Opportunities and challenges of adoption of ICT marketing by SME's in Botswana

Abstract

The adoption of ICT Marketing could be a significant source of competitive advantage for most business organizations, especially the small and medium sized businesses. Recently a lot of research has shown the role that the adoption of ICT in Marketing could play in enhancing the growth of such businesses. In this regard, this study seeks to identify opportunities related to the adoption of ICT, which SMEs in Botswana could utilise to improve their marketing instruments and strategies. It further looks into the challenges and barriers that arise in the adoption of ICT as a marketing tool, causing SMEs not to perform optimally. The study examines the strategies that SMEs could explore to enhance the adoption and full utilisation of ICT marketing tools. SMEs around Botswana do not seem to understand the relevance of the adoption of ICT marketing in comparison to other SME's in the international market and the proximity ICT marketing creates for business communities. ICT has shown to be the most relevant tool to use for growth, being relevant to the competitive and diverse market. Adoption of ICT marketing has become popular and is viewed to bring profitability to SME's and any other competing business. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to collect data from 80 respondents through a set of questionnaires administered to the SMEs as well as 10 respondents from the interviews. These were purposively selected from SMEs in Gaborone. Data was analysed using SPSS for quantitative findings and a thematic approach was used to deduce evidence from interviews. The findings revealed that there are a lot of opportunities associated with the adoption of ICT marketing tools in SMEs in Botswana. These included facilitating innovation, reduced costs and market access and competitiveness. The results further indicated there are many challenges in capital, personal, cultural beliefs, and lack of government support, high transaction costs and financial constraints. Some of the strategies identified from the findings included the reduction in cost of accessing ICT, entrepreneurial education and government subsidies for SME's. The limitation of the study is that the paper only focused on SME's in Gaborone.