Ģֱ researchers win best article award (2024) from the world's leading business marketing journal
The award-winning article Digital content marketing on social media along the B2B customer journey: The effect of timely content delivery on customer engagement was written by Associate Professors Anna Salonen and Joel Mero, University Researcher Juha Munnukka and Professor Heikki Karjaluoto together with a Swiss colleague Marcus Zimmer.
For the Ģֱ researchers, this is the third win in eight years. The researchers also received the same recognition in 2017 and 2019 and were also awarded third place in 2019.
This year's achievement is, however, particularly special, as the Ģֱ's researchers achieved a double victory. In addition to the best paper award, a joint study by the Ģֱ and the University of Turku came second.
"This recognition is an important indication of the quality and impact of marketing research conducted at the Ģֱ. Digital content marketing is a topical subject that has so far been studied mainly from a consumer market perspective. As someone who has built an academic career by focusing on the business marketing context, this award is personally meaningful. I also believe the findings contribute to the development of modern marketing practices in a managerially relevant context that is too often overlooked by mainstream marketing scholars," says Associate Professor in marketing, Anna Salonen.
Effective marketing requires content sharing that meets customers’ individual needs at different journey stages
The top awarded study explored how the timely distribution of digital content affects customer engagement in a business market context.
“Well-timed content marketing requires investments in advanced technologies and capabilities that enable individual-level tracking of customer content consumption and targeted behavioural content distribution”, Salonen says.
If a company does not have the ability or willingness to engage in fully targeted digital content marketing, the alternative is to take into account the needs of a generic buyer persona at different stages of the customer journey.
"The research shows that, on average, educational content is best suited to the pre-purchase stage, product-specific content is most effective in supporting the purchase stage, and cause-related content serves as a general brand-building tool without a specific link to any particular stage in the customer journey," Salonen explains.
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Best article 2024: Salonen, A., Mero, J., Munnukka, J., Zimmer, M., & Karjaluoto, H. (2024). .
Second-placed article 2024: Terho, H., Mero, J., Siutla, L., & Jaakkola, E. (2022). .
Best article 2017 and 2019: Järvinen, J., & Karjaluoto, H. (2015). .
Third-placed article 2019: Järvinen, J., & Taiminen, H. (2016). .
