Impact of digital marketing on the growth of SME manufacturing businesses in Kosovo

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the impact of digital marketing on the growth of manufacturing SMEs and the impact of business size and managers’ capability of using digital marketing tools as the most effective technique to communicate directly with clients. SPSS statistical software is used to process the data collected via the questionnaire instrument during the interviews with SME manufacturing managers and business owners. For the verification of statistical hypotheses, the respective patterns of linear multiple regression are constructed. The findings show that the use of digital marketing tools has a positive impact on the growth of annual business turnover. The impact of digital marketing on increasing employee numbers and business size is seen as positive, especially when it is associated with increasing levels of education among managers and owners of manufacturing SMEs. These results imply that manufacturing businesses need to use digital marketing tools and develop capabilities that enable them to increase their business in size and be financially competitive. This work extends the development of a different and comprehensive framework to understand how manager competencies and digital marketing tools affect manufacturing companies.