Introduction
Digital marketing tools and social media benefits businesses regardless of size and category; they magnify small and medium enterprises, even those in the construction industry. Firstly, Dwivedi et al. (2021) reported that the Internet and social media can cut media costs by providing an alternative means of communication with an audience to extend the reach but at a more manageable level. According to Rissman et al. (2020), traditional advertisers in the housing and construction industries may spend 6-11% of their annual revenue, as much as Deloitte has witnessed. Still, this number is expected to rise even more, and companies are now increasingly spending up to 60% of their marketing spending on Internet marketing (Leong et al., 2021). The Internet has presented no technical problems that impede the purchase of display ads or paid searches. At the same time, social media marketing has been an avenue in which a company can make great content and share it with its followers.
Moreover, digital marketing helps construction companies gain recognition, spread information about their products and services, and position themselves as key market participants. However, regular sharing of valuable content, including project progress, management advice, interviews with industry professionals, or site life videos, will help a company to establish itself as a reliable source of information within the construction sector. Of utmost importance is the fact that social media network sites promote direct contact with the potential consumer. Companies can use these platforms to respond to customer queries, conduct knowledge sessions to demonstrate their knowledge and competence and gain the customers’ trust through endorsements and positive reviews. Social media can also increase brand equity, which can happen when brand recognition, relationship, and quality are positively altered. In addition, Makridakis et al. (2022) reported that brand equity, which can be defined as the index of brand strength and brand value, will be acquired using social media, which ordinarily will be used to address the track record of the industry, the value that the consumers may generate with the products display and a positive image through community service.
Aim and Objectives of the Study
Research Aim
The primary aim of this study was to formulate a predictive model using forecasting and predictive analytics to analyse performance of marketing campaigns and establish principal factors that influence their contributions to success and failure.
Research Objectives
- To identify the impacts of types of campaigns, characteristics of the target audience and the adopted campaign channels on the rate of conversion, acquisition rate and return on investment.
- To explore the impacts of campaign type on the relationship between impressions and clicks registered during the marketing campaign process.
- To assess the effects of campaign durations on the relationship between impressions and engagement score among the target customers during the marketing campaign.
Literature Review
Social media has the potential to win customers’ trust and confidence and provide the industry with a high level of customer experience marred with customer complaints due to the use of social media. Moreover, a recent survey conducted by Evans and Mathur (2018) indicated that many people are involved in the Internet as its users suppose there is a greater need to conduct research after acquiring specific information available for free or paid online. Companies nowadays can outsource very little information about their consumers, such as the market’s environment, their rivals and the customers’ requirements, much of which comes from social media users. Customers collect and circulate data and opinions through social media sites as active generators of the social media system. On the other hand, research proved that social media user-generated content and electronic word-of-mouth positively affect purchase intention (Leong et al., 2021). The implication for businesses is that interactions may be done all day long on social media lines; how they manage the situation will determine whether they survive in this new era of marketing or not. However, the dawn of this era has made matters tricky or has created issues in designing and implementing successful market strategies. The online market adopts the attributes of customers having more control while firms see direct relationships (Henley et al., 2020). Another point is an increase in channel fragmentation (increasing channel segments carrying fewer people on each compared to channel centres) coupled with the customers’ evolving needs (about channel introduction and developed demands).
Successful companies should not only come up with a breath of commodities and services but also argue to themselves in case their current channels will continue to evolve as well as have to puzzle over in case they face a broadened view of distribution strength, which is particularly relevant to the much talked about channels evolution. Research conducted by Javaid et al. (2022) indicated that the analysis has shown, too, that as technology takes away jobs, companies strive to build these new systems as fast as possible so that they can function again with new thinking, new strategies. Modern marketing strategies need this foresight, which considers emerging trends and new disruptors, willingness to test new marketing approaches, and a marketing approach that goes through many layers to meet the customer’s needs (Evans and Mathur, 2018). It creates another challenge: hiring competent professionals to fulfil the paramount marketing positions in many organizations remains challenging as more companies try to differentiate themselves from the competition through marketing (Leong et al., 2021). One of the most annoying factors for businesses is the need for more professionals who are well-versed in marketing strategies in social media, big data, artificial intelligence, digital media.
Furthermore, Leppäniemi and Karjaluoto (2020) reported that this kind of people tends to focus on trendy, hi-tech employers who offer good benefits to attract them other than large companies, leaving small firms usually with no qualified employees. Organizational problems could hinder firms, and with managerial inflexibility, catering for these questions may be challenging. In other words, they could be very good at different marketing skills, and others still need to gain this former ability, which may no longer be relevant, preventing new ideas from development either. Consequently, they have yet to try and test or explore several marketing avenues, resulting in inefficient expenditures (Constantinescu, 2019). The analogous problem arises between the businesses that need more time to analyze their marketing campaigns. Consequently, they need to catch up in the mechanism of their marketing strategies, which would be more fruitful (de Ruyter et al., 2022). The situation has changed dramatically since the appearance of many new players who need more time to digest and analyze the available data and determine the right strategy. Circumstances make it difficult for companies – and, again, smaller businesses – to cope with the new reality of a constantly evolving world where breakthroughs in technology and internet marketing occur almost daily. According to Henley et al. (2020), in the wake of these resource- and technology-based constitutionality matters, firms are consequently compelled to embark on adopting the most novel and technologically advanced marketing tools to boost brand awareness, target new demographics, interact with emerging customers and eventually climb the market ladder.
Business Case Study
The Marketing Campaign Performance Dataset included in this analysis presents valuable information about the efficiency of different marketing approaches. Precisely, the dataset provides detailed description of the performance metrics, target audience, duration, channels used, in addition to other factors that influence overall success of a marketing campaign process. Therefore, marketers and data analysts are able to use this data to develop an in-depth understanding of different factors that influence marketing campaign success. The dataset serves as an important source for marketing research, data-driven decision-making process.
Data Exploration
In the exploration of the marketing campaign data for forecasting, emphasis was placed on the adoption of forecasting and predictive analytics techniques. Precisely, this process was initiated by comprehensive assessment of the quality of data, such as handling the missing values, performing appropriate transformations in addition to the identification of outliers. Furthermore, different techniques such as data loading and attachment, and application of different functions such as head(), str(), and summary() in R programming environment was very essential at this stage. Different text preprocessing techniques were then applied to prepare the collected data for further analysis, these include removal of special characters and conversion to lowercase.
