Social Media Marketing Impact on Agri-Machinery Purchases Decisions

Today, social media has become one of the key elements of business marketing strategy. The rapid growth of internet usage and social media across the country, especially from 2019 to 2022 has created challenges as well as new opportunities for both consumers and businesses in Sri Lanka. The primary objective of the study is to investigate the impact of social media marketing on purchase decisions of agricultural equipment and machinery under the framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1985). For this purpose, a structured questionnaire was distributed among 318 agricultural equipment and machinery customers of a prominent organisation operating in the agricultural sector of Sri Lanka. Hypotheses were developed based on literature and tested using a multiple liner regression. It was found that there is a significant impact of the age of the customer, the internet and social media awareness and usage, features and characteristics of social media, availability of product information, and prior experience with online product searching and shopping on social media on customer purchase decisions of agricultural equipment and machinery. Moreover, it was found that there is no significant impact of the perception of social media as well as demographic factors of customers such as education level, gender, and the number of members in the household on the customer purchase decisions of agricultural equipment and machinery on social media. These findings tend to shed light on an often-overlooked area of the impact of social media marketing on the purchase decision of agricultural equipment and machinery.