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1. Introduction
Many business-to-business (B2B) organizations are turning to digital marketing to boost their customer acquisition. Apart from interactive strategies to connect with consumers (Kotler and Armstrong, 2009), digital marketing offers precise targeting of prospective customers (Pandey and Gudipudi, 2019). For example, the B2B marketing executives are able to bypass multiple layers and connect to the user department executives using LinkedIn. This helps B2B executive optimize their sales productivity. It also helps track B2B consumer engagement and sales conversions in real-time. It also allows the dynamic creation of content that suits a prospective customer’s viewing habits.
Although digital marketing has been added to the marketing strategies of B2B firms, research on this subject is still at a nascent stage. In fact, until recently, many organizations believed that digital marketing is useful only to B2C organizations (Lacka and Chong, 2016). However, digital marketing success stories from B2B firms such as Cisco and IBM (Venkatesh et al., 2019) have gradually changed this perception. Organizations have come to realize that digital marketing in the B2B space enhances flow of information and trust among customers (Krishna and Singh, 2018; Pandey, 2015). Many organizations lack comprehensive knowledge about the best B2B digital marketing practices, which impacts their return on investment (RoI) (Wertime and Fenwick, 2011). Further, digital marketing adoption demands continued research as this domain is fast evolving because of constant influx of new technologies (Shaltoni, 2017). From the World Wide Web in 1990s to internet of things, the web has undergone a massive evolution so far.
Today because of digital media, B2B customers have access to information on various products and services, which was traditionally not readily available to buyers. Such information helps B2B customers make informed decisions. B2B organizations should maintain a credible online presence, either through websites or blogs on online business communities or through social media platforms (Pandey and Shinde, 2019). Managing customer relationships is also important to B2B organizations across all channels, including online. The present study aims to explore this emerging issue by focusing on the key question-how much research has been done so far in digital marketing usage in B2B domain and what are the potential research scope for future.
The structure of the paper is as follows: first, the methodology section...