Review of Literature
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
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This appendix provides commentary on the resources used to pinpoint the specific recommendations and their analyses for marketing for the IUPUI Women4Change chapter, as well as any other information the team found important. This includes information on marketing to the right audience, using other organizations for help, how to use in-person advertisement, proper audience segmentation, successful use of Twitter, and the importance of consent from participants for local studies and surveys.
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Successful Audience Segmentation Through Analysis of Audience Behaviors and Similarities
Experts in advertising often stress the idea of “audience segmentation,” which is a form of discovering a target audience to improve marketing strategies. In a report from Econsultancy’s “Social Media Best Practice Guide,” author Michelle Goodall (2019) states, “Brands should research their customers’ behaviours, which platforms are they using, where they are likely to be, what type media they consume and which brands are they likely to affiliate themselves with” (p. 27). Goodall claims that in the detailed investigation of a targeted audience, you must uncover how that particular audience behaves with the specific form of advertisement you are using, which, in this case, is various social media platforms, and how it all relates to each other. Robert Kim (1989), author in the “Bank Marketing” publication from 1989, agrees with the ideas of investigating the similarities and behaviors within an audience to boost marketing. Kim explains that to segment an audience successfully, it is important to “[find] the commonalities (i.e. areas in which motivations, financial style, and actions overlap) in the target audience(s)” (p. 27). Through researching these common attributes in an audience, a business or organization can better understand how their audience reacts and modify the way in which they advertise accordingly. Both authors, Goodall and Kim, describe the importance of exploring the nature of their target audience and uncovering their “commonalities” in order to properly segment and separate that audience from the rest of the world.
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Using Twitter as a Social Media Platform for Student Organizations can Boost Audience Interaction and Their Sense of Community
Social media is one of the most common forms of virtual interaction for college aged students. Of these social media platforms, Twitter can be considered one of the more notable mediums. The many contributors to a business journal and members of the Prairie View A&M University College of Business, Ahmed Mahfouz, Kishwar Joonas, Dalain Williams, Ruixin Jia, and Margarita Arevalo discussed in their article how JCPenney, an American department store, recently gained more traction through the use of platforms, such as Twitter. The authors state, “Twitter offers such engagement, to promote a company’s brand, relevancy to pop culture, and immediate interaction with a community of over 300 million active users around the world” (p. 185). They claim that Twitter has the ability to bring their audience together through its “immediate interaction.” Such immediacy allows for a stronger sense of belonging in a community. Bohdan Pikas and Gabi Sorrentino agree with the authors of the JCPenney article as they feel various online pages are able to build upon those communal relationships. Pikas and Sorrentino state, “Research proves that the main motivators for using these web pages are driven by consumer’s need to build and nurture social relationships” (p. 71). While they do not specifically mention Twitter, they note that “web pages”, a category in which Twitter can fall under, help create and sustain social relationships. Because social media is so prevalent today, maintaining these types of relationships through such means is crucial as it can help sustain audience involvement.