The Impact of Digital Marketing Strategies on Brand Awareness and Customer Purchase Intention

Abstract

The use of digital marketing is often described as a one-dimensional tool of promotion, but empirical research shows that the outcomes of this process are related to the quality, relevance, interactivity, credibility, and the integration of particular digital strategies. The present systematic literature review is a synthesis of 15 peer-reviewed empirical studies originally published in 2012-2024 in order to consider the effects digital marketing strategies have on brand awareness and customer purchase intention. They were searched and screened through a PRISMA 2020-informed search and screening process, with systematic extraction and narrative thematic synthesis. Three themes emerged. First, informative, entertaining, and interactive (to personalize and target), as well as trend-sensitive online content boosts brand salience and brand-related knowledge continuously, though the influence of each particular dimension depends on the platform and industry. Second, exposure does not usually explain purchase intention: more likely, it is brought into existence by some intervening (or moderating) effects, including brand awareness, brand image, advertising value, trust, engagement, brand experience, and customer equity. Third, cross-sectional convenience samples, self-reported intentions, and structural equation models are highly susceptible to methodological concentration, making the positive results of most studies seem consistent, thus restricting causal inference and increasing their susceptibility to common-method bias. More substantial evidence is found in multi-country samples and designs of behavior and decisions that dissociate exposure and outcome, but such studies are less common. The review finds that purchase intention is optimally instigated when initially brought about by means of cognitively accessible and affectively credible brand meaning via digital marketing. In the case of scholarship, the most important thing is to shift the models that are heavy in the associations to longitudinal, experimental, and field-based models that are tested to know what people do and do not actually buy. To put it into practice, coordinated digital portfolios with reach and awareness-building purposefully linked to relevancy, credibility, engagement, and conversion processes would be supported by the evidence, as opposed to being optimized simply as channel measurements.