Readiness of small and medium enterprises for marketing automation

Abstract

As the technological progress of online shopping and advertising advances with increased speed, marketing automation has been gaining more attention from both practitioners and academics. However, despite the growing popularity of this new marketing approach, there are many restrictions when it comes to its implementation by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Due to the high requirements regarding the collection of customer data and advanced knowledge necessary to set up and operate marketing automation systems, many enterprises are not able to fully grasp the potential marketing technologies offer. This article describes the mechanisms of marketing automation, provides the state-of-art research overview and analyses current level of readiness of Czech SMEs to implement digital marketing tools and the obstacles that prevent them to do so.