Abstract:

Despite the growing prominence of e-commerce organizations and digital marketing as a branch of marketing management, there is paucity of research that attempted to describe the trends of scholarly outputs in this field of research. In addition, literature search reveal that African scholars pay little attention to the dynamics to this emerging field. It is upon this premise that the primary objective of this study was to systematically collect documents, scrutinize and critically analyze the relevant literature on the field of digital marketing. The specific objective was to identify key literature in the field of digital marketing as they relate with e-commerce organizations within the global market place, discover relevant emerging themes from digital marketing literature and to identify top e-commerce organizations around the world. In order to achieve this objectives, the researcher carried out a systematic review of digital marketing literature using the basic steps given by Yannascoli et al., (2013) in conducting a systematic review, the researcher (1). Made an initial plan (2). Conducted a search and (3). Extracted Data for the discussion of the emerging themes. By reviewing 60 articles, the author was able to discover eight key recurring themes which were covered in relevant literature of digital marketing namely; social media marketing, search engine marketing, digital display advertising, digital content marketing, mobile marketing, viral marketing, affiliate marketing and email marketing. Key findings show that there is an increase in the trend of more published article and that, more articles are published under social media marketing than the rest of the other themes, North American and European authors were found to be prominent in the literature. The author recommend that scholars and practitioners in the field of digital marketing from developing continents especially Africa and South America should focus on publishing more articles.