Impact of Social Media Marketing on Small Businesses - Research Report

This report examines the impact of social media marketing on small businesses, highlighting its role in improving brand-consumer relationships, creating effective marketing strategies, and driving business growth. Traditional marketing methods are often too expensive for small businesses, making social media marketing a cost-effective alternative. The research aims to determine the impact of social media marketing, attract more customers by understanding their needs, and improve business tactics. The literature review supports the use of social media for understanding customer preferences, addressing customer concerns, and building strong online presences. Social media marketing is also crucial for brand awareness, increasing sales, and syndicating content to enhance business visibility. The report concludes by referencing various studies that underscore the importance of social media in connecting with customers, adapting to their changing needs, and promoting business effectively.

Impact of social media marketing
in small businesses

Title
Research Title:
Impact of social media
marketing in small businesses

Introduction
 It helps in improving the relationship that generally
exists between brands and the consumers.
 It is found that companies generally create number of
strategies after they properly analyze as well as
understand the various demands of the targeted
consumers with the help of social media
 Thus, it is found that social media has generally
created major effect on the small business

Research background
 It is identified that earlier traditional marketing
methods like radio, TV as well as different types of
commercial ads are utilized
 it is found that this type of medium are very
expensive which is unaffordable for the small
business organizations.
 Due to this problem, the small business
organizations faces lot of difficulties.
 However, in order to resolve this issue and
challenges, it is quite important to use social media
marketing

Purpose
 The main purpose of using social media marketing
by small business organization as social media
marketing assists in creating tremendous impact on
the business
 It helps in marketing the performance as well as
business growth effectively.
 In addition to this, it is found that social media
marketing assists in developing business tactics and
helps in grabbing the attention of the customers

Research Question and research objectives
The research question includes:
• Why social media marketing is utilized by small business organizations?
The objectives of the research include:
• To determine the impact that is created by the social media marketing in small
business?
• To attract more number of customers by knowing their preferences and their needs
• To handle the business properly by utilizing proper business related tactics with the
help of social media marketing

Literature review
 According to Godey et al. (2016), social media marketing helps in figuring out the likes as well as
preferences of the clients with the latest trends and therefore it helps in creating strong online
presence by satisfying the customers.
 On the other hand, it is found by Zhu and Chen (2015) that social media assists the business to
respond to the questions, concerns as well as grievances of the customers properly.

Literature review Contd.
 It is opined by Alves, Fernandes and Raposo (2016) that business can be able to get
proper insight as well as understanding of the customers and thus the businesses can
be able to know the opinions of the customers and can be able to create proper
network with them.
 Furthermore, when a business is generally running on a fixed marketing budget then
social media is generally considered as one of the most important as well as cost
effective way to promote as well as market the business effectively (Alalwan et al.
2017).

Literature review Contd.
 Moreover, it is stated by Leung, Bai and Stahura (2015) that social media marketing
helps in connecting the business with the clients in context to changing needs and
preferences, resources as well as lifestyle of the peoples.
 In addition to this, it is found that brand awareness among the business customers
can be increased by developing awareness about the image of the organization.
Moreover, social media marketing also helps in increasing the sales of products as
well as services.

Literature review Contd.
 According to Felix, Rauschnabel and Hinsch (2017), Social media is considered as one of
the most effective marketing methodology that is mainly utilized for syndicating the content
and for enhancing the visibility of the business.
 It is found that proper implementation of social media related strategy will be helpful in
increasing the brand recognition as you are quite engaged with the broad audience of the
consumers.

Timescale

References
 Alalwan, A.A., Rana, N.P., Dwivedi, Y.K. and Algharabat, R., 2017. Social media in marketing:
A review and analysis of the existing literature. Telematics and Informatics, 34(7), pp.1177-
1190.
 Alves, H., Fernandes, C. and Raposo, M., 2016. Social media marketing: a literature review and
implications. Psychology & Marketing, 33(12), pp.1029-1038.
 Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory
study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1),
pp.15-27.
 Felix, R., Rauschnabel, P.A. and Hinsch, C., 2017. Elements of strategic social media marketing:
A holistic framework. Journal of Business Research, 70, pp.118-126.