Analysis of social media marketing activities of Hungarian accommodation providers and catering SME’s from the aspect of lean principles

Abstract

Lean management can be viewed as an attitude that organizes and directs business processes while keeping a few main guiding principles in focus such as maximizing the customer value while minimizing losses, resulting in the creation of increased customer value by using fewer resources. The lean thinking can successfully applied in the field of social media marketing when it comes to understanding the logical process of the individual operations and to increase the overall efficiency of the campaigns while improving the key performance indicators.  The basic principles of lean can serve as the basis in any system and in any business, and for this reason, basic principles are also taken into consideration at strategic levels. The various platforms have become smart, the advertising alternatives can be highly customized based on the individual needs of businesses, which can also result in higher overall efficiency. With the help of the available social media platforms, businesses are not only able to reach their desired audience but can also measure the success of their individual campaigns. The main goal of the research is to find an answer to what parallels and connections can be discovered between online marketing and lean theories. The research aims to answer the questions of how the process of creating and maintaining social media marketing strategies can be characterized from the aspect of lean thinking while focusing on discovering whether the origin of the individual campaigns – either in-house or outsources – have any effect on the extent of how well the lean principles are applied. During the course of the research, accommodation providers and catering SMEs located in various Hungarian cities were visited in order to use a questionnaire to assess the social media marketing processes of the given units.The research proved that 70% of the social media activity in the examined region was outsourced and the vast majority of businesses (57%) do not track the effectiveness of their marketing activities regularly.  The potential presence of lean in marketing processes had been monitored.