Corporate blogs as e-CRM tools – Building consumer engagement through content management

Abstract

Corporate Blogs are fast emerging as new organizational tools for marketing, building brand relationships and Customer Relationship Management. This study has been conducted to analyse the ability of an organization to use its Corporate Blog as an e-CRM tool. We attempt to study the impact of brand communication (content type and volume), hosted on an organizational blog, on its ability to induce consumer engagement. Organizations can build relationships with their prospective and current consumers through posts on a Corporate Blog, and encourage them to participate by commenting on the blog, thereby stimulating consumer engagement. The variation in the organizational objective behind hosting each post on the blog is used to categorize the content posted on the blog. An exploratory study enables us to deduce the importance of content typologies in building a relationship with the customer. We are able to identify three types of content typologies -Organizational, Promotional and Relational. We further observe that Relational content hosted by an organization is able to induce greater volumes of consumer engagement (measured in terms of number of consumer comments) than any other content typology. The analysis of dependency of consumer engagement on the volume of content posted by the organization indicates a positive correlation between number of posts and volume of comments.

The usage of digital marketing channels in SMEs

“…However, the findings further indicate that social media is not understood as a two-way communication channel capable of serving relationship building, as had been suggested by the literature (Ahuja and Medury, 2010;Cho and Huh, 2010;Hennig-Thurau et al, 2010;Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010;Liu et al, 2011;Malhotra et al, 2013;Singh et al, 2008). In addition, the study confirms that regardless of firm size, SMEs use social media in the same way they use other digital channels; as a form of one-way broadcasting while attempting to drive sales.…”

Strategies of SMM Management, Comparison of Instagram and Facebook Social Networks

“…Customer channels should be identified before the organization can build and manage relationships with customers through social networks.After that realize the full potential of Social CRM is clients like to use social networks to share information about yourself and your interests. Social CRM in its current state is just the beginning of big changes that might occur on the foundation of today's new directions (Ahuja V. 2010). …”

Digital Strategies of Consumer Involvement and Innovation Dynamics: A Cross-Sector Explorative Study

“…Indeed, the main dimensions associated with engagement in the marketing literature are: involvement (Sawhney et al, 2005), empowerment (Shaw, Newholm, & Dickinson, 2006), interaction (Ahuja & Medury, 2010), activation, including the interaction, participation, collaboration and co-creation components (Hoeffler & Keller, 2002;Etgar, 2008). In the literature on NPD, the concept of engagement has been analysed mainly from the perspective of empowerment and of its links with perceived customer orientation, purchase intentions, and customers' attitudes towards the company (Fuchs & Schreier, 2011).…”