Where to invest in online marketing education in micro and small enterprises

The aim of this paper is to identify the educational needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the field of online marketing. This paper extends a local Czech study via international research (Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy). Primary data was gathered using an electronic questionnaire (n = 376) focused on the enterprise side and semi-structured interviews (n = 18) with online marketing agencies. Based on a comparison of questionnaire survey results and semi-structured interviews the main problem areas in the effective use of the online marketing tools were identified (complexity of the individual tools; lack of human resources, time and finance, bad previous experience; lack of knowledge and competencies). The research results indicate the definition of recommendations for micro and small enterprises - the main emphasis should be given to create a course that will create specialists for communication with online marketing agencies with the general knowledge of each online marketing tool.