Internet Marketing and Sme's: Drivers, Benefits and Measurement Working Papers in Management the Business School Internet Marketing and Smes : Drivers, Benefits and Measurement

This paper represents the current state of an action research approach to piece of “work in progress”, researching the use and usage of the Internet for marketing purposes by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The full paper discusses how the research was established, its design and development, and sets out clearly the operational parameters addressed. It also identifies through the development of an initial conceptual framework, the factors that SMEs in a number of industry sectors view as critical to the success or otherwise of their development of a web presence. An essentially inductive platform is then used as a foundation for the development of an empirical approach to be used to test the efficacy of a representative sample of SMEs’ web presence’s against a range of key business and, more specifically marketing drivers. The conceptual framework has been developed to address the research questions across a range of SME business types, namely B2C retail offerings, B2B enterprises and professional services. This latter group was chosen as it provide an insight into the effectiveness of the web for SME marketing where a single enterprise is active in both the B2C and B2B arena. The paper highlights three foci to be addressed in the first cycle of research.