Cognitive mapping of success in digital marketing for small and medium businesses

Introduction: According to the report presented by the World Bank, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), especially in developing countries, have played an important role in most economies. One of the most important business issues is product marketing, which can increase sales and company growth. The use of technological innovations in marketing activities has always influenced the competitive advantage and the performance of businesses. Today, the digital revolution has affected all behaviors and lifestyles. Marketing activities have not been spared from this change, so, despite the fact that marketing processes remain constant, a sub-branch of marketing called "digital marketing" has emerged. Therefore, according to the position of small and medium businesses and the importance of digital marketing in these companies, the current research seeks to find out, firstly, what are the key success factors for digital marketing in small and medium businesses and, secondly, what are the relationships between the identified factors.
Methodology: In terms of its direction, the current research is considered a type of applied research, and, in terms of strategies, it is considered a combination of qualitative and quantitative ones. First, to identify the key success factors of digital marketing, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 11 experts in this field. The sampling of the experts was in the form of a snowball, and the criterion for their selection was to have a scientific and experimental background in the field of digital marketing. Through thematic analysis, the interviews were analyzed and the key factors of digital marketing success were obtained. In the second step, the fuzzy cognitive mapping method, which is one of the research methods in soft operations, was used to discover the relationships between the extracted factors. Fuzzy cognitive mapping, in addition to providing the possibility to identify the factors with algebraic relationships, enables the decision-maker to gain a good understanding of the causal relationships between the factors, the direction and relative strength of these relationships, and a model consisting of the main decision factors.
Results and discussion: Using the thematic analysis method, the interviews were analyzed and the key factors were extracted. There were five factors including a) the number of visits and website traffic (the number of new visitors, the number of referrals versus new visitors, unique visitors, visits to each channel, average time spent on the page, hits, sessions, bounce rate, monthly website traffic, website conversion rate, ratio of customer purchases to total visitors, display frequency in Google results, referral traffic, customer acquisition cost, and page value, b) search engine optimization (site traffic source, ranking of website/company page position in search engine results for a keyword, organic search, incoming links, Alexa rank, keyword performance, conversion rate of each keyword, keyword rank, and traffic volume from video), c) new user acquisition or lead generation (lead generation, lead volume, lead quality, revenue per lead, monthly new leads, traffic or website visitor to lead conversion rate, cost per converted lead, rate sales lead conversion, user retention rate, and customer conversion rate), d) inclusion of social network tracking (social page visits, shares, comments, mentions, likes, number of followers, number of unique users who viewed, number of times viewed, average engagement of each post, and share brand voice), and e) paid advertising (digital marketing ROI, customer lifetime value, and cost per activity). Next, the MentalModeler software served to model the factors and form the initial decision matrix. After that, while holding expert meetings, the fuzzy values of causal arcs were recorded in the interviews with the research experts. Finally, a fuzzy cognitive mapping model was obtained for the key factors of digital marketing success in small and medium businesses.
Conclusion: The results showed that the key success factors in digital marketing in small and medium businesses are, paid advertising (0.83), the number of visits and website traffic (0.73), search engine optimization (0.62), attracting new users or generating leads (0.56), and attracting social network tracking (0.43). Also, the relationships of each component with its subcomponents are determined. According to these results, business owners were advised to pay attention to targeted paid advertisements in digital marketing. Of course, along with these advertisements, they should seek to increase the number of visits to the website through unique and valuable content. Also, learn new algorithms of search engines and apply them in the content and structure of digital marketing. Another suggestion is to conduct behavioral studies and research in this field to create clues for new contacts. It is further suggested to conduct research with such titles as analysis of the importance weights of the key success factors of small and medium businesses in a specific industry, modeling of paid advertising in digital marketing, identification of the key success factors in digital marketing as compared with the present research.