Impact of digital transformation on SME’s marketing performance: role of social media and market turbulence

Despite the rising relevance of digital transformation, there is still a knowledge vacuum due to limited literature available on digital transformation. This study aims to examine the impact of digital transformation on the marketing performance of small and medium enterprises. This research seeks to fill this void by adopting the technology adoption model in order to explore how in a fast-changing technological environment, digital transformation plays its role in firm specific capabilities that are imperative for a firm to adopt, and how they impact firm’s marketing performance. Combination of convenience sampling as well as snowball sampling was used to collect the data. Utilizing survey data from 316 small to medium-sized enterprises in the twin cities (Islamabad & Rawalpindi), Pakistan the results indicate that digital transformation has a positive influence on small and medium enterprises’ marketing performance. This encourages businesses to take advantage of the opportunity presented by new digital technologies and industry-wide digitalization trends by adopting new technologies and improving their digital capabilities in order to increase their productivity, efficiency, and innovation as well as their marketing performance. Hence this study is a practical demonstration of how developing digital transformation may be used to develop novel digital products and services and thereby improve marketing performance that leads to the overall corporate performance. Finally, the study contributes to the literature by evaluating the proposed model that describes the relationships between digital transformation, social media marketing, market turbulence and marketing performance concurrently.