Explanation of the structural, behavioral, and contextual functions of content marketing: The role of intention to revisit websites

Nowadays, customers have dramatically changed their behavior in line with technology and the world economic environment. Due to the development of online communication space, the increasing customer attention to this space and the amount of customers' online shopping, manufacturing and service businesses and brands seek to improve their methods and implement new models to develop customer relationships and increase their market share. Content marketing is one of the new approaches of attracting and maintaining customer participation on the Internet. Content marketing has a broad meaning and is, in fact, a strategic approach that focuses on the production and distribution of valuable, coordinated and appropriate contents so as to attract and retain target customers. Indeed, by creating a flow of relevant and attractive information, content marketing creates a credible image of the brand and the company. It helps to persuade customers to buy and retain the existing customers by providing useful, up-to-date and non-compulsory information.

Considering the importance of content marketing and the need to explain a model for it from different aspects, the present study was conducted to explain the structural, behavioral and contextual functions of content marketing in connection to the customer’s intention of revisiting the website.  This study seeks to examine the content marketing model and provide a context in which online stores are familiar with the components affecting content marketing and its role in the intention to visit again. This can help to produce and publish quality and effective contents to attract customers’ loyalty and influence their decisions.

In the present study, a mixed qualitative and quantitative method has been used. In the qualitative stage, the statistical population consisted of academics as well as marketing industry experts, especially in the field of e-commerce. Theoretical saturation was reached by interviewing ten randomly selected persons. In the quantitative stage, considering that the community is unlimited and according to the report of Digi Kala, the number of the users of this website was about 320 thousand people. The sampling was done through the available method, and a questionnaire was distributed among the customers of Digi Kala website in person, online (on social networks) and by telephone.In the qualitative stage, by a review of previous studies, open and semi-structured interview questions were designed and experts were interviewed. In the interview, the participants were asked for their views on the factors that generally influence the content marketing of online store networks, and key questions were asked to reach deeper layers of the concepts. After the data collection, open, pivotal and selective coding was performed, and the responses were coded and analyzed using the Max QDA software.In the quantitative phase, a standard questionnaire was designed based on the model extracted from the qualitative stage, by the questionnaire distributed among the Digi Kala customers, the data of this phase were collected, and the designed model was evaluated. The structural equation method was used to analyze the quantitative data, and the significance coefficient (t-value) and the path coefficient were used to find out the relationships between the variables and the test results of the hypotheses. The IBM SPSS Statistics software version 23 and the Smart PLS software version 2 were used for the data analysis. Based on the studied hypotheses, the structural model designed by the least squares (PLS) method was analyzed.

The results of conversations with different people showed that there is a high consensus based on 22 concepts in three categories of customer-oriented organizational culture, managers 'performance and employees' performance as the behavioral factors affecting content retrieval. Also, as generally inferred from the experts’ opinions, there are 23 concepts as influential factors in the field of contextual factors affecting content marketing. They are summarized in four categories including customer orientation, market orientation, platforms, technology and online shopping culture. According to the experts, 18 concepts serve as influential structural factors affecting content marketing. They are summarized in three categories including organizational work processes, site content and organizational performance. Also, based on the quantitative phase, it can be concluded that content marketing has a significant effect on the customer’s intention to revisit the shopping website.

The results of the qualitative section in this study showed that content marketing is directly affected by employees, managers and organizational culture as behavioral factors, site content, work process and organizational performance as structural factors, and market orientation, customer orientation and technology as underlying factors.