Galvanizing Digital Marketing Implementation in Small Businesses

Abstract

Effective marketing has always been one of the imperative factors to business sustainability in line with IR 4.0 and Society 5.0. It brings a vital concern, myriad challenges, and benefits to the world, including the development of local and global businesses, including small businesses. Predominantly, small businesses still face high sustainability start-up issues which needs to be studied further. By consolidating the current findings, this study aims to identify the direct effects of the internal factors of culture, technology, human and external factors of competitiveness, politics, and social, on digitalmarketing implementation as drivers among small businesses, in moving towards Society 5.0 era. This study employed the primary data of 218 small business owners from diverse industries that was collected via survey and self-administered questionnaire through a simple random sampling technique. The findings of descriptive and multiple regression analysis showed a significant positive relationship between internal factors of technological capacity, human capability and digitalmarketing implementation. Further on, external factors of competitiveness and political issues significantly linked to digital marketing adoption. While organizational culture (internal) and social factors (external) insignificantly connected to digital marketing implementation among small businesses. This current study sheds light by providing the critical authorities alertness on the importance of small businesses to employ digital marketing in their business since it generates a competitive edge in facing the inevitable challenges of the Society 5.0 era.