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Frederique's choice in the German market : the relevance and use of social media and search engine marketing in the context of building brand awareness

Bramer, Rick (2012) Frederique's choice in the German market : the relevance and use of social media and search engine marketing in the context of building brand awareness.

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Abstract:During the past few decades, the competition between traditional- and online markets has intensified. With the rise of the internet, a whole new concept in retailing strategies has emerged. Organizations have felt the growing importance of integrating an online presence into their competitive strategy. This has led to a booming new industry of online advertising, professional website services and domain name retailing. In addition to organizations, society and its individuals have also been radically influenced by these developments. The internet has become a completely new global environment for a tremendous amount of activities. Nowadays, the web can be used for providing everything to make a complete living. From purchasing clothes, to picking out a new house, people are increasingly using the internet to replace traditional activities and one can imagine the impact of these developments on the existing retailing market. On a parallel level, the internet has also brought about a shift in the social existence of individuals. Through chat rooms, personal pages and online discussion blogs, people are intensively using the web for social activities. Social Media or Web 2.0 has enabled the opportunity of building an online social network and at the same time the possibility for organizations to exploit this network. Online marketing has reached a new dimension with the rise of Social Media. Consumer information, from demographic figures to individual preferences, has become public and easy to find, providing a pool of useful information for organizations. The conversation between business and customer has reached higher levels, ranging from simple information exchange to complete product co-creation. In this report, an online flower retailing organization is elaborately analyzed based on the developments mentioned above. The organization is used in a case-study to elucidate how organizations can effectively cope with the rising world wide web and all its effects on the corporate world. Frederique’s Choice, an online flower retailing firm, is beginning to expand internationally by entering the German market. To achieve success in this process, the organization has to form an e-commerce strategy to attain market share. In the context of e-commerce, marketing tools like Social Media and Search Engine Marketing are to be accounted for when formulating and implementing a strategy. Frederique’s Choice has to find the most effective ways of using these marketing tools for building brand awareness. Social Media, or Web 2.0, is a new generation of online tools, applications and approaches such as blogs, wikis, online communities and virtual worlds (Constantinides et al., 2008). Organizations can engage in Social Media as a marketing tool to influence the customer’s decision-making process and the tool can be used both passively (i.e. listening and gathering information) and actively (i.e. direct marketing, customer advertising concepts, co-creation, etcetera), depending on organizational characteristics and the long- and short-term goals. There are many ways of using this e-commerce tool and many combinations to form a campaign. For Frederique’s Choice, possibilities lie in costless showing, advertising, co-creating and combinations of these three, all of which have specific tools for effectiveness. Search Engine Marketing, just like the use of Social Media, is a form of internet marketing as well. The main aim of Search Engine Marketing is to make business websites more visible on search engine result pages. Search Engine Marketing can be divided into two approaches. Search Engine Advertising and Search Engine Optimization. The first concerns placement of advertisements additional to the main result links. Advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) Web search results (Ghose & Yang, 2009). The latter deals with optimizing the ranking of web pages in search engine result pages by means of figuring out the details of search and ranking algorithms used by these search engines (Olsen et al., 2010). This can also be done by Link Building, which consists of generating optimal backlinks from external web pages to promote the main website. In the field of Search Engine Marketing, just like Social Media, there are many tools and ways of reaching organizational goals. By analyzing the website, its visitors and the characteristics of the website traffic, organizations can give consideration to certain actions. In the last chapter of this report, this will be described more elaborately.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration BSc (56834)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/61919
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