100-200 word response to the below excerpt. Citation must be APA.

There are several other variables available in Reference USA that I would expand on to improve the analysis for our software company. There are variables that report on company’s expenses, including accounting expenses, advertising expenses, computer expenses, insurance expenses, legal expenses, rent and utilities expenses, and Telcom expenses. First, I would take advantage of the SPSS compute function and calculate a proportion/percentage for each of these expenses and evaluate how each company spends their money and focus on those that spend a lot on computer and Telcom expenses. I would do this by first summing the expenses to a total expense variable, then use an equation to develop proportions for each company expense provided in the Reference USA catalog. If a firm is already spending a large proportion of expenses on technology, it would make sense to target them for our app.

Next, I would utilize the social media variables, since Reference USA already offers Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter handles. A marketing team can use these handles to pull additional information from firms’ social media sites to enrich the database, adding size of stakeholders (the following the company has), communication activity (posts and shares), and customer engagement (likes and shares) (Buratti, Parola, Satta, 2018). Firms presence on social media has been shown to have a positive impact on partner quality and B2B relationship strength (Karampela, Lacka, McLean, 2020), so adding social media variables to the dataset could be helpful in analyses.

Last, I would like to create a variable that measures firms’ international client base and use that data to derive a proportion. If the app is made for money transfers to and from overseas, then those with the highest proportion of international business would make the most sense to target. After getting these types of data, it would be useful to do more descriptive analyses in finding new areas to target. This week we read on the importance of descriptive statistics in describing a sample (Baier, Ruf, & Chakraborty, 2002) and these additional variables would be helpful for me in an analysis of new firms for our product.

References

Baier, M., Ruf, K. M., & Chakraborty, G. (2002). Chapters 5 and 6 from: Contemporary Database Marketing: Concepts and Applications. Racom Communications Inc.

Buratti, N., Parola, F., & Satta, G. (2018). Insights on the adoption of social media marketing in B2B services. TQM Journal, 30(5), 490-529. doi: 10.1108/TQM-11-2017-0136

Karampela, M., Lacka, E., & McLean, G. (2020). “Just be there”: Social media presence, interactivity, and responsiveness, and their impact on B2B relationships. European Journal of Marketing, 54(6), 1281-1303. doi: 10.1108/EJM-03-2019-0231