The Adoption of Digital Marketing by SMEs Entrepreneurs

Abstract

The new communication forms emerging from the digital field have profoundly changed how companies communicate with their stakeholders. If a few years ago, the attention of companies was centred on websites, at present specialist literature highlights how important it is for SMEs to define and to adopt an online marketing mix and to develop interactive applications. Nevertheless, given that Romania is in the last place in the EU regarding the degree of digitisation of the population and that Google develops a series of programmes for rising digital competencies of entrepreneurs, we intend to scan the attitudes and behaviours of the representatives of companies in the SMEs field regarding digital marketing, to offer clues on how professionals in the digital field and marketing could address this market segment more efficiently. In this respect, we selectively present the results of an exploratory research on the basis of opinion polls applied online. The quantitative data were collected in 2019 through an online survey technique based on a standardised online questionnaire applied to 100 Romanian entrepreneurs from the SMEs sector participating in the project Google Digital Workshop.