Digital Marketing at Coca-Cola (Term Paper Sample)

Digital Marketing at Coca-Cola Student: Professor: Course title: Date: Digital Marketing at Coca-Cola Digital media is so common that people these days have access to information wherever and whenever. Digital marketing entails the promotion of brands or products through one or several sorts of electronic media (Sterne 2010). Digital marketers monitor things such as what people are viewing, for how long they view it, how often they view it, which contents work and which ones do not, and sales conversations (Tiago & Veríssimo 2014). In this paper, Coca-Cola’s digital marketing strategy across major channels of social media is reviewed comprehensively. Building upon consumer engagement theory, this paper considers the way Coca-Cola Company uses social media in engaging with its clientele. Selected organization: The Coca-Cola Company Coca-Cola Company is an international conglomerate that makes, retails, and markets non-alcoholic beverage syrups and concentrates (The Coca-Cola Company 2015). Coca-Cola Company is currently among the most profitable business organizations worldwide. This corporation is a major brand in soft drinks with an extensive array of brands such as Dr. Pepper, Schweppes, Minute Maid, Diet Coke, Coke, Sprite, Powerade, Five Alive, Fanta, MyCoke, Dasani Mineral Water among many other brands (Telesca 2014). Coke is the company’s flagship and best selling product. This organization has been able to attain outstanding successes in digital marketing and has immense following on social media (Minton et al. 2012). As per the theory of consumer engagement, consumer engagement takes place whenever consumers and the brand connect. It is also the one-on-one interactions which enable customers to make connections with the brand (Patrutiu 2015; Chanthinok, Ussahawanitichakit & Jhundra-indra 2015). Social media means a lot to Coca-Cola Company. Numerous conversations occur online about this company on a daily basis, and the firm wants its over 151,000 associates in over 199 nations across the globe to joint those conversation, represent the firm, and share the positive and optimistic spirits of its brands (Coca-Cola Company 2016). Pinterest The Pinterest account of Coca-Cola Company is interesting considering that there is just a single board which relates to a particular advertisement campaign of Coca-Cola, whereas the other photos are focused on a random theme (Ritson 2015). During the months and weeks before the previous Olympic Games, ‘Olympic Games Moments’ board on Coca-Cola’s Pinterest account was the only brand-related board and it included numerous images which depicted the company’s sponsorship of the games, all of which linked to the official websites of the company. The other boards are themed around vague topics for instance ‘Be Active’, ‘Keep Discovering’, and ‘Be Together’, and include a number of images taken from Flickr and therefore none of it link back to the sites of Coca-Cola (Hobbs 2016). Even as all of the photos relate somewhat to the overall theme, a lot of them also include bottles of Coke. Some of them were created for Coca-Cola in particular although the majority of them are images from random Flickr accounts, meaning that there are so many people out there who like taking photographs which look like ads for Coca-Cola. Many of these photos even come from weddings of people (Kumar et al. 2016). It is a very good idea by Coca-Cola Company to gather all of these photos into a single place and most probably the individuals who took those photos would be happy that Coca-Cola has actually noticed their efforts. In addition, the company also has Pinterest account for Diet Coke which has about 5,500 followers. It has 9 boards on this Pinterest account which are mostly brand related, but it does an excellent job of collecting content posted by its fans on other sites and networks (Bird 2014). In some instances, the social team asks for permission before it re-pins images from Twitter or Instagram. In addition, the social team has run a number of competitions which have actually become a common method used by the company to drive up awareness and followers. For example, by creating a new board and pinning 4 autumn fashion photos with the use of the #TakeMeToNYC hashtag, participants in the Pinterest competitions could win an excursion or tour to the city of New York during the NY Fashion Week. There were nearly 60 boards that were named after the #TakeMeToNYC hashtag (Hobbs 2015). On the whole, hundreds of images were pinned, and Coca-Cola took time to find nice photos which other users posted to show their affinity for the company and for Diet Coke. Consequently, they have a number of very fascinating and creative photos and boards which other people would want to share and would help to deepen consumers’ brand loyalty (Ryan & Jones 2012). Twitter As is common with many other international brands, Coca-Cola Company has separate Twitter feeds for every local market where it is active. The firm has dedicated Twitter pages for different product items and sub-brands, such as Coke Zero, Diet Coke, its racing teams, as well as Doc Pemberton, who is Coca-Cola’s long-deceased founder (Ewbank 2015). Its main Twitter feed has in excess of 900,000 followers and Coca-Cola has tweeted in excess of 90,000 times, making this company one of the most active brands on Twitter (Millington 2015). In general, the social team hardly ever post any straightforward marketing messages. Rather, Twitter is primarily used in responding to @mentions. On Twitter, Coca-Cola’s social team responds to numerous mentions on a daily basis, which include compliments, complaints, follow requests as well as general chitchat. In fact, among the ranks, the social team also has a Spanish speaker (Odell 2015). All in all, the Twitter feed of Coca-Cola is utilized as a way to communicate with consumers and not used to just push out marketing messages. Even so, there are still many @mentions that go without being answered which the firm could perhaps address simply through hiring more personnel to the customer or social service teams (Roderick 2015). Coca-Cola’s feed for Diet Coke employs a totally dissimilar approach as it is largely utilized to spout inspirational quotes, tweet marketing messages, and ask questions. The Diet Coke feed responds to occasional @mentions, although not more than roughly six daily. Just like the Facebook page, the messaging of the brand is primarily aimed at female consumers and is less active in responding to other users. Del Buono (2015) noted that Diet Coke has a well-defined audience and it can easily utilize Twitter in communicating with its clients and boost brand loyalty, but it instead chooses to utilize it chiefly as a broadcast tool. Diet Coke can improve on its Twitter feeds by providing its customers with lifestyle and fashion tips consistent with its brand positioning (De Graaf 2015). It is notable that the Doc Pemberton Coca-Cola Twitter feed is an excellent example of the way that Twitter can be used not for overt marketing, but for customer engagement. The Coca-Cola Doc Pemberton Twitter account is essentially an entertaining, quirky account which usually tweets the pretend musings of Doc Pemberton, the guy who is credited for founding Coca-Cola Company in the year 1886. The individual who controls this Twitter account gives it cheery responses to most @mentions, which is helpful in softening Coca-Cola’s glossy, corporate image (Evans 2012). Facebook Coca Cola Company has in excess of 90 million fans on its main Facebook page. This is actually not shocking bearing in mind that this firm is one of the world’s most recognizable brands (Chahal 2015). This soft drink giant posts a number of updates every week so as to keep its fans interested. The firm has an extensive amount of on-page engagement even though it does not post updates on its Facebook page daily or regularly. Since this corporation does not have its own shops where consumers can come and purchase its non-alcoholic products, its social media strategy does not focus on driving consumers to its stores or to an electronic commerce platform. Rather, it is all about maintaining the company’s brand image as well as raising awareness of the company’s advertisement campaigns (Brief 2015). For instance, Coca-Cola Company has posted several updates on its Facebook page aimed at promoting the company’s polar bear ads and its charity effort to help the Arctic. In the same way, Coca-Cola has utilized its pages on Facebook to publicise its Euro 2012 and Olympics advertisement campaigns (Freeman et al. 2014). In addition, the company’s social team runs polls and poses questions quite frequently, though images produce a much better response from followers in terms of likes and comments. The engagement level on Coca-Cola’s Facebook page is somewhat high. In general, each post usually attracts a couple of hundred comments and a few thousands of likes (Parsons 2014). Moreover, this company has several Facebook apps, which include ‘Ahh Giver’ that allows people to send a free Coke and a personalized message to a friend on Facebook, and another one referred to as ‘When will happiness strike’, a video reel of Coca-Cola’s advertisements (The Coca-Cola Company 2015). In Facebook, the company also has dedicated pages for its other products including Diet Coke and Coke Zero, but these have a much smaller amount of fans. The Diet Zero Facebook page has attracted about 6 million fans although it is often updated just a few times each month. On the other hand, the Diet Coke Facebook page has about 4 million likes: the company posts everyday updates of fashion pictures and content of the Diet Coke man on this page (Taylor 2015). Google + Coca-Cola Company has been able to maintain a rather active Google+ page. It posts updates each few days or even after ever...