A Co-Word and Co-Citation Analysis of Digital Marketing Research

Introduction

Digital marketing has recently become one of the most widely developed fields. With the explosion of the digital sphere, businesses will inevitably focus on applying and implementing their marketing in this area. Research into digital marketing is useful for predicting market trends and gives businesses many advantages. Continuing to understand and learn about digital marketing will strengthen the business’s competitive advantage. Digital marketing was simply defined as implementing marketing strategies and achieving organizational goals through digital devices and technologies (Chaffey et al., 2009). Choi (2021) further explained digital marketing as marketing strategies and promotional activities for products and services conducted on online platforms with large databases to promote customer consumption quickly and effectively. Yadav and Pavlou (2014) stated that digital marketing allows both customers and businesses to participate in building marketing strategies to satisfy users’ current needs and develop future needs. In the corporate context, digital marketing is extensively applied and is ever-evolving (Singhvi & Srivastava, 2021). Digital marketing is a critical business process; it needs constant innovation, creativity, and development to support businesses and maximize revenue (Kannan, 2017; Lichtenthaler, 2021). The development of digital devices and technologies has led to the rise of digital marketing (Sawhney & Ahuja, 2021). In the academic context, the lines of research on digital marketing have diversified. Initially, digital marketing was approached in a way that involved the application of marketing strategies to digital marketing channels. It subsequently evolved into an umbrella term describing the process of using digital marketing on online platforms and developing a variety of marketing strategies used through these platforms (Kannan, 2017). The question arises of whether current understanding from the academic realm can help to explain the growing problems of digital marketing in practice. Researchers and marketers need to investigate the tension between digital marketing theories and practical activities to narrow the gap between the two (Vollrath & Villegas, 2021).

To help new researchers understand the evolution of knowledge in this field, various research topics have been undertaken by authors (Kannan, 2017; Khalifa et al., 2021; Kumar et al., 2016; Lamberton & Stephen, 2016; Leeflang et al., 2014). Additionally, to explore potential new research trends, a theoretical review is necessary. Low and MacMillan (1988) argued that it is helpful to stop occasionally, take an inventory of the work that has been done and identify new directions and challenges for the future. Even though traditional review methods have the advantage of in-depth and detailed explanations, these methods seem to be unsuitable for a large number of publications and subjective based on authors’ perspectives. Therefore, the bias is ineludible. Besides the traditional review method, some authors use the bibliometric method (Kim, Kang & Lee, 2019; Marchiori et al., 2020; Verma, 2021). This research method produces more intuitive results than the traditional method as it provides illustrative maps of the actual content and research themes, which traditional literature reviews seem to find impossible. However, the implementation of bibliometric in the literature review has not been updated, and the power of co-citation and co-keyword techniques has yet to be demonstrated clearly.