Social Media Marketing Research 2016

This assignment focuses on summarizing research related to social media marketing conducted in 2016. It requires you to analyze provided academic papers focusing on topics like digital marketing strategies, performance measurement, consumer behavior in the digital age, and the role of social media in marketing communications.

Running head: INNOVATIONS OF DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING
Innovations of the digital media marketing
Name of the student
Name of the University
Author note

1INNOVATIONS OF DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING
1. The ladder of engagement
Digital marketing is termed as the utilization of various concepts which is geared towards
the increase of audience to a website. This is a form of online conversions where a company or
organization, usually in the form of their website is used to meet audiences by leveraging the
power of internet. Due to the increase in the internet adoption by various companies, the
utilization of marketing concepts have been in place which is the cause for driving sales to the
company. As a result, various funnels for digital marketing are in place for this reason.
One of the digital marketing techniques is the ladder of engagement. This is involved in
providing a step by step process which consists of defining the steps to follow for marketing.
This process does not involve the immediate method of advertising where the end-users are
asked for engagement. Instead, they are shown various objective ideas which are associated with
the users engaging on the content (Chaffey 2016). As a result, this leads to the increase in the
engagement received on the particular content and as a result, this leads to the meeting of the
objectives of the marketer. Many companies are involved with this level of engagement which
helps in increasing the level of engagement perceived by the company.
The company Amazon is termed as a very big ecommerce company. Their main business
model involved connecting the sellers with the buyers. These sellers list the products and the
buyers purchase them. This is the main business model of the company. They also use the ladder
of engagement marketing strategy for their business applications. This result in the company
reaches out to their audience and get conversions.
The company has adopted the use of the ladder of engagement concept in various ways.
The first step involved is getting a customer to review on the product. This helps in getting

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feedback from the customer and showcase on their website. The next step involved is to show
the feedbacks to the other customers. If a customer sees the feedback obtained on that product, it
gives a positive reaction and persuades them to purchase the product. This is the main concept
involved. The customers are notified to come and review the product, which is an indirect way of
persuading them to make sales for the company (Stone and Woodcock 2014). According to the
lower levels of the ladder, the customers are allowed to give feedbacks on the system which will
then be used to showcase the features of the product. This is also an indirect form of
advertisements which helps in making sales for the company.
Figure 1: Ladder of engagement
(Source: Caldwell 2017, pp 130)
The utilization of these steps is used for making profit for the company. This is the main
reason why the Amazon Company has made great success in their productions. Similarly, the

3INNOVATIONS OF DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING
engagement of the customers has also been increased due to the adoption of such programs of
digital marketing.
2. Evaluation of social media platform
For the evaluation of a social media platform, Facebook is chosen for making an analysis.
This is an excellent website with over a billion people who surfs their social pages. Many people
are interested in surfing facebook pages more than they surf the internet. For this reason, this
paper has made an analysis of the marketing solutions provided by Facebook.
There are various methods utilized in marketing business by the use of Facebook. This is
mainly involved in increasing the customer engagement gathered on their businesses. Now-a-
days, most of the online businesses are linked to their facebook fan page (Levy and Gvili 2015).
This is mainly involved in increasing the user engagement of the audiences involved of that
business website. There are various methods of utilizing the facebook marketing options which
are mainly being used by various online marketers across the world.
Marketing ways
The first method of using the Facebook marketing feature is to connect the business page
with the website. This helps in generating social traffic to the website which in turn leads to the
increase in the engagement of the audience. This is a great way to increase the social media
traffic for companies.
The next method used by facebook is advertising to audiences. Facebook uses classic
advertisements which can be used to target audiences depending on countries, age groups or
gender (Karjaluoto, Mustonen and Ulkuniemi 2015). Moreover, the use of Facebook ads can also

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be used to target audiences depending on their behaviors like gaming, businesses or other
interests. Moreover, depending on these interests, marketers can be able to pinpoint their content
to these people with these specific interests such that it can get much amount of targeted reach
and engagement.
The third method is reaching out to influencers on Facebook. Influencers are people
which have a significant amount of audience reach in a particular interest. Business organizations
or companies are many times found to reach out to these influencers for promoting their services
(Urban, Gosline and Lee 2017). This helps the company to reach the people with much lesser
funds which allow them to increase their sales.
The fourth method of facebook marketing is retargeting the users who previously were
targeted. It sometimes happens that a post fails to get the attention of the people or a customer
does not get engagement. Facebook retargets them so that this can be used for getting the
required engagement on the posts.
Lastly, the use of promoted posts is another way of digital marketing. In this case, the
posts are promoted to the audience of the business facebook page. This helps in getting more
conversions as all the audiences are normally shown the ads for engagement.
Critical analysis of Facebook using the seven step framework
Step Task Solutions
1. What is the aspect of business? Business on facebook is done by utilizing the
analytics and ads section.
2 What is the main purpose of this? The main utilization of business from facebook is to
increase the engagement obtained from users across

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the world
3. What are the benefits? This helps a website to increase their social media
traffic and increase the engagement on their services
which helps in driving sales.
4. Disadvantages of facebook ads It takes time to build an audience. Moreover, owners
need to maintain constant relationship with the
audiences.
5. Specifications of facebook ads People are required to pay for CPC rates which must
be higher than other advertisers or close to trigger
the display of the content.
6. Types of marketing uses Image ads, video ads, conversion ads
7. Presence of alternatives There are other social media marketing platforms
like Twitter or Pinterest.
3. Website checklist
A website checklist is supposed to be an evaluative tool which helps to denote the
performance of the website by checking its response to the listed criteria. The checklist is usually
comprised of various conditions and based on these conditions, a website is evaluated. If the
website is seemed to successfully respond to the criteria, a tick mark is provided at the end of it
(). On the other hand, if the website is not able to meet the response listed, then a cross (X)
mark is listed at the end of the list.
For evaluating the usability of a website, the checklist that is usually applied is more or
less similar for every websites. This is mainly because the operations of a website are similar in

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every aspect. The main difference among the various websites is the types of services that are
provided. In case of blogger websites, the intention of the website owner is to educate the
audience regarding any associated information (Leeflang et al. 2014). These usually make their
revenue by hosting ads on the page or referring to a product for commissions. The next type of
website is the ecommerce websites which earns revenue through their products. Lastly, company
websites are design related websites which is involved with both a front-end and a back-end. The
checklist involved is similar in all these cases.
The chosen website is topman.com. This is basically an ecommerce website which is
mainly involved in the selling of apparels. These apparels mainly involve men’s fashion. As a
result, the audience of the website is male audiences (Caldwell 2017). Their products include
clothing, jeans, suits and accessories. This website will be considered for evaluating against the
made checklist. All the associate web-pages of this site will also be considered for the complete
evaluation.
Website checklist
1. Accessibility
Features Rating
Reasonable load-time of the website 
Decent text-background ratio X
Spacing/font size is decent 
Present of 404 error page 
2. Identity

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Features Rating
Prominent placement of the company logo 
Decent meaning of the company tagline 
Clear company information X
Clear contact information X
Clear perception of information from the home
page

3. Navigation
Features Rating
The navigation of the main home page is easily
identifiable

The navigation of the website can be easily found
out

The presence of links in the website are justified 
The logo of the company is linked to the home
page of the website

The search bar of the website is easy for accessing 
4. Content
Features Rating
The headings are very clear and descriptive 
There is consistency in the color and the style of
the webpage

There is sparse use of emphasis on the content of 

8INNOVATIONS OF DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING
the website
The popup or the advertisements are unobtrusive X
The main content of the website is self-explanatory
for initiating engagement
X
The URL of the website is meaningful and user-
friendly

4. Trend analysis involving niches
The modern era of digital marketing has made various innovations in the market mainly
due to the fact that they have been able to boost revenue of a company or has made various
channels of revenue for the company involved. One such trend is the niche identification. The
identification of niches is important for any online service to get the proper level of marketing
needed. Basically, people belonging to a niche are usually comprised of a specific interest which
makes up that niche (Rowley and Keegan 2017). When a website which sells services similar to
that niche advertises their product, there is a high chance that the level of conversions perceived
from them is really high. For this reason, the need to identify niches is really important in case of
any businesses.
In the recent years, the growth of specific niches is the main innovations that have been
in the market. Airbnb and Uber are the most successful business models in their specific niche.
Their niche is B2B which is defined as business to business. Both of these companies are usually
involved with connecting businesses (Ryan 2016). The operations of Airbnb are involved with
connecting house owners across the world. The platform of Airbnb connects them to their
extensive lists of customers who stay at these rented houses. In a similar manner, Uber is

9INNOVATIONS OF DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING
involved in connecting drivers to passengers. Here, drivers can list their cars to the network of
Uber and customers can easily book a cab. These are the two specific business models of the
companies which are mainly targeted towards the B2B niches. Utilizing this model, many new
companies have been found to operate using the same niche.
As a marketer, the analysis of a niche is extremely important for getting the required
conversion in terms of sales or user signup. The companies that have been listed above also
provide affiliate marketing. This means that people around the world can promote their services
and earn commissions from them. This will help in generating commission for people and in the
same time lead to increase in business for the company (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick 2016). This
is the main consideration that marketers must be wary of. The need to consider niches in the
market is the first thing to succeed here. This will increase the conversion rate from both end of
the business.
The increase in luxurious items niches are also another breakthrough in the modern
world. The business model of these niches is similar to the other companies where the sole
difference is in the services that are considered. Storefront, Appear Here and many other
business companies have adopted the similar business models of niche marketing where
customers can rent retail space or buy space. This model of business has been utilized by many
other companies across the world.
5. Transition of magazines in the digital media
The transition of digital media has been adopted by various companies in their marketing
strategies. These have been adopted in the transition of the offline marketing through magazines
to online digital magazines. The use of the digital magazines has been increased in UK. This has

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led to the increase of targeting for marketers in the digital media sections which in turn have led
to the increase in the revenue made (Kasemsap 2018). The use of the digital media is a great way
to generate content and get contents. As a result, various companies or business organizations
have been using the relevance of digital magazines in their strategies for reaching out to new
audiences.
The involvement of the digital media marketing can also be done through the use of
online magazines. In the last 12 months in UK, the increase in engagement can be evident
through the increase of online purchases. This has led to the increase of market acquisition for
brands that targets users by using online magazines for them. The increase in the purchase of
digital magazines is over 30% in the United Kingdom. However the only benefit for this media
buying strategy is for fashion brands which have made effective increase in their acquisition rate
through the use of this channel of marketing.
Figure 2: Market acquisition of online magazines in UK
(Source: Jones, Alford and Wolfenden 2015, pp 169)

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The use of digital marketing is greatly associated with the involvement of the content
marketing aspects. The use of the content marketing is greatly seen in the use of the digital
magazines or newspapers for promotions (Jones, Alford and Wolfenden 2015). As a result, the
improvement of the market has been subjected to increasing engagement from the users. Now,
the use of infographic advertisements is also a trend in the digital media. It can be seen that the
involvement of content marketing has greatly driven engagement for various companies in the
market of UK. The increase in impacts of content marketing is 18% in the year 2016.
Figure 3: Increase in content marketing
(Source: Bosomworth 2015, pp 50)
The increase in digital media has led to the tracking of users through their devices. This
has led to a study which shows that the digital media usage in terms of devices have been
changed significantly (Bosomworth 2015). These devices are tablets, e-book readers, desktop
and Smartphone. This is also another cause for the increase in content marketing through digital

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marketing for reaching out to the number of customers present across the world on the specific
niches.
Figure 4: Percentage increase in readers
(Source: Leeflang et al. 2014, pp 10)
The digital magazines are usually made in the form of PDF files. These are usually
loaded with content and images which denotes the utilization of a magazine. In addition, the
marketers who make these digital magazines embed their website URL in the PDF. This
generates a form of engagement from the users of the magazines which in turn led to the increase
in the revenue made on the company.

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6. References
Baker, M.J. and Saren, M. eds., 2016. Marketing theory: a student text. Sage.
Bosomworth, D., 2015. Mobile marketing statistics 2015. Leeds: Smart Insights (Marketing
Intelligence) Ltd.
Caldwell, D., 2017. Printed t-shirts in the linguistic landscape. Linguistic Landscape, 3(2),
pp.122-148.
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F., 2016. Digital marketing. Prentice Hall.
Chaffey, D., 2016. Global social media research summary 2016. Smart Insights: Social Media
Marketing.
Charlesworth, A., 2018. Digital marketing: A practical approach. Routledge.
Heinze, A., Fletcher, G., Rashid, T. and Cruz, A. eds., 2016. Digital and Social Media
Marketing: A Results-driven Approach. Taylor & Francis.
Järvinen, J. and Karjaluoto, H., 2015. The use of Web analytics for digital marketing
performance measurement. Industrial Marketing Management, 50, pp.117-127.
Jones, R., Alford, P. and Wolfenden, S., 2015. Entrepreneurial marketing in the digital age: A
study of the SME tourism industry.
Kannan, P.K., 2017. Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda. International
Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1), pp.22-45.

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Karjaluoto, H., Mustonen, N. and Ulkuniemi, P., 2015. The role of digital channels in industrial
marketing communications. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 30(6), pp.703-710.
Kasemsap, K., 2018. Enterprise Information Systems and Digital Marketing: Advanced Issues
and Implications. In E-Manufacturing and E-Service Strategies in Contemporary
Organizations (pp. 53-71). IGI Global.
Leeflang, P.S., Verhoef, P.C., Dahlström, P. and Freundt, T., 2014. Challenges and solutions for
marketing in a digital era. European management journal, 32(1), pp.1-12.
Levy, S. and Gvili, Y., 2015. How Credible is E-Word of Mouth Across Digital-Marketing
Channels?: The Roles of Social Capital, Information Richness, and Interactivity. Journal of
Advertising Research, 55(1), pp.95-109.
Paul, P., Bhuimali, A., Aithal, P.S. and Bhowmick, S., 2018. Business Information Sciences
Emphasizing Digital Marketing as an Emerging Field of Business & IT: A Study of Indian
Private Universities.
Rowley, J. and Keegan, B., 2017. Looking back, Going forward: the role and nature of
systematic literature reviews in digital marketing: a meta-analysis.
Ryan, D., 2016. Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital
generation. Kogan Page Publishers.
Stephen, A.T., 2016. The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer
behavior. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, pp.17-21.

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Stone, M.D. and Woodcock, N.D., 2014. Interactive, direct and digital marketing: A future that
depends on better use of business intelligence. Journal of Research in Interactive
Marketing, 8(1), pp.4-17.
Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why
bother?. Business Horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.
Urban, G.L., Gosline, R. and Lee, J., 2017. The Power of Consumer Stories in Digital
Marketing. MIT Sloan Management Review, 58(4).