Name
Abdullah Fahad Abdullah Khusheim
ID: 2302194
BUS 698 Research projects
Date
05.03.2024
Social Media Marketing Practices
The research will focus on the effective activities and challenges for social media marketing among
Saudi companies. This topic is influenced by the low research on how social media marketing can be effectively
done for Saudi Arabia-based companies. This knowledge gap adversely affects the overall development of
Saudi-based organizations as they need proper information regarding the best ways they can implement to
ensure that they raise the position of their sales through marketing that involves social media platform. In
addition, the management of the Saudi-based companies needs help with the challenges they may face while
participating in social media marketing. Therefore, engaging in this type of research will be essential to fill in
the knowledge gap and offer geographical relevance to the present research on social media marketing.
Recently, many international and foreign-based organizations have engaged in social media marketing.
Social media marketing refers to the adoption of social media platforms, also known as digital marketing, where
the users have social connections and can easily share information that is essential in the process of developing
the company’s brand, increase sales, and increasing website traffic (Evans et al., 2021). Through this method,
organizations can attract more customers, hence promoting the value of the company’s portfolio. Given that
companies can significantly benefit from social media marketing, conducting research and focusing on Saudi
Arabia-based companies will promote operational efficiency. Therefore, the information on best practices and
challenges organizations can experience is essential in ensuring companies get a new direction regarding their
marketing strategies.
Given that the social media marketing topic is broad, we will focus on market-orientation companies
that can promote customer outreach performance through social media platforms to ensure that the research is
objective. This approach will ensure that we reduce the delimitation present during the research. Structured
questionnaires will be used for an accessible collection of the data, which will be handed out to the management
of companies that have adopted social media marketing to promote their operations. The questionnaires will
ensure that the respondents accurately respond regarding the digital capability of their respective companies.
The questionnaires will be distributed to the promotion, marketing, and customer relations managers through
Google Forms-enabled virtual surveys. This will promote the response time and accuracy of data collected.
The data collected will be analyzed to establish how to effectively identify the benefits and challenges
social media marketing has on companies. The structured Google forms have direction and checkboxes,
therefore getting responses and correct details on how different companies view social media marketing and
how effective a strategy is in promoting and driving sales. Respondents will provide information on the best
platforms to use during the marketing processes and their effectiveness in enhancing performance. From the
information collected, organizations will decide which social media platforms they will run their marketing
processes on and how suitable the social media marketing processes are given the company’s objectives. Such
information will promote the operational efficiency of companies in Saudi Arabia.
In conclusion, organizations fully understand the importance of having and adopting modern ways of
driving sales. Social media marketing has revolutionized how organizations conduct their marketing practices.
Through this marketing channel, organizations can post their content on all social media platforms and reach
out to the global audience. This ensures that bottlenecks associated with other marketing mediums are avoided,
thus increasing the organization’s operational capabilities.
Hypotheses:
H1: Larger companies have more advanced social media marketing practices compared to smaller companies.
(Ghazwani & Alzahrani, 2023).
H2: YouTube and Snapchat are the most widely used social media platforms among Saudi companies for
marketing purposes (Alharthey, 2023).
H3: Building brand awareness is the top goal for social media marketing among Saudi companies. (Drydakis,
2022).
The hypotheses need to speak about the assumed relationships among the four variables employed in your
model- only, i.e., MO, Use of social media platforms, Customer Outreach, and digital capabilities. Firm size
could be used as a control variable.
Methodological Approach:
•
Interviews with marketing professionals from Saudi companies
•
Online surveys targeting Saudi companies
•
Qualitative analysis of the collected data
Research Questions:
1. Does market orientation (MO) prompt firms to use social media platforms for better customer outreach?
2. Does an effective use of social media platforms enhance firms’ customer outreach performance?
3. Does a firm’s digital capability moderate the impact of the use of social media platforms on customer
outreach performance?
Conceptual Framework: The model does not look like this. Only MO ? Social media platform use ?
customer outreach have the serial link. Digital capability is a moderator. Sales performance and
operational efficaicny are not hypothesized in this study, so drop them.
Adoption of
Digital Media
Platforms
Market
Orientation
Data Collection and Analysis:
Digital
Capabilities
Customer
Outreach
Performance
Sales
Performance
Operational
Efficiency
•
Survey with the help of a structured questionnaire
•
Data collection from promotion/marketing/customer relations managers of Saudi companies through
Google Forms-enabled virtual surveys
•
Data analysis using Partial Least Squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)
Measurement Scales:
Social Media Marketing Practices: Scales to measure the extent of usage and integration of various social media
platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat) into marketing strategies.
Items to assess the goals of social media marketing (e.g., brand awareness, customer engagement, lead generation,
sales).
Market Orientation: Established MKTOR scale by (Musa, 2018) to evaluate the market orientation of
companies, including customer focus, competitor focus, and inter-functional coordination.
Digital Capabilities: Scales to assess a company’s digital capabilities, such as technological infrastructure, digital
skills and knowledge, and the ability to leverage digital technologies for business processes.
Customer Outreach Performance: Scales to measure the effectiveness of customer outreach efforts through
social media platforms, including reach, engagement, lead generation, and customer acquisition.
Firm Size: Items to capture the size of the company (e.g., number of employees, annual revenue) to analyze
differences in social media marketing practices based on firm size.
You have the following four variables for which you need to develop scales/questions.
MO, Use of social media platforms, Customer Outreach, and digital capabilities.
You donÂ’t need to reinvent the wheel. Just take the scales used by previous studies. Search for articles using these
variables in their studies and adapt the scales from there, just like you reported for MO (i.e., Musa, 2018). All four are
frequently used variables in studies, and we have matured scales for all of them reported in the literature. Choose scales
used by famous studies published in top-tier journals.
Send me the questionnaire in the form it will be distributed to the respondents, once you have finalized.
References
Agnihotri, R. (2020). Social Media, customer engagement, and sales organizations: A research agenda. Industrial
Marketing Management, 90, 291–299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2020.07.017
Alharthey, B. K. (2023). Impact of e-marketing capabilities and E-marketing orientation on sustainable firm
performance of SME in KSA through E-relationship management. International Journal of Marketing
Studies, 15(2), 71. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijms.v15n2p71
Basri, W. (2020). Examining the impact of Artificial Intelligence (ai)-assisted social media marketing on the
performance of small and Medium Enterprises: Toward Effective Business Management in the Saudi
Arabian context. International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, 13(1), 142.
https://doi.org/10.2991/ijcis.d.200127.002
Drydakis, N. (2022). Improving entrepreneursÂ’ digital skills and firmsÂ’ digital competencies through business
apps training: A study of small firms. Sustainability, 14(8), 4417. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14084417
Evans, D., Bratton, S., & McKee, J. (2021). Social media marketing. AG Printing & Publishing.
Ghazwani, S. S., & Alzahrani, S. (2023). The use of social media platforms for competitive information and
knowledge sharing and its effect on smesÂ’ profitability and growth through innovation. Sustainability, 16(1),
106. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16010106
Musa, D. (2018). Market orientation practices among micro-sized enterprises: A descriptive evidence using
MKTOR
scale.
International
Journal
https://doi.org/10.26666/rmp.ijbm.2018.4.1
of
Business
and
Management,
2(4),
1–8.
