NEW MARKETING CHANNEL AND SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS AS MARKETING TOOLS FOR    FASHION: A STUDY OF PORTHARCOURT CITY LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Creators: name: Michael Ibe, Ukaegbu, PhD
name: Nwoke, Vivian Ijeoma
name: Ebiwari, Enainya Damini
Publisher: name: SADI journals
Year: 2024
Subjects: Social media, Influencers, New marketing, e-Marketing, Marketing tools

description: This study examined how social media influencers are marketing tools for ladies’ fashion clothing, a study of Port Harcourt City local government. The objectives of the study were set to ascertain common social media platform influencers use as marketing tools among the residents of Port Harcourt City LGA, to examine the impact of social media influencers on the popularity and customers loyalty of the ladies fashion clothing in Port Harcourt City LGA, and to determine the challenges encountered in using social media influencers for the marketing of ladies’ fashion clothing in Port Harcourt City LGA. The two-stage Communication Model was adopted for this study. The population used for the study was that of female residents in Port Harcourt City local government, which is 501,105. To arrive at an equitable sample size, the Taro Yamane’s Formula for determining sample size was adopted. A total of four hundred (400) female residents of the study were sampled for the study, however 370 returned copies of the questionnaire were used for analysis of the study.  The survey design was adopted with the questionnaire as the instrument of data collection. The random sampling technique was used for the study. The questionnaire was a 4-point modified Likert ranking scale. The instrument was validated. Also, test re-test method correlation was used to ascertain the reliability of the research instrument and the reliability coefficient was calculated to be 0.75 for the tests. Mean statistical tools were used to answer the three research questions. The findings of the study show that some common social media apps influencers used as marketing tools among the residents of Port Harcourt City are as follows; Tik Tok, YouTube, Facebook pages, Snapchat, Instagram subscribers, Search engine optimization (SEO). The study also revealed that the impacts of the social media influencers on the popularity and customers loyalty of the ladies fashion clothing in Port Harcourt City include high popularity of the products, and high sales of the products, the findings show that a lot of Port Harcourt city residents prefer to patronize popular fashion products, and that social media influencers help to get the products to the door post of the customers so that they can be easily purchased online. Finally, the study revealed that the challenges encountered in using social media influencers for marketing in Port Harcourt City include: marketing and sales of low-quality products, indiscipline in marketing, and unprofessionalism in marketing practice, difficulty in turning marketing into sales, and low accessibility of online marketing by a greater number of residents. Thus, the study recommends that; marketers and product owners should be encouraged to utilise these new social media influencers as tools in making their products to be easily known by consumers, the government should be actively involved in regulating the excesses of social media marketing, and that there should be avenues to ensure that products that are marketed and sold through the social media meet the required standard of customers.