Marketers nowadays utilise social media platforms to promote businesses and organisations more than ever. Social media platforms have enabled societies and businesses to become more connected than ever before. They have evolved substantially to not only make it easier for people to connect and engage with others but also offered businesses the opportunity to reach more accurate target markets, which contributed to their growth and success over the past few years.
That being said, we will discuss further how marketers utilised social media platforms and how it became a big part of their role.
Associate Professor Peter Vitartas, the course coordinator at EIA, has discussed in his online workshop “Informing Social Media Design Through Digital Marketing Tools Workshop”, the basics of marketing, the tools used in digital marketing, social media analysis and the relevance of marketing in today’s business environment. Watch the workshop here
What is marketing?
According to the American Marketing Association [1], marketing is the activity, set of instructions, and processes of creating, communicating, delivering, and the exchange of information that has value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Learn more: Bachelor of Marketing
Marketing focuses on understanding the people a company is serving and what satisfaction. With this being said, there are several philosophies or values of business operations that determine how businesses focus their marketing efforts based on the types of goals or objectives they try to achieve, namely:
- The Production Concept – businesses are focused on making sure they can produce a product that works, and how they can maximise their production process.
- The Product Concept – businesses are focused on further improvement of their existing products by introducing new product lines, variations, or tailoring the product to the needs of the consumers.
- The Sales Concept – businesses are focused primarily on generating sales and selling as much as possible.
- The Marketing Concept – businesses start to realise that it is important to think long term. This provides businesses with the view to be successful in providing the consumers with their needs.
- The Social Marketing Concept – business eventually realise that while addressing the needs of their consumers are important, the needs of society, in general, should also be addressed. This is where good corporate citizenship starts to grow.
- A Profit Focus – businesses aim their focus on maximising profit generation. The problem with this is when the profit becomes too great, the businesses tend to forget their social responsibility.
- A Return on Investment (ROI) Focus – businesses focus on maximising the returns on the investment a business is rolling out.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing refers to achieving marketing objectives by applying digital media, data, and technology (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2019). The elements of digital marketing include search engine marketing, online PR, online partnerships, display advertising, opt-in emails, and social media marketing.
Recommended read: What is digital marketing?
Digital marketers often use social media platforms to maximise their online presence and reach more people. To better understand this, Associate Professor Peter Vitartas presented a case study focusing on State Emergency Services (SES) in Australia.
The study aims to understand the use of social media platforms by SES, specifically Twitter and Facebook, which are ideal forms of communication for the SES because it is quick, have wide coverage and are relatively cheap.
These platforms were used and examined in the study in 2019, prior to the breakout of the 2019/2020 bushfires. Using analytics, the research team examined words for frequency of use, the sentiment of posts and if they related to likes, and the timing of the posts.
The polarity and subjectivity scores were calculated based on a Python sentiment library called Textblob, and these scores were compared to Facebook and Twitter reactions.
In the end, the researchers found no strong relationship between the two scores, suggesting that the variables are not affected by one another (i.e., sentiment scores are not reflective of ‘likes’). Therefore, reactions are not necessarily influenced by subjective or objective words. Also, the research unravelled that user engagements are higher during the afternoon and evening as compared to mornings. This indicates that there are specific time periods when posts receive higher numbers of user engagement and reactions.
Interested in pursuing a degree in marketing? Check out EIA’s Bachelor of Marketing here, and we encourage you to consider the digital marketing minor to better prepare yourself to take on the marketing world.
[1] https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing/
