Walmart's Digital Communication Channels: A Marketing Report

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Executive Summary

The report enlights the chosen topic “Walmart” with its focus on channels of digital communication that includes the overview of the company with the enduring focus on activities that are related to digital communication that includes identification of the channels of social media and analysing constituencies. The marketing report also enhances the challenges faced by social media with the increase in operations of the company with following part of recommendations that will be helpful for the company in increasing its future operations and entering focus towards the best plans that help in company’s integration for the effective improvement and growth of Walmart. The marketing report mainly gives the basic idea of the operations of social media that are used in the organization and increases more and more customers to focus on the organization and use its services and products that help in increasing the ideas as well as improving its reputation. 

Introduction

The report lays the emphasis on the chosen topic “Walmart” with the focus on channels of digital communication and company overview by identifying the social media channels and the presence that company has in the social world. The second part of the report focuses on the effective diagnosis of the reputation of the company and how the problems as well as the challenges need to be given heading focus. The third part of the report focuses on various challenges of social media with the heading focusing on promoting immediacy, risks, dealing with the critics and many more. The final part of the report is supported by recommendations that the company needs to focus on in order to increase the market space and involve socially. 

Digital Communication Channels

Company's overview

Walmart is an American based company with its retail corporation that is mainly operating as the market chain of hypermarkets, grocery stores, department stores of discount and hypermarkets. The company was founded in the year 1962 with its incorporation by Sam Walton in 1969, October 31. The company is serving at 11,510 stores all over the world. 

Social media is the most important channel of marketing with offering of the unique opportunities that helps in communicating with customers. 

Facebook 

Walmart is putting huge efforts in development of the presence related to facebook and embracing to showcase the timeline of how the brands are growing over time. 

Figure 1: Facebook

Twitter

The company uses Twitter for posting of questions that include the topics of requests, caption contests and sports (Fulgoni 2014). 

Figure: Twitter

Pinterest

The company has an account of pinterest and aims at the ideas of products and promoting green living. 

Figure: Pinterest

Digital Communication Activities 

This section of the report mainly talks about the identification of social media with its presence and focusing on the analysis of constituencies.

Identification and social media 

Source: Gupta (2020)

Heading towards the logo and image of the store, it can be recognised that it is a supercentre with all the groceries and stores for family and the establishment of brand with the training of employees and establishing of guidelines with having the best purpose for setting a network of social media and also different audience interest segments. 

Social Media Presence 

The company is using social media locally and nationally with the focus on establishment of individual pages for Facebook that has the main fan pages. The company also has a facebook app that is used by the stores to communicate for the updates, specials and sales. 

Source: Source: Gupta (2020)

The company heads towards the best ideas that help in establishment of the company and bringing its ideas globally across the world. 

Analysing constituencies 

The below table shows the organizations constituencies with what are the other thinking about Walmart and what are the focus of different communication channels. Through this the constituencies are identified with the main focus on maintaining a pace (Golding 2017). 

Diagnosis of Company’s Reputation 

The social media presence comes with certain issues that can be ignored and is mainly linked with different influences that need to be developed for the effective presence towards the social media, that helps to increase the awareness, satisfaction of customers with engagement of consumers. The company is criticized by different individuals and groups that includes advocates of small town and labour unions for the different policies and effects and practices of business. The criticism mainly includes the charges of gender and racial discrimination. 

The reputation of the company can be boosted by focusing on the communication teams of digital that has the main primary responsibilities. The first task of the company is supported by ensuring that the customers and the potential customers focus on understanding the stores of discount that  mainly has the lowest form of prices for the industry and the mission of the company is to mainly ensure that people can save money and can live their lives best. The second objective of the company is focused by to enhance the reputation, defend and project. 

The online presence of company is supported by establishment of the company and to mainly focus on achieving the best results that tend towards taking risk and trying the things that are innovative and also grows towards initiating the main focus towards more interesting focus on social media brands and through the networks that are active and can be used for the best ones. The online media channels help in growth of the company by achievement of the best results and making the company to grow by new updates and recognising the best opportunities that help in increasing the main focus towards regular updates. 

By online presence of social media the company is focusing to attract more and more customers and also to enhance the stakeholders wealth and helping towards the ideas that help in increasing the value of company and trying to focus on the best services and products initiated by the company with its major objective cooperation with the responsibility of social media and offering best offers for jobs as well as employing the best ones (Kampf 2007). 

Focusing on the website of the company it is evident that the company has a good reputation over the internet and the utmost thoughts that helps in effective starting results and increasing focus on protection of reputation across the main focus on positives and negatives. 

Source: (Golding 2017)

Social Media Challenges 

The Internet particularly has a major impact on the organization as well as the public that is allowed by anyone that has the connection of the internet that  helps in accessing, publishing, and sharing over debates. The following are the social media challenges that are faced by Walmart.

Uninspiring or Weak Call to Action- this is the first mistake in which the company is weak. Walmart mainly focused on swapping the regular bulb to the green one, that is guessed to be a hope light and also through this it could have been served better. But through this campaign there was not as much effort that was seen by the customers to initiate towards this campaign. The company thought that the campaign would go viral but there was very less inspiration seen in the customers (Katsikeas 2020). 

Non connection of commerce with the community- Walmart tried to focus on the green bulb strategy but they lost connection with the commerce and they headed towards no interaction with the community. There was no understanding of promotional awareness campaigns due to which the community was not able to interact with the customers on bold  and in communities (Stieglitz 2018). 

Source: Gupta (2020)

Confusing the customers with the Disjoined strategy of Content- this has been the third mistake done by the company as the customers were confused about the customers so this effected as the disjoined strategy and stated that creating a link in the social media to driving the people to the commerce. Once the company gets there, there should be an effective feeling of making what they need right Walmart focused on selling the green bulbs which were available in variety but there was no mention or support of the campaigns and there were no pages of search, this mainly led to decrease in its sales. 

Source: Gupta (2020)

Breaking of Security- this is the most critical challenge faced by companies, as it is very difficult to maintain the breaching of data. Due to breachment of the information, the customer’s information and data gets breach and this leads to decrease in the related information. The companies face challenges that cannot be derived by the customers and this leads to less trust by the customers due to which they switch from the company and leads to trade off. The big companies mainly face this issue as there are many hackers due to which the information gets breached. 

Getting the approval of Clients- the company faces this challenge as the approval of the customers sometimes be a difficult task for the company employees due to which the company is unable to focus on the operations and this leads to decrease in the sales of the company and also leads to decrease in customer satisfaction (Vilceanu 2019). 

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the report concludes that Walmart should focus on the operations of social media that should be initiated towards increasing the operations of the business and growth. The report focuses on the social media strategies and challenges of Walmart and this heads towards the initiating focus different channels of communication and effective diagnosis of the company with the focus on the challenges that help in focusing on the risk factors and recommendation towards the effective changes. 

Recommendations

Introduction of new platforms of communication- Walmart should focus on introducing new platforms of digital communication that should initiate towards increasing the customer base of the company.

Being professional and direct- Walmart should focus on being professional and direct towards the strategies and also focus on increasing ideas towards the best methods that help in increasing more customers. 

Receive and sending of feedback- there should be proper receiving and sending of the feedback that should help in increasing the main focus towards getting the customers feedback and knowing where the company lacks in (Xie 2019). 

References

Fulgoni, L 2014, ‘Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy In Sync with Latino-User Behavior?: A Growing Demographic Forces Media Firms To Rethink Mobile-Marketing Strategies’, Journal of advertising research, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 255–258. DOI: 10.2501/JAR-54-3-255-258

Golding, R 2017, ‘Social media – New challenges and approaches for communications research’, European journal of communication (London), vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 3–5. DOI: 10.1177/0267323116682801

Kampf, C 2007, ‘Corporate social responsibility: WalMart, Maersk and the cultural bounds of representation in corporate web sites’, Corporate communications, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 41–57. DOI: 10.1108/13563280710723741

Katsikeas, L 2020, ‘Revisiting international marketing strategy in a digital era: Opportunities, challenges, and research directions’, International marketing review, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 405–424. DOI: 10.1108/IMR-02-2019-0080

Stieglitz, M 2018, ‘Social media analytics – Challenges in topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation’, International journal of information management, vol. 39, pp. 156–168. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2017.12.002

Vilceanu, F 2019, ‘Using Social Media in Education and Using Social Media Strategies in Education and Corporate Organizations in the U.S. and Belarus: A Practitioner Study’, International journal of sociotechnology and knowledge development, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 20–33. DOI: 10.4018/IJSKD.2019100102

Xie, C 2019, ‘Quality and cost? The evolution of Walmart’s business strategy and human resource policies and practices in China and their impact (1996–2017)’, Human resource management, vol. 58, no. 5, pp. 521–541. DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21931