Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Marketing Research:

Marketing research is the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information--information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications. (Approved October 2004)

Social Marketing – Definition (reference - International Social Marketing Assn.)

Social Marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. Social Marketing practice is guided by ethical principles. It seeks to integrate research, best practice, theory, audience and partnership insight, to inform the delivery of competition sensitive and segmented social change programmes that are effective, efficient, equitable and sustainable.

We at Lotus are fully equipped to offer you bespoke marketing and branding strategies driven by digital marketing, which includes:

• Set and measure behavioral objectives
• Conversion objectives and strategies
• Analytics
• Effective usage of social media boards
• Social media community development
• Establish dollar value of the traffic though analytics
• Social community video uploads
• Content to drive participation and interest in topics
• Revenue drivers
• Measurement of KPIs
• Use audience segmentation to understand and target interventions
• Rigorous evaluation and reporting of short term impacts
• Establish ROI and long term revenue streams and outcomes
• Develop System planning and marketing management methodology
• Social reputation management

Value of social media marketing globally – USD 62 Billion – 2012 Report.

The CMO Survey ran a study that asked CMOs to share the metrics that they were using to evaluate social media. You can see an interesting breakdown of the results below:

"There is no ROI in anything if you don’t learn how to use it."

-Gary Vaynerchuk, Founder of VaynerMedia