Study on social media marketing campaign strategy -- TikTok and Instagram

Abstract

Social media is known as "a group of Internet-based applications that builds on ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and it allows the creation and exchange of user generated content (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, p. 61)." Individual users create their personal profiles, blog and connect with their friends leveraging a variety of functions including profile searching, instant messaging, sharing and commenting. With development of social media, social media became a well adopted channel for marketers to build brand awareness, launch new products, engage with target audience, source qualified leads in a fast and efficient manner. TikTok and Instagram are the top and emerging social media platforms that are being adopted by marketers to reach and engage with their target audience. There have not been a lot of research focusing on the impact of social media marketing on these platforms on consumer buying behaviors.

Thus, the writer aims to provide companies with recommendations on developing their social media strategies through this research. In order to achieve the goal, the author first reviewed and referenced research completed to understand how social identity theory, individualism vs. collectivism cultures impact consumers' buying behaviors; investigated how co-creation, virtual community transformed consumers' interaction with one and another; and compared consumers' different reactions to content marketing, sponsored content together with user generated content. With understanding of previous research, the writer then focused the study on beauty industry and leveraged beauty industry as a representation to study social media strategies that companies should deploy . She used empathy interview, case studies to understand how consumers behave to different social media marketing programs and made her recommendations to companies developing their social media marketing strategy.

Companies should first align on their short term and long term marketing goals and evaluate if its brand and product are suitable to be marketed through these social media channels. Then the company need to decide on which step of the marketing funnel are they trying to improve on in order to select the correct marketing strategy. Lastly, companies should establish its own consumer persona in order to finalize which KOLs to work with and how much budget they have for the social media marketing campaigns.