SME = Small-Medium sized businesses

Problem Statement

Despite such rave reviews of using social networking as a marketing platform, many companies have not readjusted their strategies to incorporate such elements into their execution of marketing techniques. This means missed opportunities and cost savings. Even worse, many SMEs are continuing to shell out way to much money spent on the execution of traditional advertising, which is essentially limiting their ability to compete with larger businesses. This creates a situation where market entry barriers are high, as are the potential failure rate for many new start ups and small businesses around the country.

Purpose Statement

The primary purpose of this research is to expose the benefits of social marketing within the execution of marketing strategy, and how such action can give SMEs a competitive boost that will allow them to compete with larger businesses more effectively to reach a greater share of the emerging marketplace. The research explores the benefits of social networking as intertwined with marketing techniques. It also helps provide a model for many SMEs looking to readjust marketing strategies to incorporate ones that will be feasible in a viral environment by examining the extremely cost effective and successful strategy of word of mouth marketing facilitated through social networking platforms. This model will help guide future efforts of SMEs, and therefore is another major purpose of the research as a whole.

Research Question s

Research questions are vital to a study. Without them, one does not know what is really being addressed, or how the researcher plans to use the question to show that there is a "good" answer to what is being studied. Some studies have several questions that must be answered, but there is only one question around which this study will revolve and which the researcher seeks to answer.

While more could be asked of this study, marketing is very complex. There are a large number of facets to be explored, and attempting to address too many of them would cause the researcher to struggle with the study. Too much data in a study can be just as troubling as too little data, and it is often difficult to separate the information and analyze it correctly when it has simply become overwhelming. Each study that is conducted must have a strong focus, or too much information that is unneeded for the actual study will be generated. A study that stays focused on just one research question, especially within such a broad topic as marketing, is often a better choice.

The research questions for this study are as follows:

• What are the benefits of using social networking as a platform for advertising?
• Is social media a viable strategy for increasing SME advertising competitiveness that will allow them to compete with larger enterprise businesses?
• How successful is word of mouth style marketing via social networking platforms?
• Will use of such strategies increase SMEs ability to compete with larger enterprise businesses?

Hypothesis

It is the hypothesis of this research that social media can only benefit the marketing strategies of SMEs as they aim to compete with larger enterprise businesses. Social media will prove to have a great impact on the productivity of SMEs, allowing them to gain enough marketing competitiveness to stand against larger enterprise businesses by using viral platforms to encourage cost effective word of mouth marketing strategies.

Price: $13.96

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 9 pages, 496 words and 9 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document