Global Competitive Strategies: Assessing the Role of Marketing Tools in SME Internationalization and Financial Performance.

Although small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are highly important for producing highvalue-added innovative and intermediary goods and play a crucial role in being suppliers of large enterprises, their financial restraints cause them to encounter problems regarding their internationalization process and financial performance. As a dynamic capability of Resourcebased View theory (RBV), the usage of marketing communication tools (MCTs) by SMEs, such as social media (SM), websites, telemarketing, direct mail, SMS campaigns, and Google Adwords, increases the competitiveness of SMEs and might enable them to reduce their financial performance and export concerns. However, the usage of these tools can differ depending on the firm's country of origin since countries have various socio-economic and cultural conditions that affect the competitiveness of firms and their marketing communication approaches to their export and financial performance. In this regard, this paper aims to find international differences in the impact of the usage of MCTs on export and financial performance. This paper examines 1221 SMEs from Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary for this aim. The researchers created an online questionnaire to collect data from randomly selected respondents in the research sample. The researchers also ran Binary Logistic Regression analyses for analysis purposes. Although this paper confirms international differences in the impact of MCTs on the export of SMEs, the effect of SM usage on the financial performance of SMEs does not differ depending on the SMEs' country of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]