The Impact of Social Media Marketing Strategies on Consumer Buying Decisions: With Special Reference to the Apparel Industry in Jaffna District, Sri Lanka

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to examine how different social media marketing strategies impact on customer buying behaviour of apparel in Jaffna District Sri Lanka. Because of the fast pace of technological changes, and how deeply married to social media, all the businesses have become very dependent upon digital marketing strategies to connect with consumers. Hence, this study aims to examine the influence of social media marketing strategies on consumer buying decisions. This study is quantitative research and descriptive in nature. The data were collected through structured questionnaires from the sample of 200 consumers using convenient sampling. The data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, reliability, and multiple regression analyses using SPSS. The results show that all three types of social media marketing strategies (social media content, influencer marketing, Electronic Word-of-Mouth) have a significant positive influence on consumer buying decisions at 99% confidence level. It shows that social media content has the highest impact while influencer marketing has the least important but significant. It further states that consumers generally use social media sites, and young consumers enjoys the privilege of using these sites for product information, discussion comparison, and other purposes. This means that brands should be working on deliverables with exciting, quality content, all the while building out positive user accounts and reviews online. The results have important implications in terms of enabling apparel businesses to optimize their social media marketing, improve the quality of customer engagement and enhance sales performance.