The Digital Marketing Toolkit: A Literature Review for the Identification of Digital Marketing Channels and Platforms

Abstract

Digital transformation, driven by technological advances and changing customer requirements, is stimulating the use of digital marketing. 11% of Swiss organizations regard digital marketing as a key investment area as part of their overall digital transformation strategy, with over one third of Swiss organizations currently investing in new sales and marketing tools. Unfortunately, there are implementation gaps between Swiss small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) and large enterprises (LE). In short, SME are lagging behind LE and generally do not use digital marketing tools, channels, and platforms. Barriers that prevent SME from adopting higher digital marketing tools are cultural change, limited resources/high costs, technology, and expertise. The objective of this study is to close the knowledge gap and provide SME with an overview of the most important digital marketing tools based on a literature review in order to leverage the opportunity of digital technology in the marketing discipline and reduce the distance to LE. The literature review identified nineteen relevant articles. These articles include 162 citations of tools, channels, platforms, and methods, which can be used by SME to close the knowledge gap and thus take advantage of a new, digital marketing portfolio. The twenty-four unique digital marketing tools are presented based on a comparative analysis, with the eleven most often cited tools being defined and described. Potential for further research was identified.