here the organization can struggle with the identification of the right platform. The organization is needed to emphasize several factors such as audience reach, traffic potential, cost of advertisement, lead generation, and many other aspects. The team can fix a certain hashtag to promote the organization on SM platforms.
• The next issue takes place which is the identification of the target audience. This is true that there is not any prior evidence of dealing with such problems or any database. First, the organization needed to popularize Karate among the younger people then they can formulate an effective SM strategy for business development.
• The organization can look to the promotion of Karate as well as the SKC England by involving SM influencers or celebrities. This will be effective if the organization promotes its programs through celebrities from the background of popular sports in the country, such as Cricket, Football, or any other games.
• The SM visibility of the organization is required to get effective results regarding SM and Viral marketing. The organization can be benefited by offering unique services to the consumers (Guo and Wu, 2019). The organization can offer any innovative services for the guardian of the practitioners. This is needed to promote properly in the different SM platforms. This can be an effective way of engaging consumers.
• SKC England can also offer online classes based on the history and theoretical contents of Karate. This might attract a number of consumers.

Limitations of the suggestions

There are certain limitations related to these recommendations as well which need to be carefully looked upon so that it helps in the SM marketing for SKC England. The hiring of new talents can be a very difficult task as it can be difficult to find talented and skilled individuals in the market who can adjust to various challenges faced by SM. Investing in other departments can increase the cost of expenses of the organization as a result it may reflect in the final cost of expenditure of the organization, therefore, increasing the cost of expenses.

If the reports of the business are followed in every aspect, then it may create several issues if there consist any flaws in the report. Blindly following the suggestion can be disastrous as the root cause of the problem will not be identified easily (Kong et al. 2019). In recommendation 3 there are various limitations that need to be carefully looked upon before implementing the strategy. Even if the correct SM platform is used to advertise their strategies. It may not be able to influence people on a larger scale as a result it may not attract a large number audience or customers to their organization. They need to adapt various ways in which they are able to target and influence consumers so that it helps them to increase their reputation in the market (Ahmed et al. 2019). The last recommendation also has certain limitations which need to be carefully looked upon. It is recommended to identify their target audience, which can be a difficult task in a world that consists of people belonging to diverse cultures that have different choices and preferences. It is difficult to cater to the needs of each and every individual. All these limitations need to be carefully analysed before implementing them in real life.

Conclusion

Taking into consideration the above study it can be concluded that SM marketing is one of the most important platforms to promote any business in the current situation. This mode of promotion is very effective for any business organisation as a great portion of the global people is addicted to social media as well as other digital platforms. SKC England is one of the leading business organisations in the UK and it runs its business successfully over the decades. Another important factor of the promotional activity is to meet new and quite different demands of the customers that can be easily met with the help of SM platforms. This particular factor guides to improve the brand awareness and popularity of the brand leads to enhance the annual revenue collection process as well as the sustainability of the competitive business market. This is one of the best promotional platforms as it guides to reach more amount of customers within a limited period.

References

Journals

Ahmed, Y.A., Ahmad, M.N., Ahmad, N. and Zakaria, N.H., 2019. Social media for knowledge-sharing: A systematic literature review. Telematics and informatics, 37, pp.72-112.

Brown, E., Nelson, N., Gubbins, S. and Colenutt, C., 2022. Airborne Transmission of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus: A Review of Past and Present Perspectives. Viruses, 14(5), p.1009.

Chen, R., Hua, Q., Chang, Y.S., Wang, B., Zhang, L. and Kong, X., 2018. A survey of collaborative filtering-based recommender systems: From traditional methods to hybrid methods based on social networks. IEEE Access, 6, pp.64301-64320.

Fakunle, A.G., Olusola, B., Jafta, N., Faneye, A., Heederik, D., Smit, L.A. and Naidoo, R.N., 2020. Home Assessment of Indoor Microbiome (HAIM) in relation to lower respiratory tract infections among under-five children in Ibadan, Nigeria: the study protocol. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(6), p.1857.

Guo, J. and Wu, W., 2019. A novel scene of viral marketing for complementary products. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 6(4), pp.797-808.

Keles, J.Y., 2020. Return Mobilities of Highly Skilled Young British Kurdish People to Kurdistan. The Kurds in the Middle East: Enduring Problems and New Dynamics, p.305.

Kong, X., Shi, Y., Yu, S., Liu, J. and Xia, F., 2019. Academic social networks: Modeling, analysis, mining and applications. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 132, pp.86-103.

Tang, J., Zhang, R., Wang, P., Zhao, Z., Fan, L. and Liu, X., 2020. A discrete shuffled frog-leaping algorithm to identify influential nodes for influence maximization in social networks. Knowledge-Based Systems, 187, p.104833.

Varagi?, S.P., Towards the Reinterpretation of the 1980s in Yugoslavia. Research in Dragana (Jovanovi?) Žarevac’s Performance Archive.

Websites

bn.co, (2020), Tech-enabled Paid Social Media Services, Available at: https://bn.co/solutions/media-services/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=BN+-+Search+Campaign+1&utm_content=Ad+Group+1&ppc_keyword=social%20media%20marketing%20companies&gclid=Cj0KCQiAm5ycBhCXARIsAPldzoW-rO39aTa_axuZs0NRnzkZXCSQtiu_9As6anqWMMN0GnQR1VZqb90aAm6wEALw_wcB, [Accessed on: 1st December]

influencermarketinghub.com, (2022), 5 of the Biggest Social Media Marketing Challenges, Available at:https://influencermarketinghub.com/social-media-marketing-challenges/#toc-0 [Accessed on: 1st December, 2022]

Shureidokarate.com (2022), Overview of the Company: https://shureidokarate.com/ [Accessed on: 09-12-2022]

socialmediatoday.com, (2022), The 5 Step Social Media Evaluation, Available at: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-5-step-social-media-evaluation/453053/ [Accessed on: 3rd December, 2022]

sproutsocial.com, (2022), Social media marketing: What it is and how to build your strategy, Available at: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/ [Accessed on: 3rd December, 2022]

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