Designing a Digital Content Marketing Framework to Engage Consumers with Brands on Social Media: A Bibliometric Review

Given the importance of digital content marketing, and the scattered knowledge in the body of literature, this study seeks to take a comprehensive look at the factors influencing the digital content marketing process in order to engage the consumer with the brand on social media. With the help of the Bibliometrix package of R and VOSviewer software, the science performance and the scientific network were recognized and mapped. Classifying five main clusters in the co-citation analysis, theories, contexts, and main constructs of the field were identified. The recent trends were identified using co-occurrence analysis.  Finally, the achieved results were presented within a conceptual framework. The most common antecedents and consequences of digital content marketing were presented together with the contexts.

Bibliometric systematic review has been used to identify and analyze thematic trends in digital content marketing and brand engagement scopes. In fact, bibliometric analysis is a specific scientific field that examines the evolution of knowledge, scientific quality, and the impact of resources in this field from an objective and quantitative perspective. The bibliometric method generally has two main parts: (1) performance analysis and (2) intellectual mapping of science. In the section on performance analysis, the actions of authors, countries, and scientific institutes as well as their contribution to scientific development in a specific field are examined, while knowledge maps are used to identify the intellectual structure of the field and examine time trends and current issues in each period.

In the performance analysis, the most-cited countries, authors, and articles were identified. The United States, China, and the United Kingdom were the most outstanding countries in this field. In the co-citation analysis, five main clusters were identified and the main constructs of each cluster were extracted along with important theories, contexts, and methods. With the help of these constructs, the antecedents and consequences of the digital content marketing process were presented. Co-occurrence analysis recognized new trends in this field to complete the framework.

Based on the ADO-TCM framework, five important antecedents of the digital content marketing process were introduced: social media characteristics, source characteristics, content characteristics, consumer characteristics, and online community characteristics. Consumer participation or non-participation is a behavioral decision that originates from the digital content marketing process, which ultimately leads to brand engagement as the output of the process. Finally, culture and artificial intelligence were introduced as important contexts to facilitate this process.