Marketo Ratings & User Feedback
Marketo is a Marketing Automation platform with a range of editions offering different capabilities spanning small business to enterprise. Most customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles, though B2C made up 12% of bookings in Q4-2013 and is a growth segment for the company. Marketo's small business options begin with Spark at $1,195/ month and offers email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages and lead scoring. Other options include the Standard and Select packages which offer additional features. The enterprise version offers increased scalability and security options, as well as the Revenue Cycle Analysis module that provides sales cycle modeling and revenue forecasting.
Marketo became a public company in 2013. It has completed two acquisitions — Crowd Factory, a social media incentive tool, and most recently Insightera, a reverse IP/ website content personalization platform. Marketo is currently not profitable as it is investing heavily in sales and marketing for growth.
| Company status | Public |
|---|---|
| 2013 revenue | $95.9 million* |
| Growth 2012-2013 | 64%* |
| Customers | 3,001* |
| Employees | 663** |
Aggregate User Ratings on TrustRadius
Marketo generally scores well across the board, though slightly below the Marketing Automation average. When assessing these scores, it should be noted that many Marketo users are quite sophisticated and demanding of their solution. Marketo's scores are relatively similar to Eloqua, its most direct competitor, but both usability and implementation satisfaction are rated higher for Marketo. While Marketo's customer support rating is quite strong, it is lower than the rest of its ratings, which suggests room for improvement in that area.
| Marketo | Marketing Automation Average | |
|---|---|---|
| Likelihood to recommend | 8.3 | 8.4 |
| Likelihood to renew | 8.2 | 8.3 |
| Product usability | 8.2 | 8.3 |
| Performance and reliability | 8.4 | 8.8 |
| Support rating | 7.7 | 8.3 |
| Training satisfaction | 8.1 | 8.6 |
| Implementation satisfaction | 8.2 | 8.5 |
Summary of Review Feedback
| Strengths | Areas for Improvement |
|---|---|
| Usability — General perception that landing page design, lead nurturing and scoring are easier to use than other products, particularly Eloqua. | Reporting — Many feel that the out-of-the-box reporting capabilities and dashboards are too basic. Some users resent having to upgrade to the Revenue Optimizer module. |
| Salesforce Integration — Since the program is built on the Force.com platform, integration is simple to set up and real-time. | Sales Insight Reporting — A few reviewers mentioned this as a shortcoming. Can see clicks and opens, but no aggregate reporting. |
| Comprehensive Feature Set — In addition to a powerful email engine, strong capabilities around landing page creation, nurture / drip campaigns, lead scoring and social integration. | System Responsiveness/Speed (historically) — Although database size is a factor, even standard implementations have some responsiveness issues. Marketo has since re-architected the product to be a lot faster. |
Excerpts from Interview with , Co-founder and VP Marketing
On market focus: “We believe it's a fallacy to focus on a specific segment…we fervently believe that we can effectively serve a broad spectrum of clients with the lowest end being a company with a single dedicated marketer on staff.”
On product breadth: “All the Marketing Automation vendors are building some form of partner ecosystem. Marketo LaunchPoint has more than 250 companies in it. The more open you can be to have other companies plugged in, the better you'll serve the needs of your customers. Breadth of ecosystem is becoming another element of competition.”
On market education: “Marketing automation is a hard discipline. The biggest constraint on success and growth is people who can sit down and figure out how to be successful. Often when companies do not succeed, it's not because they chose the wrong tool, it's because they don't know how to use it to drive better marketing.”
On thoughts for the future: “Buyers are increasingly omni-channel. Marketing automation needs to be more omni-channel, too. There needs to be more incorporation of listening, i.e., behavioral context data from more places and also more interaction via different channels.”