Digital Marketing Strategy : B2B and Stakeholders Communication

Sammanfattning: Since digital media entered the business domain, many different tools and platforms have transformed the nature of business communications. This transformation has not been easy, since the journey has been accompanied by challenges from the marketers’ side against the adoption of the new platforms into the firm’s communication channels. Business to business marketers have also been engaged in such challenges by maintaining a slow adoption, which has motivated the researchers to study the adoption of different means and tools of digital communication in a business context.Through this research, I contribute by exploring the adoption strategies of digital platforms in the B2B supply chain including B2B firms, retailers and end users. By digital media, I mainly refer to social media and beacon technology. First, I begin this thesis by identifying the adoption and integration strategies of social media and digital marketing into traditional marketing channels in a B2B context. In this part, I identify the B2B firms’ target audience and propose a model facilitating a B2B firm’s practical social media adoption strategies.Second, to explore the benefits of different social media content sharing approaches derived from information accessibility resulted in the prior study of this thesis, I introduce and examine Public and Gated-Content sharing approaches. Thereafter, assisted by Social Power Theory and Resource Dependence Theory, I examine the effect of Public and Gated-Content sharing approaches on the target audience’s willingness to interact with the firm. The findings of this study reveal that Gated-Content approach can help the firms build closer relationship with the target audience and engage them in a co-creation process.Third, by studying proximity marketing through the adoption of beacon technology in the retail context, I explore the current methods of usage, as well as the benefits and challenges of in-store proximity marketing adoption for content sharing purposes. I complete the thesis by presenting the different challenges of such adoption, which consist technical, human behavior, managerial perception, resource and privacy factors. Finally, I identify the need to integrate the physical aspect of place and location back again into the online digital communication channels within a retail context.