Human Resource Problem
The management of the Working Women Clothing Line wants to introduce online marketing as its marketing strategy to increase its market share and boost profitability. In this case, the human resource department has the challenge of hiring new employees and offering appropriate training to the existing ones for the marketing strategy to be effective. Evidently, a significant number of women who are working are preoccupied with their work, and they do not ample time to perform shopping in malls and stores. Since these women are potential customers, the introduction of online marketing is a strategy, which helps working women to purchase fashionable products from online stores in the comfort of their workplaces and homes.
Define
In the United States, there are big fashion companies, which dominate the fashion industry, and they offer competitive products to professional women. As an upcoming company, Working Women Clothing Line faces challenges, which emanate from the topmost competitive fashion companies. The market share of Working Women Clothing Line has expanded, and the management considers venturing into online marketing to expand clothesline by exploring international markets. Online marketing has the potential to revolutionize a company by expanding its operations, and hence, making it require additional employees in all the departments (Dellarocas 1416).
Hence, the human resource department has the responsibility of hiring, training, and retaining top-notch employees to meet the demands of the expanding operations. Currently, the company has only been able to market in three states in the United States, where it has opened its fashion stores. The idea behind online marketing is for the company to sell its products to customers across the world and provide shipping services where possible.
Working Women Clothing Line has identified that most professional women double up as wives and managers at home, who do not have enough time to visit the stores. The aim of online marketing is to provide these women with a chance to select and purchase their fashions online and have them delivered to their workplaces or homes across the United States. Judging from its current demand, the fashion industry is growing tremendously in the United States and globally. As physical stores are limiting and expensive to open in all areas, the management plans to use online stores to expand into diverse markets. The establishment of physical stores requires more resources than venturing into online marketing because it needs additional employees and stores.
Measure
The current group of marketers has no one that can run the online marketing platform. The human resource department, therefore, has to employ someone who can operate online marketing and train the other employees. First, management must design a website that the target customers can easily use. The design is important because it determines how customers can easily search and access information on the website (Kiang, Raghu, and Shang 388).
Training for current marketers should improve their productivity. The management should also create platforms where online marketing occurs. Evidently, the use of social media platforms enhances the marketing of products. However, resources are necessary to put up the best technology for social media marketing. Since most of the employees have little expertise in the existing and constantly changing technology, the company requires immense resources to offer training. Moreover, the current employees need motivation and training about the goals and the vision of the company to incorporate them in achieving the goals.
Since the expected outcomes are proportional to the inputs, the management should optimize time. Time management is essential because it enhances the effectiveness of the online marketing system. The human resource department, therefore, needs to ensure that it gets the right marketers, who are not only committed but also determined to fulfill the expectations of the company. The task of recruiting people with the required technical talent may cost the company resources while retaining the technical talent may be a challenge for the department. However, all these need consideration and implementation to ensure success.
With an increased market share, the sales of the company will increase as well. The increased market share means that the company needs additional employees all departments. In this case, the human resource department will face the challenge of recruiting new employees and motivating the current ones. The increase in the number of employees creates a diversified culture, which is prone to conflicts. Hence, the human resource department has a duty to improve the organizational culture. Establishment of vision, mission, and values will enable the human resource department to instill an organizational culture, which fosters productivity and ethics.
To enhance the management of increased employees, the company needs a strong leadership, with the ability to mobilize employees to achieve set goals and objectives. The human resource department will need supervisors, who will oversee the progress of operations in all the departments. Hence, the management needs to promote employees or hire experts, according to the demands of operations. The promotion of employees requires further training, while the hiring of experts requires enormous resources. The human resource department, therefore, has the responsibility of ensuring that all employees undergo appropriate training that is sufficient for them to run operations well.
The human resource department ought to come up with a strategy that defines the roles of each employee in every department. With defined roles, it is easy to assess employees periodically and determine their worth in the company. The human resource department should issue alerts, warnings, and punishments to employees in cases of misconduct. The rules and regulations that apply to the workers in the firm should be clear to all. If an employee receives a warning more than once without adherence, the human resource manager should fire him/her as a form of discipline. Then, human resource manager should hire another employee to replace the fired one.
In addition, the human resource department should ensure that it maintains high morale among the employees all the time. It can motivate employees by matching the skills of employees with the job their duties to optimize their performance and avoid frustrating their efforts. In motivating employees, human resource department should provide employees with the opportunity to grow and advance their prospective careers, offer quality tools and working equipment, maintain a friendly and conducive working environment, and reward them with monetary and non-monetary gifts. These motivational strategies will ensure that there is a low turnover of employees, and thus, the company will be able to retain the best employees on their respective job positions.
The human resource department is also charged with coming up with the budget for the company. The resources required in hiring the new staff and to maintain them in the firm should be well calculated and utilized for budgeting purposes. The department should prepare a return on capital justification to show the need for using the company’s resources in recruitment of new employees and training them.
The human resource manager should be in a position to show the owners of Working Women Clothing Line that using a certain amount of resources is a worthy investment. The department should also be involved in strategic decision making of the firm. Fundamentally, expertise is necessary to sustain profitability, create a robust employer-employee relationship, generate revenue, and meet the demands of the business as it expands.
Online marketing is advantageous because it is easy to keep record of what customers think of the competitors in comparison relation to the company. Whenever a customer mentions a competitor in a particular post on the product page, the human resource manager should follow up and find out what the customer implies. Gay, Charlesworth, and Esen state that customer follow up is essential to ensure that a company meets the expectation of the customers by improving products (28). Tools that are able to monitor results will be useful in monitoring the performance of the markets on each site. With the right tools, progress is easily marked out and any new development noted and looked into as soon as it occurs.
Analyze
Once the human resource department hires online marketers, it should instruct them to create many social platforms to increase awareness of new product in the market. As there are many sites, considerations of where most of the professional women are present is essential because they are the targeted customers. Creation of diverse social platforms aims to increase the customer base to maximum levels. The online marketers should ensure that the social platforms are interactive to keep up with the customers’ inquiries. The profiles on the networks should be catchy for customers to see company’s profile information at a glance. Customers should be able to connect the images used on all the sites with the firm in that where images exist; they should be the same images on all sites.
Another consideration of website is that it that it should be able to display current posts and trending posts. The posts should keep in tandem with changes in seasons of fashion industry. Essentially, the change of fashion in the clothing industry takes several months. Bearing in mind that this is a startup strategy, frequent posting at first should be considered before the sites acquire momentum. The more one posts and checks the reviews, the more one is able to know the right timings and the frequency that will work for each site. Afterwards an automated mechanism can be created to run the sites on the specific timings. Comparison of the effectiveness of the automated system and manual system will then show differences, which requires adjustments.
Design
After the analysis, the goal of the firm is to come up with an online marketing strategy that targets professional women. The sites they frequent most are where the online marketers will post adverts. With the established social platforms, it is wise to create profiles on these sites only, but not on all the social media networks. Targeting sites where professional women are dominant will ensure that the target customers see them, hence, avoiding the wastage of time and resources on sites with no potential market. As most of these women are working for the better part of the day, online marketers should post and make reviews at least once in a day.
The marketing department should analyze the progression and statistics every two weeks and compare to the benchmark. Gurau states that quality control system should be in place so that every new strategy undergoes test against the benchmark to see if it work for a firm or not (177). If it works, the management can implement it appropriately. In this view, the quality control system allows testing of new ideas as they emerge to improve the performance of the company.
Verify
When the marketing strategy is in place, the management should make an automated system, which posts and give updates at specific designed schedules. The automated system will ensure consistency in posting as scheduled (Bondarouk and Ruel 510). One, however, needs to follow up conversations on the sites to monitor customers’ satisfaction levels and follow up on questions asked. Customized settings that exist on the networks alert every time one posts anything or visit the website. The automated system should be adapted to the customer usage for easy follow up on questions and queries. Customer retention is important and everything should be done to ensure that online customers are satisfied.
Implementation and monitoring follow up should be regular to ensure that links to the sites are useable. The links will help the customers to click on them and get whatever they want easily and quickly. Pages should be easy to bookmark and tag so that one person can easily lead others to the same page. The recommendations require analysis and implementation to improve quality of services that customers receive. Ultimately, the online marketing should reach to extensive customers and satisfy their needs by offering appropriate services.
Works Cited
Bondarouk, Vara, and Herbert Ruel. “Electronic Human Resource Management: challenges in the digital era.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management 20.3 (2009): 505-514. Print.
Dellarocas, Chrysanthos. “The digitization of word of mouth: Promise and challenges of online feedback mechanisms.” Management Science 49.10 (2003): 1407-1424. Print.
Gay, Richard, Alan Charlesworth, and Rita Esen. Online marketing: a customer-led approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.
Gurau, Calin. “Integrated online marketing communication: implementation and management.” Journal of communication management 12.2 (2008): 169-184.Print.
Kiang, Melody, Thomas Raghu, and Kevin Shang. “Marketing on the Internet: Who can benefit from an online marketing approach?” Decision Support Systems 27.4 (2000): 383-393. Print.