How Blogs Can Use the Hierarchy of Effects Model of Marketing Communication - Research Proposal Example

How Blogs Can Use the Hierarchy of Effects Model of Marketing Communication to Improve Outcomes of Their Marketing Campaigns Your Name (First M. Last) School or Institution Name (University at Place or Town, State) Abstract This paper seeks to explain how the hierarchy of effects model of marketing communication can be used in the assessment of a blog’s marketing campaign strategy. With internet penetration in the world increases so does the number of content producers and as such blogs. This makes for a very populated field of content producers chasing after a wide spread mass. How one curves his/ her niche in this mass is a result of marketing as everyone everywhere with access to the internet can access an online blog. The nature of this industry makes the hierarchy of effects model ideal for measuring the effectiveness of a marketing communication plan as the a space is open to anyone with providing equal opportunity to new and already existing blogs to be read. How Blogs Can Use the Hierarchy of Effects to Improve Outcomes of Their Advertisement Campaigns With the advent of user generated data on the internet better known as web2.0 ( O’Riley, 2001) the internet has seen a growth in the number of blogs as the internet penetrates further and further in the world. The word is blog is short form for weblog, a blog is a simple website made of posts in inverted chronological order (National Center for Technology and Education, 2008). There are more that 8 million blogs in the world and a new blog is created every 7.4 seconds with 10,800 updates made every second around the world (www.Tecnnorati.com, 2016). With these statistics you can begin to appreciate the mess that a blogger is in when they decide to make a blog and the competition he/she faces to make a successful blog. These blogs are targeted to all the internet users who are estimated to be above 3.2 billion (World Bank, 2016). With proper application of the hierarchy of effects model of marketing communication it is possible to track and the effectiveness of a marketing campaign Literature Review Marketing campaigns on blogs are mostly done online although some have taken to print and even television shows to drum up traffic for their blogs. The end goal of marketing a blog is to have a constant readership/traffic. While marketing online there are many ways of getting ones message to his audience, these methods vary but the most used conduit is social media. The social media sales funnel is best expresses the process of social media marketing (Ball, 2011). The funnel illustrates the nature of advertising campaigns how they are wide at the beginning a narrow toward the end .At the top of the funnel there are is everyone who a campaign can reach and as you get to your target audience and the few people who are final consumers of your product. Figure 1 shows a representation of the social media sales funnel and how people from different social media sites are herded together towards one product (Ball, 2010). Although this has been used for product sales it still holds for blogs as they are the products and the goal of the marketer is to gather an audience from everywhere online. Figure 1 Social media sales funnel Source: (http://socialmediatoday.com/SMC/176665) The hierarchy of effects model This model suggests that a disinterested individual does not become a convinced purchaser or consumer instantaneously but rather in through a process of steps. This model suggest that the disinterested individual is grown to a convince purchaser in seven stages, i.e. awareness, knowledge, liking, preference conviction and purchase. (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961). (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961) breaks down the six stages of the hierarchy of effects in accordance with the three functions of marketing related to the classical psychology model. At the bottom of the hierarchy awareness and knowledge bring out the cognitive function of advertising. The second function is affective stage where the public/target audience of a campaign begins forming emotions towards the brand. This function in the hierarchy of effects marketing communications model is executed by the liking, preference and conviction stages. The third marketing function, the co-native or motivation, the striving stage, in the model is brought out by the last step at the top of hierarchy, purchase. Figure 2 is a representation of the hierarchy of effects related to a classical psychology model Figure 2: Hierarchy of effects marketing communication model Source: Author Methodology Breaking down the campaign in to the respective segments in regard to the hierarchy of effects model one should be able to measure the effectiveness of a campaign and make corrections where necessary. 1. Awareness and Knowledge (Cognitive Stage) Having no audience is hard for a product whose sole purpose is its audience, this stage the blogger should evaluate his entrance strategies. This on online marketing would be done using sponsored adverts showing what the blog is about on social media a blogger may decide to use friends and associate posts to make some noise. To determine the effectiveness of the effectiveness of activities in this stage a blogger could employ simple online survey tools to measure awareness on social media. A blogger may run a concurrent survey to see how much of a buzz they make. The survey would run on different social media platforms casting a wide net over the possible population. A successful campaign would result in a high number of people surveyed alluding to that they recognized the blog. In the case that the survey shows that there is still very few of the people surveyed knew the blog then bloggers could take measures to push more content to the public. After making adjustments, another survey should be run to measure the effectiveness of the adjustments made. After a successful first stage, that is the numbers from the surveys are acceptable, then one can commence on measuring the second phase. 2. Liking Preference and Conviction (Affective Stage) The main purpose of this is to find out how the public feels about the product or service, in this case, a blog. In this stage the measurement tool would be a semantic differential scale to find out how the brand is perceived by online users. Using theses perceptions we would then know how to move on. While still using online surveys a blogger could affordably run a wide survey allowing him/her to capture all the data he/she needs. If statistics point out that the audience doesn’t appreciate the content on the blog then the blogger would need to either change his target audience to people who like his current content or change the content to suit the audience amerced from the first stage of the campaign, whatever the case corrective action is needed to make the campaign a success. On the flip side however, if the statistics are positive that is people can relate with a blog i.e. they like it then the next step is make them prefer it over the thousands of other blogs which are just like yours. Preferences and convictions in this sphere could be aided by consistency and quality content. It doesn’t matter the subject matter of the blog if there is consistency in color, font, and content quality of the posts a blogger will be able to condense a constant readership. Simple disciplines such as this will help the target audience know what to expect and when to expect it, and in the case of video blogs how to expect it. It is especially key that the once the niche audience has been curved out, the content quality has to be maintained. With blogs it is about the content any changes in it entirely. The key factor in this stage is consistency. 3. Purchase. (Behavioral Stage) The steps in the hierarchy of effects model are not equidistant (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961). In the marketing blogs the distance between the liking, preference and conviction stage and the purchase stage is very small compared to the rest of the stages. Blogs aren’t bought as with products or services. In the traditional approach you cannot buy a blog. When a reader totally accepts the blog views consistently and even shares it on his/her own social media network we can say that this reader has fully bought this blog. This stage can be measured with the number of return users and social media shares. At this point the marketing journey of a blog is complete. If at this point the number of shares are not to the ones projected at the beginning of the campaign or are unsatisfactory one can analyze the campaign process but if the results are projected then the blog at this point can only maintain its crowd consistency at this point the marketing process of a blog can be said to be complete. References Ball, C. (2010). Social Media: Extending & Growing Your Brand. New York: Freeman Retrieved from http://www.freemanco.com Lavidge, J and Steiner, A. (1961). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness: The Journal of national quarterly publication of the American national publication, 59-62 National Center for Technology and Education, (2008) Blogs, Retrieved March 18 2016, from http://www.pdsttechnologyineducation.ie/en/Technology/Advice-Sheets/Blogs.pdf O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. Retrieved September 30th, 2010, from http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html State of the Blogosphere 2010. (n.d.). Retrieved March 18, 2016, from http://technorati.com/state-of-the-blogosphere-2010/ The World Bank. (n.d.). Retrieved March 18, 2016, from http://data.worldbank.org/ Visualizing Social Media ROI. (2010). Retrieved March 18 2016, from http://socialmediatoday.com/SMC/176665 Read More