Digital marketing through social media for start up fashion companies

Abstract

Social media channels started in the early 2000s and since then their production has been growing at exponential rates to enhance and satisfy existing and new needs of the users. Recent data showed that within 2019 two thirds world population were using internet and at least 3.5 billion people used a social media platform that is one in every three people in the world (Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). There’s no denying that social media plays an integral role in today’s society, but now how these platforms engage, and influence users is changing.

The rapid development of social media applications and their enormous use; allowed individuals to consider themselves as active content creators in social media networks. Many changes deriving by the evolvement of innovative marketing trends, such as Social Commerce, that are incurring in the business environment, highlight several advancements in this new technological era.

The purpose of the project was to analyze and provide a better understanding on how Small and Medium sized enterprises (SMEs) should utilize Social Commerce and more generally Social Media to help them grow and stand out among others. Also, the study intended to analyze the consumer behavior with respect the online purchasing to identify any issues of the marketing technique.

In addition, the study investigated the hypotheses of credible information offered via social media and their views as trustworthy and in a positive way; how deals and offers are made through social media and how trust is perceived and how it affects consumers’ behavior in the online context. In order to examine all the above a quantitative survey was conducted in order to draw results on perceptions of users around Social Media. The results of this survey that were collected using Google Forms and Microsoft Excel and analyzed with the use of SPSS present the relationship of the social factors that influence consumer behaviors.

In general, the results showed a positive attitude towards brand communication and its performance as well as the positive comments on incentives offered on social media and at the same time a distrust to the validity of the sales deals offered on social media as well as the credibility of social’s media advertisements.

Implications and recommendations for future research are also mentioned and discussed.