Social Media Marketing in Business, Research Paper Example

Purpose

The following memorandum is intended to recommend that DEC Electronics Inc. start a social media marketing business to promote the retail business for the marketing department, and for permission to conduct research to develop this idea. I believe the project will not only improve the brand awareness and public relations, but also increase the sales volume of our consumer electronics and personal computers. I would like to thank you for granting me the opportunity to introduce my proposal.

Background

I have been working as a marketing assistant in the marketing department of DEC Electronics Inc. for six months, and I have realized that traditional advertising and an established business website were no longer effective for our developing organization, especially for the purpose of gaining a strong market position. As marketer in our organization, we need to continue to explore innovative ways of marketing our products and growing our businesses. Nowadays, many companies start to use social media networks and demonstrate their promotional information on the primary social media tools such as Twitter, Blogs, Facebook or YouTube (Anderson, 2010, p. 5). However, not all small business owners are using social media as a marketing tool, and this is clearly a gap in the market. Companies using social media as a promoting tool have expanded extremely well in recent years among the competitors, while other companies who do not use social media perform in a decreasing way. In this case, starting a social media marketing business will help our company build meaningful relationships with audiences, increase brand awareness, establish trust and customer loyalty, manage the reputation, and most importantly promote our products and services.

Discussion

I have carried out some research and came across a study by Michael Stelzner who set out to find the prevalence of social networks as marketing tools, and sponsored by the Social Media Success Summit 2012. According to Michael’s report “How Marketers are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses”, a significant 83% of marketers report that social media is extremely beneficial for their business, which indicates a strong trend within the marketing community. In this report, the top five social media networks, which marketers use, include Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, blogs and YouTube. I will illustrate detailed information of all these five tools in my final proposal, and how they benefit the organization individually. Furthermore, for the time spent on social media networks, a significant 59% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more per week, while 33% of marketers for 11 hours or more. There is nearly 15% of marketers spending more than 20 hours weekly on social media activities.

The primary benefits the social media marketing will bring to our organization are generating more business exposure, increasing traffic, and providing marketplace insight. More specifically, based on Michael’s report, a large number of marketers (85%) showed their social media efforts led to increased exposure for their business. 74% of participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing. Nearly 65% of marketers found the social media a helpful tool when understanding the marketplace.

With social media networking, anyone can effectively extend themselves without geographical boundaries or personal introduction (Evans, 2012). It is also an extremely valuable marketing tool, which requires a relatively low budget. According to my research, we need to spend approximately $3000-$5000 on the work of initial setup and custom design for Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. When looking at rates for monthly content management of social media tools, the price may vary from $4000 to $6000.

In addition, I found 50% of companies entered social media without a strategy. I will do some research and illustrate three to four strategies in my proposal for the better use of the social media networks as a marketing tool. In addition, I will continue to do the detailed research about how social media networks will benefit our company and how time invested on social media networks will affect the results.

Conclusion

As is mentioned above, the project of building the social media marketing tools will undoubtedly help increase the brand awareness for our electronics retailing company, and consequently increase the sales volume and market value. In one word, this project will provide the marketing department the superior value. I strongly recommend DEC Electronics Inc. to undertake my proposal and give me permission to move forward with the research. Thank you again for reading my proposal. You can reach me at 301-318-0130 anytime or via email.

References

Anderson, E. (2010). Social media marketing [electronic resource] : game theory and the emergence of collaboration / Eric Anderson. Heidelberg ; New York : Springer, c2010.

Evans, D. (2012). Social media marketing [electronic resource] : an hour a day / by Dave Evans. Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley ; Chichester : John Wiley [distributor], 2012.

Gunelius, S. (2011). 30-Minute Social Media Marketing : Step-by-step Techniques to Spread the Word About Your Business Fast and Free. McGraw-Hill.