Revolutionizing Digital Marketing: Exploring Social Media & Beyond - Essay Sample

Introduction

From a professional perspective, it is not doubted that digital platforms and online capabilities have revolutionized marketing. One form of digital marketing that has revolutionized marketing is social media digital marketing. In terms of definition digital marketing is the component of current marketing that exploits the use of the internet and online-based digital technologies (Humphreys 2016, p.23). It involves the use of desktops, mobile phones, and any other digital platforms that aid in the promotion of products and services of a company. Digital marketing began development in the 1990s and the 2000s (Humphreys 2016, p.23). Since its beginning, it has revolutionized marketing in a lot of ways. Some of the means of which digital marketing has revolutionized marketing is through one of its common form which is social media marketing. Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms, for example, the major social media platform Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to connect with a company's audience to build a brand, increase sales and move forward the website traffic (Lindgren 2017, P.34). In this essay, the focus is to evaluate the process of revolution of marketing spearheaded by social media marketing as a form of digital marketing. The case study used is marketing procedure over the years in the Coca Cola Company.

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First social media impacts and influence on the daily lives of everyone have since been huge. Most people can never with a doubt live without social media (Schafer and Van 2017 p.23). Many companies, brands, and businesses have had since devised that social media can be a powerful way to connect them to their audience. Social media is a useful way to connect and engage with the target audience, which is the reason it is considered a revolution rather than revolution to marketing trends (Kannan and Hongshuang 2017, p. 26). Social media marketing is a revolution that has built a strong long-lasting, positive brand reputation which is why it has revolutionized marketing for the Coca Cola brand in the following ways;

Brand Engagement

Social media has revolutionized marketing through brand engagement. Brand engagement in the previous years before social media marketing was impossible. In previous times marketing was done through a newspaper which is one-way communication. In the nineteenth century, marketing was done by the Coca Cola corporation was done through classified advertisements. The advertisement often covered the entire page of a newspaper. Each of the products to introduce to the readers of the magazine was arranged in matters of the most importance. Coca Cola is a brand that was quite huge at that time; it would get the first page of the Manchester Guardian (Assimakopoulos, Antoniadis, Kayas. and Dvizac 2017 p.172). The kind of marketing that was done then about branding was done through the different bunches of the magazine. In terms of interaction, there was not any feedback, there was an assumption from the marketing department of Coca Cola that those who read this papers with colorful picture was attractive enough to make the clients and customers going for more Coca Cola brands on the shelves.

The branding set was done unique to every magazine and newspaper. The marketing strategists assumed that readers of the New Times in London are different from those that read Manchester Guardian. With such an assumption, the marketing strategy was to ensure that note the same product category would be on both papers. In a nutshell, the company pushed its brand through target profiling. The company believed that a group of users in a particular place would prefer a product category than another group and so they decide to put the preferred product category on the newspaper page as a form of building their brand. Market profiling before the existence of digital media was the only way that marketing would be unique in the newspaper on matters branding. The existence of digital marketing has revolutionized branding. It is only through social media marketing that brand engagement can take place, which is a complete revolution from market profiling. In market profiling, there is no engagement of the audience of the brand (Ananda, Hernandez-Garcia and Lamberti 2016, p.175). All that is done in market profiling is an assumption. Social media is a revolution since it is built around the community that uses the brand in service. Social media only thrives through users interacting on a one on one platform with their favorite brands. Social media marketing is a popular source of information for the user, which makes the platform interactive.

Brand engagement and social media make marketing easy as there is one on one engagement between the selling brand and the customers. Social media marketing allows the service brand to engage with customers either publically or through private messages which build the brand of the service provider. For the case study, Coca Cola Corporation adopted social media marketing in 2006 (Gupta, 2011, p.58). Their strength lies in regular engagement with their customers. They use regular engagement with their customers and have continuously strengthened their brand. In the year 2017, the company through twitter as a social media platform using the hashtag tastes the feeling to get an edge over its soft drink competitors (Gupta, 2011, p.58). The campaign hashtag that the company used went viral and talked about all over the internet and all the social media platforms. The hashtag tastes the feeling received a lot of feedback online which informed the company on the number of users that subscribe to their brand. Unlike regional profiling that the corporation used digital marketing through social media marketing presented an excellent opportunity for the brand to engage their current audience and potential prospects. Such an opportunity did not exist before thereby confirming the thesis of this study that digital marketing has revolutionized marketing.

Provision of Customers' Service

A second evaluation which is proof that digital marketing has revolutionized marketing is through the provision of customer service. Social media marketing has revolutionized marketing into customer service helpline. Before the existence of digital media marketing mass communication forums created a platform for marketing. The existence of radio and televisions enhanced marketing platforms. The attraction of spoken words, music, images, moving pictures and colors made it easier for marketers to advertise products and so they could not resist. From the Case study of Coca Cola, they ran a lot of advertisement on live stream media. As a company, Coca Cola created highly proficient target marketing as a scientific discipline (Keegan and Rowley 2017, p.1334). The marketing departments of the company in the year 1998 spend about more than fifty thousand US dollars on a complex market research project. These projects were supposed to help determine what kind of marketing strategy worked over the mainstream media over another. The answer to these entire research projects was not found until the introduction of social media which enhanced customer service processes.

The revolution began in the year 1990 with the early years of the internet. The revolution becomes stronger in the year 2006 when Coca Cola Corporation decided to open social media accounts linking its customers. The market research that the company spends billions of money on was not successful because there was not any engagement of the customers on the kind of products and help that they needed. All the marketing strategy was chosen based on trial and error. However, the existence of social media marketing there was a clickable banner linking marketers directly to their customers. The company can now serve their customers based on their customer needs. Users of a brand can now contact their brand via social media channels to get their questions on areas of concern answered. The former long process that involved emailing, calling for customer helpline was time-consuming and most clients felt unsatisfied. On social media platforms, the reply to a customer by a company is the instance. The social media marketing platforms have made easier and effective to get a response from a representative and resolve customer's queries quickly.

According to Coca Cola Corporation borrowing information from their website, they take pride in their brand and reputation by being the company that serves its customer's concerns within a very short period on all their online platforms (Macarthy 2018, p.89). Social media marketing revolutionizing customer service has helped Coca Cola Corporation have control over the kind of service that their customers are demanding. An example is the opportunity to realize negative posts and comments and be able to delete them or respond to them before other beverage service providers can see it. Removing comments enabled through social media marketing enables the customers to express their feelings further while limiting the extent to which they destroy the brand. From the above explanations, it is clear that social media marketing as a form of digital marketing revolutionized marketing through the introduction of online customer services which were not there previously. The explanation supported by the case study of Coca Cola supports the thesis statement that digital marketing has revolutionized marketing.

Monitoring Of Advertisement

Another way in which social media marketing as one of the forms of digital marketing has revolutionized marketing is through monitoring of advertisements. Advertisement since the development of media has been a marketing strategy exploited by many businesses and entrepreneurs (Helmond et al. 2019, P.124). All through the print media era to the mainstream media era advertisements were paid for by the company that needed the services. The advertisements that were published in newspapers cost between sixty-three thousand US dollars to eight million. Coca Cola Corporation in the financial year 2002-2003 spent forty thousand US dollars on print media and mainstream media advertisements (Gupta, 2011, p.60). The amount spent by Coca Cola averaged to about 342 000 US dollars per thirty seconds of TV advertisement (Gupta, 2011, p.60). The amount spent on advertisement is quite expensive. The revolution caused by social media marketing on advertisement displays itself in two ways.

Social media provides several marketing and advertisement opportunities that are free. Although the social media platforms also include paid advertisement opportunities the cost spends on advertisement can be reduced by exploiting the free marketing opportunities. For an established company like Coca Cola paid advertisements on social media is a marketing strategy that enables their brand to reach a lot of people globally. Social media marketing provides the opportunity for budgeting which plays a factor in the level of advertising that will go out to consumers. The opportunity of budgeting was not provided for in the mainstream media advertisement. The only way out for companies was to pay a lot of money to the mainstream media so that their brand would run a lot of advertisements within short periods. Social media has revolutionized advertising so that even small and medium enterprises which could not get spaces on mainstream media for advertisements due to their low budget now have an opportunity to advertise freely on social media with a great outreach than the mainstream media.

The second means in which advertisement as a marketing strategy has been revolutionized by social media marketing is through providing a space for monitoring (Jenkins, Ford and...