Week #13 Post 1

As a tea business we are constantly learning from other business in every aspect to be able to maintain our competitive advantage, some of such businesses are – Red Blossom Tea, Full Leaf Tea Co., Little Red Cup Tea, Rishi Tea and Samovar tea. In my opinion these businesses are doing a great job of following right criteria required for social advertising. While some need to catch up a little bit in their advertising strategy. Consider Rishi Tea and Full Leaf Tea co., their Facebook presence is really engaging. They are responding to customers negative experiences as well as maintaining two-way communication, Easy shopping cart right in the post, very convenient checkout process and their posts contain videos and images with various tea offerings. Red Blossom Tea, Samovar Tea and Little Red Cup Tea though were engaging consumers with good posts such as videos and images they are not linked up to a shopping cart nor did they have landing page or call to action. In my opinion it has half effectiveness than its full potential.

While there are many different formats of advertising on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, primary goal is to captivate the user and turn them into buyers. What catches one’s attention, when on these sites is relevance of content, creative videos on using products or services and colorful images along with call to action. Not many of them have call to action, however, there is benefit of using this feature because consumers need not have to struggle to place an order if they want to make a purchase. It’s the convenience of putting forth all that a business has to offer, just few clicks away.

Online advertising has become versatile medium to target specific target groups. It is expected to grow to $82 million by 2018. Online advertising includes search engine markets such as pay-per-click and Google Ad Words, Videos, Social Media advertising such as Facebook, Twitter and Email Marketing. As a start up company without lot of budget set aside for advertising, our option would be to use Online advertising platform. Compared to traditional advertising which can get expensive and that is inclined to reach or bring in new target audiences, in social media people are already there all that needs to be done is finding the right target audience for low cost. Building connections, creating trust and hearing the audiences is well achieved through online advertising via two-way communication than mass communication where it is one side. For us this would be a better marketing strategy.