Understanding the value of digital marketing tools for SMEs

Digital marketing is gaining predominance in marketing strategies across the globe. Digitization is becoming more and more present in business, not just changes in consumer behavior, but the adoption of new technologies, tools, and applications is highly disruptive, with immediate impact on the business of all companies. The common link between digital marketing definitions is the use of tools, namely online tools. One of the biggest changes in human interaction is the recent proliferation of online social networks. Rapid growth of web-based platforms that facilitate online social behavior has significantly modified the nature of human activities, habitats, and interactions. Real-world social relationships have been migrated to the virtual world, resulting in online communities that bring people together from across the globe. This study aims to identify and describe the various digital marketing tools and which of these can be used to increase the SMEs competitiveness.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Application of social media tools by retailers

The chapter explores the factors influencing the adoption process and the degree of engagement of the social media as part of the online marketing strategy by Spanish retailers. A retail industry survey identifies four different segments of retailers depending on the level of implementation of social media marketing strategies. The study examines the antecedents of the social media tools' adoption process across the dimensions of a Technology Adoption Model (TAM) and assesses various other factors likely to affect the degree of the adoption. One essential conclusion is that the company size is not important but that the level of adoption social media marketing is related to the organizational maturity in the areas of management attitudes, employee empowerment, access to Internet technologies, and technological infrastructure. The study proposes a future research agenda including cross-cultural studies for better understanding the global business attitudes in this area and underlines the need for development of benchmarks and metrics necessary for better assessing the value of social media marketing

Value Creation in Business-To-Business Crowd Sourcing

publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Value Creation in Business-to-Business Crowdsourcing

In knowledge society the utilization of social media as a communication channel between people, groups and even companies is increasing. Current innovation and social media research has already shown the potential of crowdsourcing in the business-to-consumer (B2C) markets. The authors argue in this paper, however, that crowdsourcing has a great and yet partly undiscovered potential also in the context of business-to-business (B2B) markets. In order to get the full potential, a more detailed understanding of the logic of value creation in crowdsourcing activities between multiple stakeholders in B2B context is needed. This paper presents an exploratory study that is carried out as an empirical netnography-based multiple case study. The study opens up potential future research avenues by starting the discussion of value creation logic in B2B crowdsourcing. Practical implications are created through cases revealing what kind of value companies have already been able to gain from crowdsourcing in B2B context.</p