Critical factors affecting sales promotions on social media in Sri Lankan banking sector

Abstract

Banks are adopting social media for sales promotions to benefit from the popularity of social media and to build a brand over their competition that offers a similar set of products and services. Such promotions on social media are considered to be attractive as they enable targeted marketing, direct customer engagement, multiple forms of engagement, and low cost. However, the effectiveness of social media-based sales promotions is not clear as they primarily rely on soft metrics such as number of likes, sharing, and comments than the actual customer conversions. Moreover, it is unclear what factors to be considered while launching and running a successful sales promotion campaign. We address these problems through a case study of twelve sales promotions from different banks in Sri Lanka. The research was conducted as qualitative analysis based on the Straussian grounded theory. This version of grounded theory allows a literature review for theoretical sampling, concept development, and defining properties and dimensions. Data were gathered through a set of interviews and observations. We found that six factors, mainly contribute to a successful sales promotion campaign. Those factors include the type of the promotion, target audience, timing of a campaign, platform for communication, mode of communication, and resources. We also found that platform rules, regulations, and organizational constraints affect the strength of the relationship between the independent and dependent factors.