Social Media Marketing and Business Success: A Quantitative Study

• Project

  Research has shown that the traditional approaches of marketing can only partially be applied to small businesses. Due to their lack of resources, small businesses have to make their marketing as effective and efficient as possible. Therefore, they have to pursue entrepreneurial marketing strategies that are cost effective, but at the same time generate the greatest amount of consumer attention. An answer to this challenge may be social media marketing.

  However, academic research on social media marketing is just emerging and only few studies have examined its usage in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) context. The purpose of this project is therefore to empirically investigate if and how social media marketing impacts SME success by taking into account entrepreneurial orientation and responsive market orientation. Moreover, the project aims at answering the question whether success-related differences exist between SME and large companies dependent on social media marketing.

  Within a quantitative approach, data will be collected from companies in the German-speaking countries Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. In order to generate a representative sample, 1,000 companies will be randomly selected via databases (Aurelia database for Austria, Swiss Schober database for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Hoppenstedt Company database for Germany). As part of a ‘key informant approach’, only Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and top-level managers, primarily from the marketing and sales departments, will be contacted via telephone to obtain consent. In the case of acceptance, the link to the online questionnaire will be sent directly to them via email. Structural equation modeling (SEM) using maximum likelihood method on covariance matrices and listwise deletion for missing data will be used to test the derived hypotheses (using AMOS, v.18, PASW Inc.).

• People

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  • Isabella Hatak

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  Partners

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  • Prof Fabian Eggers, Menlo College, USA
  • Prof Sascha Kraus, University of Liechtenstein and University of St. Gallen, CH
  • Oliver Kohler, BA BA, University of Liechtenstein, Liechtenstein, LI

Publications

• Hatak, I., Schmid, J., Rößl, D. 2013. Entrepreneurial Marketing as a Coping Strategy within an Economic Crisis. 58th ICSB World Conference, Ponce, Puerto Rico, 20.06.- 23.06.
• Schmid, J., Hatak, I., Rößl, D. 2013. Entrepreneurial Marketing as a Success Factor. 10th EBES Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, 23.05.-25.05.