1. Introduction
Digitisation is shaping the traditional ways in which the business and the customers used to deal interact. It has been known as an active agent which has played a pivotal role in changing consumer behavior. The majority of consumers prefer to spend their time online. Many of them remain active for almost a major part of their day scrolling through social media. Thus, the internet has transformed the methods of interaction. With a wide customer base, and spending their time on social media, it has become imperative for businesses, to target such customers through integrating technology with traditional marketing methods. Digital media marketing has emerged as a resulting strategy that can help companies to reach out to customers through online channels (Dumitriu, et al., 2019)
Digital Marketing has become an integral tool for the effective performance of the business. Digital marketing is the promotion of products and services of the business to potential customers. It utilizes the various digital media channels to reach out to potential customers (Nuseir, and Aljumah., 2020)
1.1 Background and rationale
With the outbreak of Artificial Intelligence and related tools, technology has taken the world by storm. Advanced techniques and methods are being used daily to run business affairs and to increase business efficiency and overall business performance. Digital marketing is among such techniques that are being employed by businesses in the current times. The business environment is becoming highly competitive with every passing day. Organisations are facing a hard time optimising their marketing and distribution processes. Attracting and retaining customers has become more challenging (Adam, et al., 2020)
In such challenging times, employing a technological-based approach to traditional marketing has become the need of the time. Different channels of digital marketing are required to be understood by businesses for their effective implementation. Businesses that are using appropriate digital media channels are becoming more successful. However, still, many businesses are striving to investigate the digital media channel that can help them leverage success. The use of appropriate digital marketing channels helps the business to conduct online marketing campaigns. It helps the business to generate new leads by reaching out to clients beyond geographical boundaries who are searching for good products and services (Tolstoy, et al, 2022)
Literature on the topic indicates that employing digitisation as a strategy has positive outcomes on the overall performance of the business. Digital marketing channels provide the business with many lucrative opportunities for attracting new customers on a limited budget. Recent developments in the field have indicated that the recent social app development has further facilitated SMEs to perform their marketing function more efficiently and has facilitated positive business outcomes. However, it should be noticed that the marketing reality of SMEs is quite different as compared to large corporations. Therefore, digitisation is a greater challenge for SMEs (Taiminen, and Karjaluoto., 2015)
Literature indicates that, for SMEs, the traditional marketing theory is not applicable as the marketing function in SMEs is more spontaneous, informal, and reactive. Therefore, there exists a gap in the best practices as advised by the advanced market theories and marketing practices of SMEs. Thus this indicates that the rapid evolution of digital marketing strategies and their usage might not benefit SMEs on the same level as it can large corporations. A vast literature is available on the positive impact of the adoption of digital marketing by SMEs. However, how SMEs should adopt and select digital channels to leverage their marketing function needs more research. This research study is, therefore, aimed at analyzing how the SME’s marketing functions are designed and which digital media channels can best meet the need of SMEs for optimising their marketing function (Yamin, and Sinkovics., 2019)
1.2 Research Aim and Objectives
The research study under consideration is aimed at exploring different digital media channels that can help SMEs to optimize their marketing efforts. To address this aim the objectives of this research study are;
· To analyse different digital media channels available for the businesses
· To investigate the most effective digital media channel for SMEs for enhancing their business performance
· To assess the enablers and barriers to the usage of digital media channels in SMEs.
2. Literature Review
As per the work of Hollebeek, and Macky, (2019), Digital marketing has revolutionised marketing functions to a great extent. It has provided businesses with many affordable and effective solutions. It has also changed how customers perceive and seek products or services. Post-COVID, the majority of customers have shifted to online mediums for shopping. Amazon, Shopify, and other such platforms have further contributed to accelerating online purchases. Customers now perceive that, if a company or product is not found on Google, then it perceived that the company does not exist. Thus, with such changing consumer perceptions, the adoption of digital media channels has become necessary for brands. SMEs should follow the same progression if they want to take full advantage of digital tools (Hollebeek, and Macky, 2019).
SMEs constitute a significant percentage of the world’s economy. In Europe, they constitute 92% of the total economy and are responsible for providing a significant percentage of jobs in the private sector. Considering their significant contribution to the world’s economy, SMEs must work to have sufficient knowledge and understanding of the use of appropriate digital marketing channels. Having the right knowledge and using the appropriate channel can help SMEs to leverage their marketing function. It can further help SMEs to be more competitive in the business world. Furthermore, the use of appropriate channels can help them to cultivate positive business outcomes (Taiminen, and Karjaluoto., 2015)
2.1 Digital media channels available for the businesses
According to Islam, et al, (2018), Digital marketing has greatly influenced consumer behavior and competition in the business landscape. Since the past decade, it has been observed a significant increase in the use of digital media by consumers. This has encouraged organisations to use digital marketing for reaching out to their customers. Since 2010, the number of internet users has increased by 2 billion. With the advent of multiple optimization options, this number is doubling every year. In recent years, many firms have invested almost 60 billion dollars in digital marketing to optimize their marketing process. Considering such heavy investment by the firms, the use of digital technologies to approach the customers has become necessary for meeting the cutthroat globalized competition. Therefore, for most firms, employing and implementing digital marketing is the need of time (Islam, et al, 2018).
Lai & Hitchcock (2019) have highlighted that there are many digital marketing channels that companies can adopt for designing their digital marketing campaigns. Some digital marketing channels only offer one way to communicate, whereas, some channels facilitate two-way communication. The most common example of one-way communication is websites and emails. Through these channels, the firms can have strong control over their communication. The website of the company is the home of the company in the world of the Internet. It is an online environment, where the brand market its products and services (Lai & Hitchcock, 2019). According to Karjaluoto, et al, 2015, Emails are used for different purposes. It can be used for sharing information, guiding customers, addressing customers’ queries, and maintaining relationships.
Email can also be used as a two-way communication channel, but it is mostly used for sending advertisements and newsletters. Usually, SMEs rely on these two channels for marketing their products and services. However, with the increase in popularity of various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. SMEs have also shifted to these channels, but optimum usage is still a struggle for many SMEs (Karjaluoto, et al, 2015).
According to Zhang, et al, (2021), Two-way communication channels have become more common with the rise in popularity of social media applications. Social media applications have completely changed the marketer-customer relationship. The power has now been shifted to customers from marketers. Two-way communication channels include social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, etc. The essential nature of these channels is to enable the company to conduct two-way communication with the customers. With such marketing channels, the firms can naturally exercise less control over the customers. The customer’s voice is louder and the information is usually generated by conversations of the customers about their experiences of a certain product or service. Therefore, for SMEs, this is an extra workload and it becomes quite difficult for SMEs to consistently reply to queries around the clock (Zhang, et al, 2021).
2.2 Enablers and barriers to the usage of digital media channels in SMEs
Lee, et al, (2018) in their work mentioned that many SMEs are at an early stage of the adoption of digital media channels. The small and micro firms are the slowest adopters due to their limited resources, however, the performance of medium-sized firms is much better in this regard. As compared to SMEs, large corporations are more resourceful, and therefore, they possess a better knowledge of the adoption of digital marketing channels (Lee, et al, 2018). In the work of Yamin and Sinkovics, (2019) they have highlighted that in the case of small firms, resource is the dominating factor that influences the decision-making process of the firms. Three main categories can be analysed to investigate the adoption of digital media channels by SMEs. The first factor is the firm-specific and owner-manager factor, the second factor is resource related factor and the third factor is the environmental factor. These classifications help in understanding the enablers and barriers that can motivate or hinder the usage of different digital media channels in SMEs (Yamin and Sinkovics, 2019).
3. Research Methodology
3.1 Research Philosophy
Research Philosophy guides selecting the research approach that can help in completing the research work (Pandey, and Pandey., 2021) Positivism research philosophy will be selected considering the scope and nature of this research study. This research philosophy has helped in restricting the researcher to take an unbiased approach towards data collection and interpretation.
3.2 Research Approach and Strategy
The research approach can be defined as the procedure which is used by the researcher for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. The inductive and deductive approach is usually the two types of approach that is adopted by the researcher for conducting the research work. The inductive approach is flexible and exploratory in nature and is based on qualitative analysis. Whereas, the deductive approach is mainly structured and is based on quantitative analysis (Davidavičienė, 2018).
For this research work, the deductive approach has been selected. This research study will be systematic and structured. The data collection and results of this study will be based on quantitative analysis.
The survey will be used as the research strategy for conducting this research work. Survey Strategy has been selected because this research is required to be completed in a short period. Therefore, surveying the identified sample will help in collecting and analysing the data in a limited period.
3.3 Research method
Qualitative and quantitative methods are the two types of research methods that are typically adopted to conduct research work. The qualitative approach is usually descriptive in nature and is adopted to gather and analyse non-numeric data. Quantitative research on the other hand is numeric in nature and includes countable or measurable data.
For this research work, a quantitative approach will be adopted for conducting the research work. The responses of the participants will be recorded in a password-protected Excel file. STATA will be used for analysing the data. Descriptive statistics will be used as the main technique for data analysis and interpretation. This technique will help in analysing the collected data of the sample and generalising the responses on a larger population. It will also help the researcher in completing the research at the respected time.
3.4 Research Design
This research will be quantitative in nature. For this research work primary data collection method will be used. Primary data collection includes collecting the data directly from the participants (Gupta, and Gupta., 2022) The primary data collection method will help in getting direct insights from the employees who are working in managerial positions in SMEs. The questionnaire will be used to collect the data.
The closed questionnaire will be designed and used for collecting the data from the participants. The questionnaire will be designed on five points Likert scale with strongly agreed, agreed, neutral disagree, and strongly disagree as the options. The participants will be required to give answers from the provided options. This will help in collecting the desired responses in a limited period.
3.5 Sampling Method
The population of this research work will include employees serving in the SMEs of the UK, London. Only ten SMEs will be selected randomly based on ease of access to the employees. Simple random sampling will be used for this research work. Simple Random sampling is a type of probability sampling where the researcher randomly selects the subsets of participants from a given population (Snyder, 2019). This sampling method will increase the chances of each member of the population becoming part of the sample size. 150 employees will constitute the sample size of this research work.
4. Planning (Overall Presentation) and ethical considerations
4.1 Ethical considerations
This research study will take care of certain ethical considerations to enhance the credibility and reliability of the research work. Extreme care will be taken to ensure that all the data that is included in this research work is free of plagiarism. Care will also be taken to ensure that the authors have been given due credit through reference if any, or part of their work has been used as the basis for completing this research work.
Efforts will be invested to ensure that the participants have been included in this research work out of their free will. The participants will be asked to fill out the consent form before becoming part of the research work. Care will also be taken to ensure the anonymity of the participants.
4.2 Potential limitations of the study
This research study will have a few potential limitations. The first limitation that has been observed is that, due to time restrictions, the scope of this research work will be limited. Only ten SMEs will be adopted to analyze the larger sample size and the results will then be generalised for a larger population. The major drawback that can be observed in this approach is that the results obtained might not fairly represent the situation of SMEs and their choice of digital medial channels. The sample size is small which also suggests that generalising the result to a larger sample size might not do justice to the topic. Furthermore, this research is only based on quantitative analysis. Thus, no secondary data will be used to analyse the SMEs approach in the selection of digital medial channels. This can further affect the quality of the results as including secondary data in the results section in numerical and descriptive form can further add to increasing the authenticity and scope of the research.