Influence of Digital Marketing on Enhancing Sales of Small and Medium Enterprises

<p>Small and Medium-scale industries play a major role in both developed and developing countries. They contribute to the growth of the economy in various ways such as generating job opportunities, new venture development, and opening up new avenues for economic growth in a country. In Sri Lanka Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) make up a large portion of the national economy, accounting for 80 percent of all businesses. Any business is involved in various promotional and marketing campaigns to improve the sales of their products or services. Digital marketing has gained a significant place among them. At present small and medium enterprises have tendency to resort to this form of digital marketing. Accordingly, the main purpose of this study is to explore the impact of Digital Marketing on sales improvement of small and medium- scale businesses. This study is based on small and medium scale enterprises in the Hambantota district of the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. 320 small and medium scale enterprises registered with the Hambantota branch of the Sri Lanka Chamber of Commerce were used as population. Selected 105 of SMEs among them with using simple random sampling method. The basic premise of this study is based on primary data. In obtaining the primary data, the questionnaire was presented to the selected sample. The aim is to analyze whether the use of digital marketing methods has impacted SMEs' sales improvement. For this, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was performed. According to the data analysis, digital marketing positively impacted SMEs' sales improvement.</p>