Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Thai Retail SMEs
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Abstract
This study aims to (1) examine the relationship between digital marketing investment and business returns of retail SMEs, (2) analyze differences in business performance across business types, and (3) propose strategic digital marketing development guidelines. This quantitative research employed questionnaires as the primary data collection instrument. The sample consisted of 250 retail SMEs across Thailand, purposively selected from a population of 147,500 businesses. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, including Pearson's correlation analysis, analysis of variance, and stepwise multiple regression analysis.
The research findings revealed that 1) digital marketing budget and utilization of analytics tools significantly correlated positively with ROI (r = 0.642, p < .01 and r = 0.598, p < .01, respectively), 2) fashion and apparel businesses demonstrated significantly higher ROI than other business types (F = 5.82, p < .01), and 3) the developed D-MROI Model comprises three core components: Data-driven Strategy, Multi-platform Optimization, and Resource Optimization for Investment. These findings demonstrate the value of strategic approaches where SMEs should invest at least 20% of their digital marketing budget in analytics tools and allocate budgets according to the 70:20:10 ratio for advertising, tools, and experimentation, respectively.
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