What is Search Engine Marketing

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.