Adobe Marketo Engage vs. Ion Interactive

If you are looking to, you're looking to scale up your lead gen work. Adobe Marketo was a very good tool for that. You're looking to deliver leads to a sales team from marketing campaigns. It's a very good tool for that. It runs everything we do on the marketing side and I think a small lead gen team or a very large one could use an equally well.

Incentivized

I don't give 9 ratings easily. Anyone wanting greater user engagement would benefit from ion interactive. I can slap together a simple interactive tool for a social post easily. I also have a plan selector with complex logic built in that would have cost me $50k to build without ion. Now I'm able to duplicate it and make adjustments to use it for various other applications. We've created a couple dozen fun interactive tools for social posts and now we simply re-purpose them easily to create new ones frequently. I just created a new page for our website that we'll want to be fluid; so the site developers suggested we simply embed an ion tool to give us real-time flexibility. Marketers in other divisions are jealous when they see all the fun stuff we're doing--they're gradually becoming ion converts

Incentivized

• Adobe Marketo Engage excels at automating complex marketing workflows and delivering personalized customer experiences at scale.
• Adobe Marketo Engage enables marketers to create targeted campaigns, schedule automated email sequences, and personalize content based on user demographics and interactions, resulting in more relevant customer engagement.
• Adobe Marketo Engage provides robust analytics and reporting, allowing teams to track campaign performance, monitor conversion rates, and measure return on investment(ROI).

• I love that ion interactive autosaves. So many of these platforms leave me terrified of disconnection or closing my laptop.
• This WYSIWYG actually works. I've yet to have a translation or code glitch.
• Fast load times are a huge bonus, as well as mobile-optimized display.

Incentivized

• Adobe Marketo Engage crashes a lot or freezes. We don't have many users and less than 300k contacts so there's no reason it should ever crash.
• It's really expensive! It would be nice to pick which features we want a la cart versus being stuck paying more for a feature and not using the others in the package.
• Because of our integration with Dynamics, we had to use a 3rd party tool called Scribe for field matching. No one at Adobe will help us now that we have a 3rd party tool

Incentivized

• no revert option/revision history if you make a bad mistake
• some simple styles that should be just there for you have to be made through custom CSS
• some of their template options have some pretty bad designs and are not usable beyond a basic functionality level/have to be completely reskinned

Incentivized

We're likely to renew for several reasons:

• Now that it's been implemented, I can't imagine not having marketing automation and the easy interface that Marketo provides to run our campaigns
• Marketo's community and customer service is fantastic; I know that when I need help, I'll get it
• Marketo continues to improve the product, so I know that I can expect it to be even more useful in the future

Because unless I find something better to replace it with, we're probably going to renew our contract. Ideally, Ion interactive can update Liveball so it's easier to use, more functionality that includes forms and javascript options currently not in place

In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.

Incentivized

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.

Incentivized

There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.

Incentivized

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

If you are first time user then the training is perfect, but the advance training is not that effective. After working in Marketo for 5 years there is nothing new to learn. The new tools that Marketo have are expensive and too difficult to use. + I would recommend to learn the basic and use Marketo on the daily bases as you will forget everything in a month if you don't use it.

You can get 100% of your training done online. Marketo's community is filled with experts and they list free training videos on marketo.com. They also have user groups in every major city that help you get the most out of your Marketo instance and Marketing Automation in general. It's really easy to pick up this tool and start running on day one.

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

[...] is a partner of HubSpot, and we are mutual customers of each other. This may be because HubSpot is a [...] investor, but roughly half of [...]'s customers are Adobe Marketo Engage customers (the other half being HubSpot customers).

Incentivized

I haven't had a lot of experience with templated CMS systems and was not involved in the original selection, though I was part of the renewal discussions. Most of the templates I've used have been html and created in house on an as-needed bases

Incentivized

As we have grown, Marketo has grown with us. We started with simple single email campaigns and are now doing complex campaigns with multiple emails and tracks that we send a contact to if they take certain actions within our emails. We also have a complex integration with several systems and have the visibility into our marketing activities throughout our organization.

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• Adobe Marketo Engage automation capabilities have reduced the amount of manual work required to execute campaigns, allowing our marketing team to focus more on strategy and customer engagement rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
• The platform has helped us generate more qualified leads through personalized campaigns and lead scoring, enabling our sales team to focus on prospects with the highest likelihood of converting.

• So far the impact has been positive, but as we are new to the platform that opinion is based on relatively few interactive assets.
• There hasn't been any negative reactions or impact from Ion as of yet, but as I said before it's still early for us in terms of usage (less than a year).
• We do really appreciate the level of complexity and customization available in the platform.

Incentivized