Digital marketing impact on the growth of small and medium size enterprises in Cameroon : Case study Jumia

Abstract

Marketing has been a major challenge to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) around the world due to high cost. The classical marketing communication system such as television, radio, etc. seems to have a high cost for which it does not even reach the targeted customers and hence, not producing the expected result. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of digital mar-keting of the growth of SMEs in Cameroon. To achieve this, several channels of digital marketing were used such as email marketing, social media, online advertisement, etc. while the concept of growth was evaluated in terms of sales and market share. Thus, questionnaires were formulated and administered through an online platform and 46 of the 50 questionnaire distributed respondents an-swered, giving a respond rate of 92.00%. The population was made of customers and the employees as well as employer of JUMIA.

The data was collected following the research question and objective in which a qualitative deduc-tion approach was used. Descriptive statistics such as bar chart, pie chart as well as table were used. The data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) v.21.00 software. The general finding shows that digital marketing channels such as social marketing, online market-ing, greatly contribute to the growth of SMEs in Cameroon in general and JUMIA. Therefore it was suggested that policies such as the digitalization of the economy should be implemented as it will go a long way to create more sensitization on the use of electronic devices that could create and devel-op the country as a whole through marketing communication.