Marketing Strategy: Apple And Social Media Marketing By Apple

Apple is known for its unique marketing strategy which was a brilliant idea by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. Apple took aggressive approach in marketing to turn itself into a profitable business organization and dominate the market all around the world. The major reason for the success of Apple is its continuous innovation and catching up to the trend in design, production and marketing. Apple has always focused on delivering the best which was received well by the customers. Even though Apple’s marketing strategy did not consider online digital marketing seriously, off late the company has started to focus on online marketing. Using social media for marketing by Apple for its products is to start off in a big way; they built its own social networking

Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a part of digital marketing and the use of web, emails, social media platform as a tool for digital marketing of a product.
3.1. Target Audience and Segmentation
Segmentation as per Dibb et al (2001) is the process of understanding the differentiation among customers in the target market so that the organization can understand their needs and the market potential and to build strategy to deliver the product or service to satisfy the customer and increase the profit. iTunes has customer segment from all sector of people irrespective of location, country, language and culture. This is because iTunes has globalized its music, video, books, film content to suit to all languages and people. iTunes is used by all ages including parents and children, teachers and students etc.
3.2. Target Marketing
Target Marketing is about focusing on the segment identified for social media marketing. The targeted group may differ in many ways.
Chaffey et al (2012) have discussed about customer targeting for online marketing. iTunes targets teenagers, students, adults who love music, reading and who love watching movies online. iTunes had music collection of 200,000 tracks when it was launched. As on 2009, it has 10 million songs in its catalogue (Lettice, 2009). And it has sold more than 7 million songs to their customer which is more than 50 million people (Schonfeld, 2009). Goonan (2008) says that Apple’s iTunes holds 70% of online music

Advertising on social media platform
Social media advertisement has become a necessity for the modern day business. It helps to easily identify potential customers by utilizing the social media information shared by users who have same interest and likes. Social media advertisement has advanced targeting technology, good chance to convert an onlooker into a potential buyer and they can reach a customer through his mobile also (Ganguly, 2015).
Apple has used the popularity of its brands –iPhone and iTunes to boost its computer business. It has continuously used iPhone and iTunes to establish Apple brand in the market. This halo effect using iPod and iTunes has increased the popularity of Apple’s other products among the segments of customers who were eager about Apple’s computers. Marketing Minds (2015) says that since the launch of iPod by Apple, they witnessed more sales in computers. iTunes U has shown tremendous increase in its U track downloads due to its presence in social media (U.S. National Archives, 2015) as shown in Figure