From Knowing to Doing: Evaluating Digital Marketing Training for Village Entrepreneurs in Sukabumi Regency, Indonesia

Digital marketing training is a common community-service response to the slow digital adoption of village micro-enterprises, yet such programmes rarely establish what participants already know or whether knowledge turns into action. This study evaluates a short single-session digital marketing workshop, covering digital marketing concepts, online shops on Shopee, short-video promotion and branding and pricing, delivered in Sukajaya and Karawang villages, Sukabumi Regency, West Java, Indonesia, in August 2025. Thirty village entrepreneurs took a 20-item pre-test (Sukajaya = 16; Karawang = 14), and 22 provided valid pre-test and post-test pairs. The test showed good reliability (KR-20 = 0.84 and 0.81). Baseline knowledge was already high (mean 85.0 out of 100). The paired mean rose from 85.9 to 89.1, a small change that was not significant (p = 0.13; d = 0.34; class normalized gain = 0.23). Karawang participants, who started lower, gained 5.4 points (normalized gain = 0.33; p = 0.09), whereas Sukajaya participants hardly changed. Gains were concentrated on platform-specific items, namely the online-shop platform, product descriptions, hashtags and video length, while product showcase management and pricing remained the weakest areas. After the training, participants opened one Shopee shop and five TikTok accounts. Most participants could therefore identify the online-shop platform, but very few opened a shop. The findings point to a gap between knowing and doing: conceptual knowledge was largely in place, and the harder step was turning it into operational practice. Village programmes should measure baseline knowledge, concentrate on hands-on platform tasks and evaluate behaviour through follow-up mentoring.