Digital marketing has become very important to SMBs to improve sales, reduce cost of customer acquisition and retain existing customers. The core functions of lead generation, opportunity conversion and life-cycle customer relationship management remain at the center of marketing objectives and are the focus of automation.

It is viewed by SMBs as a natural extension of their CRM applications and SMBs believe that it sits between CRM and business intelligence solutions. With Marketing Automation solutions SMBs are able to add very powerful communications, filtering, data management and workflow components to the base CRM system enabling more efficient sales process management. Although SMBs are recognizing the need to adopt marketing automation they also find it complex to understand and implement.