The effects of social media marketing on increasing sme customers: A study in the ready-to-wear sector

Today, the struggle to reach large numbers of customers is difficult for businesses to survive and be successful. The main purpose of the enterprises is to gain more customers, to gain competitive advantage and to guarantee their future in this race. The rapid change in recent years has made it difficult for businesses to achieve this goal. The dynamics of this change, which offers new opportunities, is based on increasing globalization and developments in technology. With globalization, the ties between economies have increased, the distances between countries have shortened and all economic values have been able to move easily across borders. Technological developments also played an important role in this process, accelerating the worldwide development. Thanks to information technology (IT), businesses have made it possible to coordinate research and development around the world. As a result of the rapid development of technology and information and the internet, transactions that were previously made in other ways have now become a priority in the electronic environment; Applications such as e-government, e-commerce, e-health and e-education have started to increase rapidly. Social media marketing, which has strategic importance for SMEs, is based on many factors that affect the performance and success of the work. These; information technologies, social media marketing goals, the level of achievement of social media marketing goals, barriers to transition to social media marketing, educational status of the manager and employee in the business, the size of the business and other factors. Of course, conducting a research that will cover all of these factors would be beneficial in terms of collecting all the necessary information to gain customers. However, there are difficulties in collecting data on all factors, such as inability to concentrate on a specific area due to lack of cost and time and expanding the scope of research. In this research, the role of information technology in increasing the success of marketing through social media marketing and their contribution to SME Performance, the perspectives of SMEs on information technology and social media marketing, their effects on success and customer acquisition have been tried to be determined. The role of ITs and the internet in the success of social media marketing studies is tried to be determined. The relationship between information technology and social media marketing has been tried to be determined by determining the information technology usage levels, social media marketing levels, goals, levels of reaching these goals and performance levels of the enterprises. For this purpose, a survey was conducted with 342 SMEs operating in the textile field in Istanbul, using the survey method. The survey results were analyzed with the help of SPSS 26.0 package program. When the results are evaluated, it has been observed that SMEs operating in the textile field focus on the parts of social media applications that give results in a short time. It has been observed that instant messaging applications are more popular due to the fact that subjects such as social media management and content creation give results in a relatively long time. It has been observed that the SMEs participating in the survey have increased their income with the increase in the budget allocated to social media marketing, they have achieved their intended use more, and they have earned gains other than their basic goals.