Brain Storming – Week 14
Posted on February 3, 2014
This week, the coursework was introduced and our tutor asked each and every student to brain storm on the product to promote and how to go about marketing such product. i have always want to start mobile money company. However, after enough research, i decided that to choose company name “DecaMobile”, i needed a logo for my company and also carry out a research on companies who are doing the same business as i am.
The creation of my Company’s Logo – Week 14
Posted on February 3, 2014
Finding of a perfect logo for my company “DecaMobile”, a company whose sole purpose is to provide the mobile financial services to its customers. I made several researches in order to find with the look and feel of a logo for the company and after i had gone through the website of existing companies with the same business such as PayPal, PocketMoni, MyPaga and Gtb, the final design of the logo was put together as a result of combination of existing companies. These companies were considered because they really reflect the concept of my idea.
Social Media Research and Analysis – Week 15
Posted on February 8, 2014
A social Network is a virtual community consisting of several individuals/groups originating from diverse physical location to share personal details. Various Social networks are in existence, with each network having its technological strengths and core business service. Boyd M.D. (2007) illustrates that, social networking companies depend absolutely on their users in order to adopt a working structure and rendering expected services.
On a social network, new friends are being made, old connections are being restored, deals are being transacted and awareness to goods and services are also being established. Several researches have been conducted to analyse the business prospects that social networks bring to organization (especially, international business). Lea et al (2006) gives a brief details on how lucrative a business can be if channeled through a social network. In their article titled “Enhancing business networks using social network based virtual communities”. Several case studies of giant companies making profits from social network are showcased.
This document reflects on the success stories captured by Lea et al and helps re-establish a few facts about social networking and business.
Some major Social networks are: Facebook, Google Circles, Twitter, HI5, You tube etc.
Social Media Strategy – Week 16
Posted on February 15, 2014
Over 54% of small Business need help with social media. In recent times, many businesses have move from the physical business presence into the world of social media. Today, social media marketing is a very efficient tools for marketers to take advantage of, and I think of some good strategies to sell their company.
Planning a social media strategy, DecaMobile can use social media in an effective way to reach its targeted audience and the world at large.
Finding our target audience is very important because all of our hard work and money used to produce the product will be wasted. Making an engaging content for our targeted audience is important to keep clients.
Advert Designs – Week 17
Creation of promotional video – Week 20
Posted on March 13, 2014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H16FgtmiVQ
Final Submission – Week 22
Posted on March 28, 2014
Social Media Plan
Introduction
A social Network is a virtual community consisting of several individuals/groups originating from diverse physical location to share personal details. Various Social networks are in existence, with each network having its technological strengths and core business service. Boyd M.D. (2007) illustrates that, social networking companies depend absolutely on their users in order to adopt a working structure and rendering expected services.
Research and Analysis of Social Media
On a social network, new friends are being made, old connections are being restored, deals are being transacted and awareness to goods and services are also being established. Several researches have been conducted to analyse the business prospects that social networks bring to organization (especially, international business). Lea et al (2006) gives a brief details on how lucrative a business can be if channelled through a social network. In their article titled “Enhancing business networks using social network based virtual communities”. Several case studies of giant companies making profits from social network are showcased.
This document reflects on the success stories captured by Lea et al and helps re-establish a few facts about social networking and business.
Some major Social networks are: Facebook, Google Circles, Twitter, HI5, You tube etc.
Social Recommendations
Using the selected social media platform which is Facebook, YouTube and Twitter does not bring about promoting our products and services, it is mandatory that certain recommendations should be made in order to maximize the effectiveness of these platforms.
Every Customer is now a reviewer
Treat them like one. If there are three or more negative reviews of a product, 70% of people won’t buy it. That makes being responsive and engaging with customers one-on-one more important than ever. Social media allows brands to do this more efficiently and in real time.
Be Human, Transparent, and Live up to mistakes quickly
An unhappy customer is equally as likely, or perhaps even more likely, to talk about their experience as a satisfied one. It used to be that brands pushed out information and heard very little back, but now that they get instant feedback, they have to respond quickly and in the right way.
Some of the best product innovations will be suggested by our customers
Soliciting feedback and listening to customers can spur new ideas you would have never considered. Brands and customers can now work together to be co-creators of products that serve the customer best.
Social Media Plan
Social media plan involves constructing procedures to market a services or products through social media platforms. In this plan, strategies are established in order to help the company get the confidence of our existing clients and also as well as potential clients. Plus, it will justify the various social media platform chosen for our promotional campaign and how effect they are utilized to reach our target audience. It will also help in bring a cost effective way to advertise online and help spread our global reach of our products and services while bring our targeted audience to know about and start using them.
Aim
One of the main reasons why organizations adopt social networks is to establish strong relationships with their customers and show-case their products and services to help build awareness. Judging from previous researches, social networks can therefore be utilized far more than their literal social use into becoming an essential business tool, since majority of business audience spend more time on the internet and giving a relatively huge amount of time to social networks. In order for DecaMobile (an entirely new and unique product) to capture its desired audience, a social network will be an ideal driving force
Setting meaningful goals and objectives is a pre-requisite for any enterprise technology to grow.
With the help of a social network, DecaMobile seeks to achieve the following
AIM:
Create a Strong and recognizable market for DecaMobile to thread harnessing the power of a social network create and retain customer relationship.
OBJECTIVES:
1. Create customer followership through posts and updates on the selected social networks
2. Create an enquiry avenue for customers’ feedback.
3. Indirectly Snares customers outreach.
Target Audience
DecaMobile would focus on the everyday users within the age of 16 – 60 who make everyday transactions (payments, transfers, purchases etc.) will include;
1. Students.
2. Youth.
3. Senior citizens.
4. Company staff.
5. Existing customers.
. The use conventional means of payment (cash and proprietary credit/debit) through your mobile phone, have proven to be stressful. Research has also proven that young adults constitute the population of mobile phones usage in the world Grabmeier J (2013). This backs DecaMobile policy of emphasizing more focus on these young adults within the age of 16 – 60 who are legible by age and right to possess a mobile phone. The mobile money application will serve as a medium for them to make transaction, as a credit facility and makes it easier for their parents to transfer and send money to them from phone.
Considering audience it is noticed that banks stands as the main pioneers for mobile money, as different banks possess different cards for different purpose. Banks will be key drivers to this brand as this will help them cut costs on generic card printing as one client will only need one card. They won’t have to pay various vendors for their payment services, rather only pay for one absolute service. The will give banks a profit maximization power as every transaction will have to go through their portal and only regulated by DecaMobile admin portal.
Social Media Tools:
The social media has over the years evolved from networking where people make and connect with each other to share love, ideas and feeling into a marketing ground where organizations can use to maintain their customer relationship, showcase their product and most importantly maximize the cost of doing business by making profit. SM is believed to be used by the world’s population among different race and culture. With this, various sites and tools are been developed daily to help promote this growth by many. The 21st century medium of advertising has gained immensely from these social media tools, as most organizations have seen it as a means of increasing their customer base by reaching out to the population of the users of these sites.
In order to achieve these, a Twitter handle, a Facebook page and a YouTube account will be created. The Facebook page will be represented as the center of focus for promoting the product since it envelops more potential users. It will contain all product information important to users in both textual and graphical format (including free offers) and will be updated once a week. To notify users, a link of our promotional Facebook page will be posted on my twitter page each time a new post is made.
The following social media tools would be used by DecaMobile to promote our product on the social media, which include:
Facebook has an estimate of close to 2billion users (average of 1.6 active users monthly). Facebook is seen as the center of publicity because of its fan and group page which is efficient and economical. According to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Facebook provides easy networking and communication, popularity, instant customer engagement, low price, information immediacy and fast feedback. The DecaMobile team will therefore create a Facebook page which will serve as a medium to help give awareness of our product to our target audience.
Strategy
• A fan page will be created and people will be invited to like and share the page
• We will develop updates and post recent stories in other to engage followers of our page
• Add companies details, to ensure consistency across all platforms
• And finally, we will measure the success metrics by checking the number of likes, tags, and referrals from other SMT
• Give incentives and credits privileges to users who refer other users via the social networks.
Twitter is seen as a social network which is similar to the Facebook, but possesses some characteristics Facebook is yet to achieve. It is believed that over 200 million users who visit the site on a daily basis and requires tweets between pairs to share and transfer ideas and information.
Twitter will be used to promote our product because as the saying goes “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Twitter gives extra functionalities that can’t be found on Facebook such as link suggestions of celebrities and other popular pages to enhance popularity. We would follow and respond to tweets by celebrities or pages that have similar interest (prepaid-card) as our product, by doing this; we will build our own group of followers and build lasting relationships which is based on sales. The twitter account will help increase the recognition of our product to increase number of followers
User will follow the DecaMobile handle, see regular updates on the products and also have the opportunity to Re-tweet comments made about the product to other users following them. The twitter handle for DecaMobile therefore is @ DecaMobile.
Strategy
• Create a similar company profile to ensure constituency across all platforms
• We will use Third party twitter accounts and pages to increase our followers
• We would make daily post about our product and interesting topics related to pre-paid services. On every post made, there would be links to our other SMT to crave awareness of our product across all platforms.
• And finally, we will measure our success by noting the number of followers, re-tweets and referrals from other users
YouTube
YouTube is my choice for uploading my promotional video because it is the most recognized video search engine with over 1 billion views daily. It’s an open tool which allows people to post, likes and view video content on the web. With this, we can reach our target audience by uploading our promotional video on the Youtube platform. A banner would be created and will be embedded in other external websites that will redirect people to our page and the YouTube video. Videos will be uploaded on YouTube and the links will be posted on, Facebook and twitter page. Fulfilling this plan requires resources, so I have taken the liberty to gather the necessary resources such as a laptop and a reliable unlimited web access plan among other things, and be solely in charge of the media.
Strategy
• A you-tube channel would be created with the companies profile to ensure constituency across all platforms and videos and files will be uploaded
• We will put together a 2 minute promotional video of our product, which will serve as an advertising medium for people to know about our new product
• It will be uploaded on our official you-tube channel where people can view, like and comments
• Finally we would measure success metrics by taken the number of views and likes on every video uploaded.
Blog
Blogs are seen as one of the most used social media tools according to surveys made. It is believe that about 65% of the world today visit blogging site to get information and post comments. The majority of these visitors are seen as student, organizations, business men and many more. These visitors’ covers majority of our target audience, which has prompted us to use the blog as a means for reaching our target audience. A Word-press blog would be created to serve as the main company web-site. The blog will be updated often with discussions related to our product. The discussions would be very interesting, intriguing and educative to make viewers of the blog to always want to visit our blog at all times. The blog will also contain information of our product and service DecaMobile card provides to attract potential customers.
This blogging site will help increase the recognition of our product, and also gives it reputation by posting positive brand comments of the product and encourages people to share and like the post. And the success metrics would be measured by checking number of posts, audience growth (unique and returns), comments/likes, referrals from other social networks
Parameters For Content Analysis Facebook
Target Group Nearly 54% in the age group 16 – 60. Graduates and students of all age.
Types of Advertisements Video engagement ads and Fan- pages.
Communication strategy Regular Posts, updates, videos, images, and new things about DecaMobile product
User interaction Through fan pages, posts, events and games.
User interest Expect brand to be communicated through games, fan pages and events.
Resources And Budget
Social media has become the platform to cross for product promotions for little or no cost. In other words, there is no direct cost in using a social media for promotion. But to create a standard campaign Ad on Facebook costs about $0.46 per click, $1.00 per day. But DecaMobile will settle for the price offer of $50.00 for a lifetime to reach over 2,946,840 Facebook users around the world.
Other costs include:
Designing and printing a banner (Vista print) 3-7 dollars per poster (logo included)
Models (Modelmayhem.com) 100-500 dollars per hour
Cost of Maintaining the Post and updates Regular Pay rates to SNARE IT staffs (no additional costs) but more time will be allocated
The Above costs are mostly one-off, so it is advisable DecaMobile ventures into this risk and reap an everlasting reward of customers in the nearest future.
Evaluation
Promoting companies and its products is never an easy task. But one of the effective ways of getting this done is through social media platforms which are used by companies to create awareness of their products and bring an increase in traffic to their website and strengthen their relationship with their audience. Companies believe that through this means, information about the company and products are made viral. The main aim of companies marketing their products through social media to engage their target audience in discussions in order to know what they feel about the products through likes and comments. The company can make better decisions on their future decisions based on the ratings from their audience’s needs. Moreover when making use of the recommended social media platforms to promote our companies products, it’s very important to make a metrics in which companies can use monitor the success of their social media plan. Through the metrics companies can develop measures for any hindrances that may occur and improve on the part of the strategy that did not according to plan
Evaluation Metrics
Making an impact in the social media world is not easy feet so to be able to achieve this, the need to track social media progress is very important. The recommended social media platforms are evaluated based on the statistics showing the number of target audience who visited our page through their likes and comments along with their repost. Through the appendix B for graphs and table showing the progress and failure of the each social media tools used
Appendices
APPENDIX A FOR SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS TARGET AUDIENCE CONTENT DURATION TESTING FREQUENCY
Student
Youth
Workers
Senior Citizens
Likes
Comments
Shares
Products Update
Promos
Images of the Products
1-3 Posts per day on weekdays and 2 post on weekends High
Student
Workers
Senior Citizens
Products Information
Follow Trends
Images of the Products
1-3 Tweets per day on weekdays and 2 Tweets on weekends Medium
YouTube
Student
Youth
Workers
Senior Citizens
Product Awareness: 1 video upload in 2 weeks Medium
APPENDIX B FOR SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS TOOLS
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS MEASUREMENTS ON THE SOCIAL MEDIA TOOL TOOLS TO MEASURE
Likes by individuals
Numbers of new likes
Products information through Facebook
Facebook Insights, Google Analytics
New Followers on daily basis
Amount of tweets
Products information through twitter
Google Analytics
YouTube
Likes on Ads Videos
Comments About Ads Video
Google Analytics
Reflective Report
From my experience, the best way to promote a product is to make a good advertisement and engage the target audience with all forms of promotion because, social media will not fix a bad advertisement, neither will it encourage customers to patronize a product, especially when they are not happy. I have focused exclusively on the user graph of social networking sites; many of these sites allow users to host content, which in turn can be linked to other users and content. I am also happy that I have been able to reach people and to make known to them my first product and how it’s been promoted. I wouldn’t say my product and social media plan was a complete success but I wouldn’t say it failed either. In a few days I was able to acquire over fifty likes so I considered that to be a successful beginning. I however did not follow up on the viewers and I did not respond to the chats on time therefore reducing my growth and progress strength. If there was anything I could change, it would be to respond to the likes and comments more efficiently. This would have helped me understand the way the social media viewers respond to my product and make room for change.
Reference
Grabmeier, J. (2013) Credit Card Debt: Younger People Borrow More Heavily and Repay More Slowly, Research and Innovations Communications, Columbus, The Ohio state university
Kaplan, Andreas M. and Haenlein, Michael. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53, 59-68.
Nielsen, J. & Molich, R., 1990. Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. New York, ACM, pp. 249-256.
Nielson, J., 1993. Usability Engineering. San Diego: Academic Press.
Norman, J. F., Norman, H. F. & Clayton, A. M., 2004. The visual and haptic perception of natural object shape. Perception & Psychophysics, 66(2), pp. 342-351.
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