Critical factors for market sales promotion on social media in banking sector

Banks are adopting social media for market sales promotions as it is popular and enables targeted marketing, direct customer engagement, and multiple forms of engagement at a lower cost. However, the effectiveness of market sales promotions is not clear as they primarily rely on number of likes, sharing, and comments than the actual customer conversions. Moreover, it is unclear what factors to be considered while launching and running a successful market sales promotion campaign. We identify those factors through a case study of twelve market sales promotions from different banks in Sri Lanka. The research was conducted as a qualitative analysis based on the Straussian grounded theory, because this version of grounded theory allows a literature review for theoretical sampling, concept development, and defining properties and dimensions. Data were gathered through a set of interviews and observations. We found that six factors that mainly contribute to a successful market sales promotion campaign, namely the type of the promotion, target audience, timing of campaign, platform for communication, mode of communication, and resources. Moreover, platform rules, regulations, and organizational constraints affect the strength of the relationship between the independent and dependent factors.