IS THE WEBSITE MARKETING STRATEGY CORRELATED WITH THE COMPANIES OUTCOMES? EVIDENCE FROM ROMANIAN IT INDUSTRY

Abstract

With a constant yearly growth of more than 20% over the last five years and adding up to10% of the GDP, the Romanian Information Technology (IT) sector has an important potential for development. Emphasizing on websites marketing in this sector could enhance more profitability. Even though this tool is considered to be much depersonalized, the users like getting a sense of the company behind the website. Having a wide range of information facilitates this understanding. In a very competitive environment, the IT managers have to realize that the overall site is what represents their organization to users. Prospectors look at product pages and read the site content when they are evaluating an organization as a possible vendor, business partner, employer, investment opportunity. Therefore, websites marketing is one of aspects that need to be constantly reevaluated in an ever-changing word of communication. Given this facts, the present study identifies the extent to which the most valuable IT Romanian companies practice webpage’s marketing. Specifically, we examine the content, in-time communication tools, navigability and style of the websites in correlation with their outcome and size. Moreover, the paper analyzes the differences between websites characteristics of Romanian IT SMEs and large companies from top 100, according to their turnover. The specific objectives in order to investigate the websites marketing of Romanian IT companies are: -To evaluate the websites marketing policies of the software developer, hardware and IT distributors; -To analyze in depth the Romanian IT companies websites performance in correlation with their profit, turnover and number of employees; -To assess the differences between websites policy of SMEs and large companies from Romanian IT industry; This study is exploratory and consists in a qualitative assessment of websites from top100 software, hardware and IT distributor companies. The sample consists of 93 functional websites. The corporate website of each company was analyzed and subsequently codified on 97 variables clustered in four dimensions: content, handling, interactivity and layout. The results outline the fact that firms engage in websites marketing activities to a relatively high extent. There is a strong correlation between websites content and companies’ turnover, profits and number of employees. Moreover, a positive correlation was revealed between interactivity and turnover. The research outcomes reflect high disparity between Internet marketing policy of software, hardware and distributors.

Keywords

• websites marketing, SME, IT industry, Romania