Abstract
This essay looks at how the Huffington Post was able to succeed by using its blog and the marketing strategies it employed. The paper also looks at how Turbo Tax Experts have embraced the social media not only as a marketing strategy, but also as an avenue of assisting their customers with tax issues.
The Huffington Post: How a Single Voice Became Many
Celebrity sells. The possibility individuals who are not famous to achieve success may not be practical. In this case study for instance, Arianna Huffington relied hugely on her celebrity status to popularize her blog. This celebrity status allowed her to get interviews in various cable television networks, which served as a platform to market her blog (Barker, 2013).
Acquisitions also play a significant role in making organizations successful in markets. For instance, the acquisition of the Huffington Post by AOL will have more positive effects compared to the negative ones. At the time of acquiring the Huffington Post, AOL had wider market coverage compared to the Huffington Post.
This meant that the Huffington Post would benefit from the broad coverage, and hence expand its content to other untapped markets. It also needed to maintain Arianna because of her celebrity status, and integrate internet use in its operations.
For instance, the staff of the Huffington Post was assisted by identifying exciting material on the internet which was in line with the blog’s left wing inclination. They also focused on celebrity gossip and optimizing of web contents from original articles.
This was done so that the Google search engine could pick the Huffington Post’s articles before the primary article. These strategies are also applied to other blog spots since there is no law which prohibits the optimization of search engines (Anderson, 2010). However, moral and ethical considerations are against this practice.
The Huffington Post emphasizes on moral and virtues while involving celebs as part of its promotional activities. For instance, it enjoys a lot of fame by virtue of being associated with Arianna. She has many political and celebrity connections, which would improve the ratings of AOL. It is most likely that AOL will lose its identity due to the increasing fame acquired by the Huffington post.
TurboTax Experts Take Over Twitter
The Software Quicken of Intuit enabled Turbo to have a strong brand name. This affected the company’s Twitter strategy in many ways. The company was able to develop an excellent retention program, which enabled it to staff and connect with experts in an efficient manner.
The management took advantage of the company’s brand name, and scaled its Twitter efforts to assist consumers during tax seasons. The company changed its twitter strategy to follow the CEO’s philosophy of ‘follow me home.’ There are several pros and cons of using twitter to engage with customers on matters concerning tax.
The pros of asking for tax advice on Twitter include a fast response time and attraction of new customers (Barker, 2013). The satisfied customers turned out to be loyal to Turbo after being offered prompt and satisfactory services through Twitter. However, there are several disadvantages of using Twitter to advise customers in Turbo’s case. For instance, the company incurred extra costs because of employing experts and training its staff to handle tax questions.
It also experienced challenges when customers started asking the company about personal tax issues. To better manage the rush besieging tax today, Turbo uses social media tactics such as using twitter as a persuasive engine, and allowing customers to help each other on Twitter. It also uses Co Tweet to deal with new customers. It also re-directs questions to relevant experts (Chaffey, 2009). For instance, Team TurboTax deals with tax questions.
The company also benefits a lot from its seasonal nature of work. For instance, it makes media marketing easier by getting Turbo Tax close to customers, engaging them, and commenting on their taxes. It makes it difficult by demanding devoted resources to make the whole process successful.
To make the rush around tax day easier to manage, the company should take several steps. It should avail all resources. This includes hiring and training more staff than before, developing a team headed by experts, and scaling the idea of assisting customers.
There are several advantages of Turbo Tax’s strategy. These include word-of-mouth recommendations, customer persuasion, satisfaction and retention, fast customer services, as well as increased loyalty to the business (Weber, 2009).
References
Anderson, E. (2010). Social media marketing: Game theory and the emergence of collaboration. Heidelberg: Springer.
Barker, M. (2013). Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach. Cengage Learning.
Chaffey, D. (2009). Internet marketing: Strategy, implementation and practice. Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall.
Weber, S. (2009). Twitter marketing: Promote yourself and your business on earth’s hottest social network. Falls Church, Va.: Weber Books.