Analysis and categorization of studies of digital marketing in small and medium enterprises

Abstract

Purpose: To analyze and categorize the scientific production in the field of digital marketing in small and medium enterprises.

Design/methodology/approach: We retrieved the bibliographic information of 294 publications in this field indexed in Scopus and employed technology-mining techniques and cluster analysis of keywords to gain insight into the most relevant trends in this research area. We conducted a keyword cleaning process to remove ambiguity, synonyms, and obvious results and employed our own Python scripts and the Bibliometrix package in the R programming language for the calculations.

Findings: Our results paint a broad picture of this research area, highlighting its most important journals, countries, researchers, and keywords, as well as their interactions. We also identified and explained five thematic clusters: electronic commerce, social media, specific social media, internationalization, and brand. We found that social media, big data, search engine optimization, advertisement, internationalization, websites, and Facebook are hot research topics in this field. 

Originality/value: This study offers updated information on the trends of the scientific production in said research field, covering a time window that goes up to the year 2021. This is beyond any traditional bibliometric analysis, and it reveals the structure of the knowledge in the field. This paper can be used as a reference point to define a future research agenda in this area.