Digital Marketing As a Driver of Export Competitiveness in Emerging Economies: Evidence From Uzbekistan

In emerging economies, the ways in which firms develop export competitiveness are being transformed by digital transformation — more recently whilst digital marketing becomes a central mechanism for breaking into new markets, enhancing strong brand presence and creating trackable international demand progressively. The author uses general marketing frameworks to analyse the impact of digital marketing as an export competitiveness enhancer for Uzbekistan, country with a rapid growth of internet penetration and development of digital infrastructure provide new opportunities for export-based enterprises. Nevertheless, although export marketing has become a major area of interest, little empirical research exists on the relation between the effectiveness of digital marketing and export performance through analytical models that combines both the above-mentioned variables and variables that have clear empirical measurement such as in the case of Uzbekistan.
In order to address this, the study employs a mixed-methods approach that consists of a structured market entry framework; a multi-channel digital marketing effectiveness assessment model, and econometric analysis. The performance of digital marketing is then analyzed over key channels such as social media, search marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and influencer marketing, taking into consideration synergy effects across platforms. There is a very significant linkage between the efficiency of digital marketing and performance in export which shows a good level of representation/regression and shows that firms stronger in the systems of digital marketing are more competent in exports. Results further indicate that email & influencer deliver the most marginal UR return, but SEM & SMM largely underpins scalable competitiveness via market breadth & expansion capabilities.
In turn, the contribution of the study is the provision of an evidence-based overview of how digital marketing can be used as a strategic export growth tool in Uzbekistan. The findings provide practical implications for firms as they raise awareness of building digital capabilities whilst widening the understanding of policymakers to develop policy measures that accelerate export diversification and competitiveness through data driven marketing modernization.