Consumer's attitudes and behaviors towards digital content marketing activities on social media

Thanks to advanced technology, social media has become an important part of many people. Through social media, consumers can easily learn about the content that produced by products and brands. Content marketing is important to create effective and valuable content about the brands, make distribution activities in the most appropriate way and meet the needs of consumers. Brands, which use the benefits of content marketing such as providing information, entertainment and trust building through social media effectively, can affect consumers and build strong connections with them. The main purpose of this study is to reveal whether the perceived benefits of digital content marketing activities in social media and herd behavior, have a positive effect on the attitude towards content marketing and the behavior of content sharing. The other purpose of the study is to investigate whether the attitude towards content marketing has an intermediary role on the effect of perceived benefits of digital content marketing and the herd behavior on the behavior of content sharing. In order to collect data, an online questionnaire has been applied to 549 participants who have been selected with purposeful sampling and have at least one social media account. According to the findings of the study; It has been observed that the perceived benefits of content marketing activities (information, entertainment, reliability, financial benefits) and herd behavior have a positive effect on the attitude towards content marketing activities and the behavior of content sharing. On the other hand, it has been shown that attitude towards content marketing has a mediating effect between perceived benefits and content sharing behavior.