Chiranjit Mazumder

Digital marketing has moved from a peripheral communication activity to an increasingly consequential component of market access, customer relationship management and channel strategy in agribusiness. Yet the evidence is fragmented across agribusiness, agricultural economics, information systems and small-business research, and positive accounts of market reach often sit beside evidence of weak organisational readiness, logistics constraints and platform dependence. This critical narrative review synthesises literature on the role of websites, social media, social commerce, e-commerce marketplaces, online reputation mechanisms and live-streaming in agribusiness enterprises, with particular attention to small and medium-sized enterprises, farmer-entrepreneurs, cooperatives and agro-processors. Literature published from 2000 to 9 June 2026 was identified through accessible scholarly indexes, repositories, DOI and journal records, supplemented by authoritative institutional sources and citation searching. The evidence indicates that digital marketing can reduce information and search frictions, expand geographic reach, enable direct selling, intensify customer interaction and strengthen reputation signalling. Its contribution to sales, prices and enterprise growth is nevertheless conditional rather than automatic. Benefits depend on managerial digital capability, strategic integration of channels, credible product information, fulfilment and cold-chain performance, customer trust, social connections and supportive digital ecosystems. Much of the firm-level literature remains cross-sectional and geographically concentrated, while stronger quasi-experimental evidence concerns e-commerce penetration more broadly rather than marketing capability itself. Platform-mediated marketing also creates new forms of intermediation through visibility algorithms, traffic acquisition costs, certification systems and dependence on dominant platforms. The review therefore reframes digital marketing in agribusiness as an organisational and ecosystem capability rather than a collection of promotional tools. Research should move towards longitudinal and causal designs, channel-level profitability measures, comparative work beyond China and Europe, and explicit analysis of platform governance, inclusion, logistics and resilience.