Abstract
This chapter covers the MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprise) owners/managers' perceptions towards the adoption of e-marketing with respect to its importance and effectiveness for business success, implementation, barriers, future use, expenditure, and general awareness about the government e-marketing initiatives. Data was collected from 253 MSMEs located in states of Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh in India. The authors observed that MSMEs perceive e-marketing as an important element in the success of their businesses. They feel that display advertising, social media marketing, and mobile marketing add more effectiveness to their business. They perceive that display advertising is effective for brand awareness, search engine marketing for lead generation, affiliate marketing for customer acquisition and increasing ROI, mobile marketing for better CRM, and search engine optimisation for generating web traffic. MSMEs indicated an increase in future expenditure on digital marketing activities. However, a large section of MSMEs were unaware of the government's e-marketing initiatives.
TopLiterature Review
Importance and Effectiveness of E-Marketing
A reasonable number of theoretical and conceptual studies have been carried out on E-marketing in SBEs. Kervenoael, Soopramanien, Elms, & Hallsworth (2006) emphasised on understanding of consumer value for online grocery purchases and advised “integrated service solution” packages for growth and sustainable marketing strategy and policy. Bui, Le, & Jones (2006) assessed the effectiveness of Web technology in promoting tourism. El-Gohary (2009) studied the effect of e-marketing on the marketing performance of Small Business Enterprise by making comparison between Egypt and the UK. Similarly, Eid & El-Gohary (2013) examined the impact of e-marketing (EM) use by SBEs on marketing success to develop a conceptual model of the consequences and antecedents of e-marketing use by SBEs. Study revealed that the use of EM tools has a positive influence on SBEs pre-sales activities, after-sales activities, marketing performance and marketing effectiveness. Yildiz, Bozkurt, Kalkan, & Ayci (2013) has also confirmed relationship between technological investments and innovation performance of firms. In Iran, Hanafizadeh, Behboudi, Ahadi, & Varkani (2012) noticed that factors like internet publishers, SMEs, government role, advertising agencies, user types and e-commerce development have significant effect on adoption of internet advertising by SMEs. Similarly, many past studies have mentioned how online businesses are using social media to reach out their audiences (Kalia, 2015, 2019; Kalia, Ben Dahmane Mouelhi, Tebessi Hachana, Malek, & Dahmen, 2019; Kalia, Singh, & Kaur, 2016).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Search Engine Marketing: Promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages primarily through paid advertising.
Affiliate Marketing/Referral Marketing: Common technique used to promote web sites, products and services, where affiliates are rewarded for every visitor or customer who came because of their marketing efforts.
Social Media Marketing: Marketing of product and services with the help of social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Search Engine Optimization: The process of improving the website’s search engine rank in organic search results.
E-Mail Marketing: A format of an e-mail-based marketing activity in which advertisements, promotional and marketing activities are conducted through sending E-mails to a targeted list of recipients.
Content Marketing: Management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably in the context of digital content, or bit-based objects distributed through electronic channels.
Display Advertising: Banner ads and other graphical advertisements used by companies to market their products and services.
MSME: For this study, the definition of MSME includes businesses that invests up to a maximum of the Indian rupee (INR) 100 million in plant and machinery in case of manufacturing sector and up to INR 50 million investment in equipment in case of service sector.
Video Marketing: Marketing of products or services with the help of short videos.
Mobile Marketing: Mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products or services between buyers and sellers, where the primary point of contact is mobile device.