Digital Marketing Strategies for Clarks: Facebook Analysis and Google Analytics

This assignment provides an overview of Clarks, a British shoe manufacturer and retailer, and explores their use of digital marketing strategies, specifically focusing on Facebook analysis and Google Analytics. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Facebook as a marketing platform and how to measure success using Google Analytics. Recommendations for Clarks' digital marketing campaign using Facebook are also provided.

REPORT OF CLARKS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
Overview of Clarks (C. & J. Clark International Ltd).................................................................1
ANALYSIS OF FACEBOOK.........................................................................................................1
DIGITAL ANALYTICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS.....................................................................4
RECOMMENDATIONS.................................................................................................................6
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Overview of Clarks (C. & J. Clark International Ltd)
Clarks also known as C. & J. Clark International Ltd is a British international shoe
manufacturer and retailer. Clarks was founded in 1825 in England by Cyrus and James Clark.
Organization has more than 1000 franchises and stores present all around the world. They also
sell their products through third party distribution as well. Main products sold by them are
footwears. They are mainly known for their Desert boots, high ankle boots, school shoes,
joyance sandal etc. They have more than 15000 employees working for them all around the
world. They have broad customer base and provide different range of products for wide range of
customers present globally. They target two distinct customer groups: First group is professional
workers or students and second groups are housewife or women who look forward for stylish
shoes. Clarks is one of the top British shoe brands who have various competitors such as Little
Burgundy, Allbirds, Muroexe and Designer brands also known as DSW. Out of these DSW is
one of the top most rival of Clarks.
Clarks is focusing using various kinds of digital technologies for marketing of their
products and services. They have implemented various kinds of digital technologies for their
stores and supply chain as well. These technologies have not only helped them to increase their
sales but has also helped them to increase their customer base, provide value products to their
customers and has also helped in improving retention rate. These digital technologies have also
helped in boosting their overall sales. One of the main digital marketing techniques that Clarks
uses is social media (Mariani, Mura and Di Felice, 2018). With the help of social media, they
engage their customers within their products and services. They also ask their customers for their
opinion so that they can not only do proper marketing of their products but can also identify
scope area to for improvement. Some of the commonly used social networking sites used by
Clarks for digital marketing are Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Other than using social media
marketing, Clarks also uses Search engine optimization as one of a digital marketing strategy to
engage their customers.
ANALYSIS OF FACEBOOK
Use of social media nowadays is increasing continuously because of which it has become
quite easy for organizations to reach an advance level to engage their customers (Mariani, Di
Felice and Mura, 2016). Clarks also uses social media for marketing of their products and
1

increase customer engagement of their customers. Facebook is one of the most commonly used
social networking sites that are used by most of the individuals. It is a common technique used
by organizations for marketing of their products. Facebook is one of the best marketing
techniques that can be used by organizations that operates at global level and target international
customers. It is another marketing techniques that helps organizations to remain competitive
within the market and make their customers aware about the new products or services launched,
changes brought within the organization and its products. Clarks also uses Facebook as a
marketing strategy to engage their customers and enhance their customer experience.
Use of Facebook platform as a marketing technique has its own strengths and weaknesses
that can affect an organization’s customer experience and engagement, employee retention and
many more (Helmond, Nieborg and van der Vlist, 2019). If organization like Clarks uses
Facebook as their digital strategy then it is important for them to review its strengths and
weaknesses. Some of the strengths of Facebook as a digital marketing platform for Clarks
are as follows:
 Usage of Facebook can help Clarks to reach their target customer base i.e. advertising on
Facebook can help Clarks to target customers who are interested within their products and
services. This will also help them in analysing their customers interest, likes and dislikes
associated with their products. Not only this Using Facebook Clarks can also increase their
customer base and reach large number of people within a specific duration or time period.
 With time Facebook is evolving in many different ways. Clarks can use it for marketing
campaigns for various purposes. Clarks uses Facebook for their marketing campaigns for
various purposes such as in order to track their performance, connect with Facebook users,
increase customer engagement with the organization, increase brand loyalty among
customers and for many more reasons.
 Facebook can help Organizations to enhance communication between their target customers
and organizations in a better manner (Liebana-Cabanillas and Alonso-Dos-Santos, 2017).
With correct marketing skills and appropriate content organizations can enhance their
customer’s satisfaction level and can create a strong bond with them. With the help of
Facebook Clarks can easily spread their message or can make their customers understand
their main objectives which will further help them to increase their customer satisfaction and
can enhance their bond with their customers in a much better and improved manner.
2

 Facebook helps and organization to create a greater buzz for any event or campaign created
or organized by them. It acts as a platform for organization where they can interact with their
customers in a better manner and can easily get to know their interest related to the event or
campaign organized by the organization. Clarks can use Facebook as a platform to gain a
closure insight of their customer’s behaviour by creating a campaign to reach to their
customers in a better manner.
 One of the main Strength of Facebook that can help an organization is that it can help
company to divert their main customer traffic to their actual product. Organization can focus
on providing product gift card to their customers or can provide them with some special
discount (Phua, Jinand Kim., 2017). This can help the organization to increase their overall
sales both online and offline and other then this, Facebook can also help the organization to
increase customer loyalty within their customers. Clarks can use Facebook to increase their
overall sales and increase customer loyalty within their customers for the organization and
for their products or services as well.
Some of the Weaknesses of Facebook as a digital marketing platform that can affect
Clarks in many different ways are as follows:
 One of the main weakness of Facebook is that it can increase the overall marketing budget of
an organization. This can make it difficult for the companies to practise or work on Facebook
advertisement or marketing on regular basis. This can work as drawback for the
organizations that can limit their activity on Facebook for marketing of their products and
services. This weakness of Facebook as digital marketing platform can affect overall
marketing budget of Clarks as a result their activities on Facebook can reduce.
 Another weakness of Facebook is that it can only help an organization to reach specific
number of social media users (Higgins, Wolf and Wolf., 2016). All the offers or coupons
offered by the organization can only be used by Facebook users. Facebook does not have any
other option to reach customers outside social media platform users. So, any kind of
campaign conducted by organizations can only help them to reach to specific number of
customers who are available on or are active on Facebook. Clarks can use Facebook to reach
their customers but only specific number of customers. They need to use different marketing
strategies in order to reach to the customers wo do not use social media platform such as
Facebook.
3

 Facebook is one of the platforms on which both positive and negative comments or messages
can spread easily. In fact, Negative comments on Facebook are spread much faster which can
affect overall image of the organization. Angry customers or competitors can spread
unappealing comments or degrading post in order to affect overall image of the organization
which can further reduce overall sales and customers loyalty among their customers (Sharma,
Alavi and Ahuja., 2017). Clarks has faced such negative comments on Facebook because of
angry customers negative comments which not only affected their overall image but also
affected their overall sales.
So, it can be said that Facebook can be used as digital social medial platform for
marketing by Clarks but they need to focus on weaknesses of Facebook as it can affect their
brand image, decrease customer loyalty, lower their sales as well as can also increase their
overall marketing budget. However, effective use of Facebook for marketing can not only help
the organization to boost their sales but can increase customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.
DIGITAL ANALYTICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS
Digitalization has helped most of the organizations to reach their targeted customer base
and expand their overall business. Facebook is one of the best social media platforms that can be
used by organizations to reach their targeted customer base and expand their overall business
(Delacroix, Parguel and Benoit-Moreau., 2019). But it is quite difficult to measure the overall
success of digital tool used by the organization. These analytical tools help in measuring
effectiveness of the content marketing done by an organization One of the digital tools that can
be used to measure overall success of digital marketing platform is Google Analytics. Google
Analytics can help an organization to analyse their current performance on chosen digital
marketing tool, measure success of their chosen marketing tool and also help an organization to
take appropriate measures on the basis of the analysis and their overall current performance. It is
also known as a website manager or marketing expert (lhlou, Asifand Fettman, 2016). It is one of
the best ways to measure customers engagement. Organizations that uses social media marketing
such as Facebook can use Google Analytics as a tool to measure effectiveness of their marketing
and campaigns. There are various ways though which Clarks can use Google Marketing to
analyse success of their Facebook social media marketing digital tool.
 Clarks can use Google Analytics to check number of Facebook pageview of the organization.
It can help an organization to check number of customers who have visited their Facebook
4

page. It can also be used to traffic on a particular content i.e. what Facebook Post is liked by
the customers the most.
 Google Analytics can also help Clarks to check type of content which is maximum liked by
the customers and shared by them the most. With the of Google Analytics all the marketing
content shared on Facebook can be analysed and checked that can help an organization to
understand what type of content is maximum liked and shared by their customers (Özen,
Kartal and Emre, 2017).
 Google Analytics can also help in creating demographic report for the organization using
Facebook as marketing platform. With the help of this analytical tool they can understand
likes and interest of customers according to their interest within marketing content of the
organization according category wise. Clarks can use this demographic report generated by
Google Analytics to understand what type of customers are interested in what type of
products in a much better manner.
 It can also be used for measuring referral traffic i.e. Using Google Analytics Clarks can
understand and analyse from which websites or other digital platforms customers are diverted
to their Facebook marketing page (larke and et.al., 2018). From any other website if users are
diverted to the Facebook marketing page of the organization then it is considered as referral
traffic.
 Clarks can also use Google Analytics to measure traffic on their Facebook page according to
time and date i.e. at what time of a month and day traffic on the website is more on their
Facebook page or on the marketing campaign organized by them on Facebook (Mariani,
Mura and Di Felice, 2018). Google Analytics allows the organizations to analyse traffic on
their Facebook page with the help of a graph so that they can analyse time when high volume
of traffic was observed on their website. So that they can understand what type of post is
maximum liked and viewed by their customers.
So, it can be said that google Analytics as an analytical tool can be used by Clarks to
analyse their Digital marketing tool i.e. Facebook by measuring some specific measures such as
measuring traffic on Facebook page, post liked by their customers the most, type of customers
who liked the post the most and many more.
5

RECOMMENDATIONS
Here are few recommendations that can help Clarks to proceed with digital marketing
campaign using Facebook. For this RACE will be used as a marketing planning. FACE is a
digital marketing planning framework that stands for reach, Act, Convert and Engage.
Reach: It is an exploration stage. Clarks can publish and promote their content on Facebook in
order to draw their customer attention. This will help Clarks to generate awareness about their
brand and their product. Using Facebook Clarks can easily reach their targeted customer base for
their digital marketing campaign.
Act: It is a decision-making stage. At this stage Clarks can focus on increasing customer
engagement on their Facebook marketing campaign. Clark’s digital marketing campaign should
be interactive where customers can easily visit and get to know more about the company and
their products in a better manner (Ingle, Desai and Kale., 2020). Their campaign should focus on
increasing their customer engagement where customers can provide their reviews and share
information with others.
Convert: this stage is also known as purchase stage. Clarks should focus on promotion of their
products such that they can convert their targeted customers into paying customers by providing
them with discounts, coupons etc.
Engage: this stage is also known as advocacy stage (Helmond, Nieborg and van der Vlist, 2019).
At this stage Clarks should focus on building long term communication with their customer in
order to increase their loyalty and satisfaction level. Clarks can measure this success either
though increase in sales, percentage of active customers or through analytics tools such as google
analytics.
CONCLUSION
From the above assignment it has been summarized that there are carious digital
platforms that can be used by organizations for marketing. Out of those social media marketing
one of the best and effective way of marketing and reaching to targeted customer base. It has
been analysed that Facebook is one of the most commonly used digital marketing platform that
can be used by organizations to reach to their targeted customer base, increase customer
satisfaction and overall sales of their products and services. Facebook marketing as its own
strengths and weaknesses that are required to be focused on by organizations as it can affect
success of their overall marketing. Effective use of Facebook as digital marketing tool can help
6

organizations to reach to their targeted customer base. It has also been analysed that it is quite
difficult to measure success of digital marketing tool used by organizations i.e. whether it has
helped them to fulfil their desired marketing objectives or not. Google Analytics is one of the
best analytics tools that can be used by organizations to measure success of their marketing done
on their chosen digital marketing tool.
7

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Alhlou, F., Asif, S. and Fettman, E., 2016. Google Analytics Breakthrough: From Zero to
Business Impact. John Wiley & Sons.
Clarke, T.B., and et.al., 2018. Teaching search engine marketing through the google ad grants
program. Marketing Education Review. 28(2). pp.136-147.
Delacroix, E., Parguel, B. and Benoit-Moreau, F., 2019. Digital subsistence entrepreneurs on
Facebook. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 146. pp.887-899.
Helmond, A., Nieborg, D.B. and van der Vlist, F.N., 2019. Facebook’s evolution: development
of a platform-as-infrastructure. Internet Histories. 3(2). pp.123-146.
Higgins, L.M., Wolf, M.M. and Wolf, M.J., 2016. Wine on facebook: A look at millennials’
wine information search. In Successful social media and ecommerce strategies in the
wine industry (pp. 13-29). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Ingle, P.S., Desai, A. and Kale, R.D., 2020. Digital Marketing: An Overview. Our
Heritage. 68(30). pp.3645-3649.
Liebana-Cabanillas, F. and Alonso-Dos-Santos, M., 2017. Factors that determine the adoption of
Facebook commerce: The moderating effect of age. Journal of Engineering and
Technology Management. 44. pp.1-18.
Mariani, M.M., Di Felice, M. and Mura, M., 2016. Facebook as a destination marketing tool:
Evidence from Italian regional Destination Management Organizations. Tourism
management. 54. pp.321-343.
Mariani, M.M., Mura, M. and Di Felice, M., 2018. The determinants of Facebook social
engagement for national tourism organizations' Facebook pages: A quantitative
approach. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management. 8. pp.312-325.
Özen, Z., Kartal, E. and Emre, İ.E., 2017. A case study on improving e-Learning services using
Google analytics in Turkey. International Journal of E-Adoption (IJEA). 9(1). pp.26-37.
Phua, J., Jin, S.V. and Kim, J.J., 2017. Gratifications of using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or
Snapchat to follow brands: The moderating effect of social comparison, trust, tie
strength, and network homophily on brand identification, brand engagement, brand
commitment, and membership intention. Telematics and Informatics. 34(1). pp.412-424.
Sharma, R., Alavi, S. and Ahuja, V., 2017. Generating trust using Facebook-A study of 5 online
apparel brands. Procedia computer science. 122. pp.42-49.
8