The impact of content marketing on creating positive attitude on consumers in social media

With the start of the development of computer systems in the 1950s in conjunction with the internet era and with the influence of today's globalization, people in social media can interact without limit of time and place. The whole process including the activities such as making the products and services more attractive than classical advertisements, reaching the target masses, creating awareness and activating the masses, selecting and distributing the channels with verbal – visual contents to be broadcast are defined as content marketing. Content marketing is important in terms of creating a positive attitude at present when the brand becomes a leader in the market because of its effectiveness and low cost. In this study, we aimed to measure the effect of content marketing on creating awareness about brands and values through social media in order to create a positive attitude on consumer behaviours and create permanent brand loyalty. Content marketing has been identified as five hypotheses by creating positive attitudes on social media users, purchasing products, sharing recommendations with other users or sharing in favourable content in other social media circles, and creating a positive relationship with the interaction created between users. In order to investigate the hypotheses, the questionnaire prepared in accordance with 5 Likert Scale was applied to three hundred and eighty five subjects. The demographic characteristics of the participants were age, education levels, occupational groups and gender. In addition, the educational status of the age groups, the quality of the content and the comparison of the purchasing criteria with the age groups, and the comparison of the interaction with the educational status were evaluated. As a result, we have determined that there is a linear relationship between the quality of the content prepared in the social media and the purchase, sharing, suggestion and interaction. The same positive relationship has also been observed between sharing - proposition, sharing - interaction, proposition - interaction, purchase - sharing, and suggestion - interaction. Hypothesis testing by gender groups revealed that although the values of purchase, interaction, sharing and proposing were equal for both groups, the values of the influence of content differed between men and women. In the hypothesis testing for age groups, although there is no difference between the values of proposition, interaction and sharing, differences between purchasing values and content values were determined. Hypothesis testing according to the educational status showed that there was no difference in purchasing, content, sharing and suggestion values among the groups although differences were observed between the interaction values in the education groups. Due to the intense competition in the market and the widespread use of the internet, the importance of content marketing is increasing day by day. We believe that this research on the use of content marketing will be beneficial to companies which aim to fulfil their marketing targets by creating brand awareness and brand loyalty.