Effect Of Digital Marketing Strategies On Customer Attraction In Kenyan Universities

Abstract

The main objective of the study was to assess the effect of digital marketing strategies on customer attraction in Kenyan universities with a focus on social media marketing, website marketing and mobile marketing as the specific objectives. The study was conducted among the chartered universities in Nairobi County (University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, Multimedia University, Cooperative University and Technical University of Kenya (public). Whereas private universities were (Catholic University, Strathmore University, KCA University and United States International University).The target respondents were marketing staff in the nine universities, however only 50% were sampled. The study adopted descriptive design that was considered suitable for this study because it helped the researcher to collect quantitative data from the respondents using the questionnaire. Primary data was collected through drop and pick technique and the exercise took a period of three weeks. After the collection exercise, data was cleaned edited and coded and was then analyzed using descriptive statistics for the general information and multiple regressions for the study objectives with the help of STATA Version 13 Software. The results were presented in form of tables, figures and text. The study established that all the three platforms positively and significantly affected customer attraction in Kenyan universities with website marketing providing the highest contribution(44.25%) followed by social media marketing(38.82%) and mobile marketing(17.37%) respectively. The study further established that the combined effect (R2 ) of the three digital platforms explains 53.31 % of the variance in customer attraction while 46.69% is attributed to other factors. These results were similar to those obtained by other scholars (Reddy, 2016; Islam and Khan, 2017; Wanjiku, 2014). Therefore, the study recommended that universities enhance the use of digital tools in their marketing plans for improved performance.