Priority Determination of Digital Marketing Media for MSMEs in Indonesia

Abstract. More and more Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia have used digital marketing techniques to broaden market access, build good customer relations, and enhance business competitiveness. In addition, the growing number of digital marketing media has been recognized as one of the strategic issues for MSMEs in Indonesia due to their limitation in terms of budget, technology, and management capacity since most existing literature tends to discuss one particular type of digital marketing medium or even digital marketing adoption but not the priority of the media at all. To address this issue, the current study aims to identify the priority of digital marketing media for MSMEs in Indonesia using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Seven alternative forms of digital marketing were considered in the analysis such as social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), digital content marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and instant messaging. Five criteria which include cost-efficiency, market reach, interactivity, implementation ease, and performance measurability were applied as evaluation factors for the alternatives. Five experts in digital marketing and MSMEs development were invited to assess the priorities of the alternatives according to the set criteria, and the judgments from the experts were analyzed based on AHP consistency ratio prior to aggregation. As a result, market reach emerged as the first priority among other criteria followed by performance measurability, cost efficiency, interactivity, and implementation ease. Among alternative options, social media marketing became the top priority (0.2381), followed by SEO (0.2354), digital content marketing (0.1946), affiliate marketing (0.1570), email marketing (0.0591), PPC advertising (0.0586), and instant messaging (0.0572). Keywords: Marketing, Digital Marketing, MSME, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)