Analysis Of Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media is gaining importance as a component of marketing strategies. However, there is a paucity in both theoretical and practical guidance on how to better use social media and incorporate it into marketing strategy. To fill the gap, this paper firstly conceptualized “social media marketing strategy”. We then proposed an integrated framework which is referred as four-stage model of social media marketing strategy. With in-depth review of existent literature, this paper includes social media marketing mix strategy, content marketing strategy, firm engagement strategy and social CRM strategy into the model as four stages to build social media marketing strategy. The study elaborated each strategy based on extensive review of previous studies,

2016; Killian and McManus 2015; Lamberton and Stephen 2016). Consumers are increasingly taking control of marketing communication, as they have become creators, collaborators, and commentators (Hamilton, Kaltcheva and Rohm 2016). Meanwhile, firms are taking the advantage of social media platforms to expand geographic reach to customers (Wright et al. 2010), increase brand awareness, and build strong relationships with customers (Rydén, Ringberg and Wilke 2015). Marketers nowadays are competing for customer engagement and seeking to have real conversation with increasingly networked consumers on social media.

With an understanding of the importance of engagement with customers, fewer firms appear to have strategized for their social media appearance (Griffiths and Mclean 2015). For most companies, the difficulty has not been to initiate their social media campaigns, but to truly engage and build valuable relationships with their consumers (Schultz and Peltier 2013). This presents an enormous challenge for companies who fully understand the importance and opportunities of social media and, but are lack of theoretical guidance on how to better integrate their social media usage into marketing

Research of social media marketing strategy is still limited, the literature on this topic mainly focus on specific and isolated aspects. For example, Keegan and Rowley (2017) developed a stage model to evaluate the key stages of social media campaigns. Felix et al. (2017) emphasize their study on the conceptualization and dimension of strategic social media marketing. Kumar et al. (2013) create and test metrics of effective measurement of social media strategy. There is a lack of studies on the content of social media marketing strategy from a holistic perspective. Questions such as what is social media marketing strategy, what objectives and activities should include in an integrated social media marketing strategy are still not answered.

This study responds to calls for appropriate strategies for companies to deal with social media in this changing landscape (e.g., Schultz and Peltier 2013; Guesalaga 2016). Our objectives are threefold. First, we conceptualize the term of “social media marketing strategy” and thus contribute to its conceptual clarity. Second, we build a research framework by organizing the fragmented body of literature. Third, we provide an in-depth review of previous research and propose for future research