The effect of companies' digital marketing strategies on marketing performance through digital marketing activities

This thesis aims to investigate the impact of companies' digital marketing strategies on marketing performance and to explore the significance of digital marketing activities in the context of firms' marketing performance, including financial performance, customer relationship performance, and new product and service development performance. The research proposal is designed based on the necessity of examining how effective these factors are in influencing marketing performance. In this context, it is aimed to examine in detail the mediating effects of digital marketing activities within the scope of content marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing and social media marketing on these performance criteria. The primary aim of this research is to analyze the scope of digital marketing activities carried out by companies implementing digital marketing strategies in Turkey, as outlined in the research proposal. Additionally, the study seeks to assess how these companies' strategic goals in digital marketing impact their success in marketing performance. The study population consists of all companies engaged in online product and service sales in Turkey, registered on the TC. Ministry of Trade E-Commerce Information System, listed on the page https://www.eticaret.gov.tr/sirketsorgula. The sample group, created using the simple random sampling method, consisted of 673 companies from 43 provinces in Turkey. In this context, exploratory factor analysis was conducted to determine the factor structures of the scales corresponding to the research variables in the designed research questionnaire, and confirmatory factor analysis was performed to establish the construct validity of the scales. To test the research model, multicollinearity among the variables was examined; correlation analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to investigate these relationships. The findings obtained in the research have revealed positive and significant relationships among the variables in the research model. At the same time, they have demonstrated the importance of the effective implementation of digital marketing strategies by the participating companies and the positive contribution of their digital marketing activities to marketing performance. Keywords: Digital marketing strategies, content marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing