Adobe Marketo Engage (acquired by Adobe in 2018) is a marketing automation platform whose basic features include email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages, and lead scoring, but other editions offer additional advanced features. Typical customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles.
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Seismic Content
Score 6.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Seismic is a recognized leader in sales and marketing enablement. The vendor's value proposition is that their solution equips global sales teams with the knowledge, messaging, and automatically personalized content proven to be the most effective for any buyer interaction. Additionally, the vendor says powerful content intelligence and analytics enable marketers to prove and improve their impact on the bottom line, revealing what is really driving revenue and what needs to be…
Seismic and HubSpot were the top two finalists and ultimately we chose Seismic because its integration with Dynamics CRM was already ready to go. HubSpot was working on their integration but we knew from experience how difficult working with Microsoft could be, so we went with …
While Seismic is fundamentally a bit different than Marketo, the idea behind tracking contact interest is similar and provides helpful insight on the prospect.
Verified User
Employee
Chose Seismic Content
Unfortunately I wasn't involved in the evaluation phase of other products/competitors of Seismic.
I've used Salesforce Knowledge. Seismic is much more robust in its search capabilities, the functionality associated with tagging and categorizing the content and the ability to track the usage including the level and frequency of access by the Customer or Prospect. Salesforce …
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.
It is excellent for a cloud-based workspace between you and your customers. I find the chat feature to be a cool and underutilized tool. I appreciate how you can consolidate all your information on one page, rather than having multiple attachments. Easy to clone DSRs (Digital Sales Rooms), which saves a significant amount of time. Especially when all you have to do is make minor changes between customers.
Seismic allows for one location to store all relevant content so that associates are not having to spend as much time searching for what they need.
Seismic provides the ability to fully customize content such that one template can serve many needs with the simple ability to answer questions that drive the customization in the content. This customization can range from simple to quite complex depending on your level of expertise with the tool.
Seismic provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to organizing your content and how to make the experience of accessing that content unique to the needs of each user in the system.
Marketo's email editor is basic in comparison to other cheaper alternatives out there.
Marketo doesn't work as well in B2C scenarios as it does in B2B. One of the painpoints of this is it's difficult to showcase a selection of product recommendations based on purchase behaviour without a very time consuming workaround. It's manageable if you're only selling a handful of products, but it's inefficient when dealing with a large catalogue.
Marketo's form and landing page builder are also behind the times. Perhaps not as bad as the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, but for an enterprise company the product should be much better.
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.
Seismic is super easy to use and has so many different features and functionality to take advantage of. But being a company who utilizes Google platform a lot we have some issues with the api connections and integrations across the board. But all in all it is not a huge issue, I would just like to see them improve the integration more
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.
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.
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.
Seismic's support team has been exceptional at providing support when an issue has come up, or when we have had questions regarding the platform. They have responded quickly, and I feel as if they truly try to find a solution to the quickest of their abilities. My team and I truly feel supported when it comes to reaching out to Seismic.
Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
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
Adobe Marketo Engage is one of the best email sending platforms I have worked with, because there is so much you can do on a lead scoring area and also then connect this to other platforms such as Salesforce. It allows for seamless reporting and working alongside sales colleagues. We chose Adobe Marketo Engage because it allows for more sophisticated audience segmentation and management of ongoing large scale nurture flows across a number of complex criteria.
Both Highspot and Seismic are great tools. They each provide an extensive library that can be easily customized based on the rep/team/deal cycle stage etc. Seismic has a much cleaner look and feel. As a rep, I felt it was much easier to navigate the tool and organize my content the way I wanted to. Highspot tended to feel cluttered and even overwhelming at times. Along with that, the AI and saved search feature ran smoother in Seismic. I could easily find the document or sales deck I was looking for, whereas in Highspot I felt I had to look around longer than I would have liked.
We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.
We can quickly generate product-specific proposals.
We've experienced repeated frustrations while trying to edit/update the LiveDoc.
Errors in LiveDoc coding have occasionally produced errors in the generated proposals where certain fields (Customer Name, for example) should have been automatically completed but were not.
