KickFire’sB2B solutions provide account-level information such as industry, revenue, employee count, and more based on an IP address. KickFire’s proprietary TWIN Caching® technology and robust firmographic database deliver business intelligence for first-party intent, content personalization, account-based marketing, predictive/intent, data enrichment, and much more. KickFire offers IP address intelligence and B2B firmographic data through its LIVE Leads platform, API, and integrations…
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Adobe Marketo Engage
Score 8.3 out of 10
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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.
For small businesses that don't have big budgets for marketing automation, VisiStat is an ideal first step. For companies that have sophisticated systems in place, VisiStat will augment your analytics and provide a deeper dive into your website activity. Since the implementation involves adding javascript to your site, the user should be familiar with how to do this
The best thing with this tool is how they use rich behavioural data, built -in intelligence and sophisticated journey flow to identify and engage our best customers and accelerate the customer experience. The support team has been very phenomenal and outstanding for the last 1 year I have not been delayed any response to my question.
De-anonymizes website activity at the account (company) level.
Identifies net new target accounts.
Displays click path, time on page, time per session, and engagement level of each de-anonymized website visit.
Gives great daily insight on watchlists you've set up.
Delivers every possible de-anonymized visit with little filtering for accuracy.
More on the watchlists. I really love that you can receive immediate alerts on website visits from accounts you've listed on your watchlists. This way, you never miss the window of opportunity to reach out to your key targets while they are currently on your site.
Salesforce integration is good. KickFire pushes most recent website visits, pages visited, website click path, activity percent change, and more to the given account in Salesforce. You can then create reports and run them regularly to see which accounts are surging in website activity. This is also great for account prospecting, and for planning your sales outreach plan of attack. You can see which bits of your website content are most interesting to the company, and which products they are most interested in.
The ability to clone entire programs and campaigns should not be underestimated as a marketing manager. This is a stand-out feature that other automation tools can't do (yet) in my experience.
myTokens: Campaign-based/local variables that can be used in emails and landing pages for everything from basic text, rich text, email scripts, CSS, scoring, and more. Set up your emails and LPs with myTokens and you'll be able to create an entire campaign without opening the email or LP editor. Clone program, update myTokens, test, and launch.
Engagement Programs: let you quickly create basic email nurture tracks with ease. Currently EPs can only send on a cadence of once per week, but future product release announcements suggest variable cadence will be possible soon.
AB Testing: using Email Programs and AB Test or ABCDEFG Test is simple to set up and report on. Manually chose the winner of your test or have Marketo choose automatically.
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.
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.
They are very good at solving cases that I bring to them. I'd like to see more proactive support to make sure we are getting the full value out of the solution.
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.
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
The tutorials are very good and they explain how to get started using the system. The online webinars are very good for advancing your knowledge of the product.
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
I covered this pretty extensively in the cons. The key differentiator here is that KickFire serves up almost all the data (or so it seems) to the end client. The client then has to do their own work on interpreting it. This is good because it means we don't miss out on any website activities, but it's bad because we get a lot of false positives. 6sense uses the confidence score approach I mentioned in the Cons section, which means the match rates of the data we get are much higher. Our experience with Clearbit comes from other tools that are built on it (Bombora, Drift, etc.), and it has not been great. We've seen many more inaccuracies with Clearbit.
Prior to Marketo, we used SharpSpring. I will say that SharpSpring is more intuitive to use than Marketo, but it has much less functionality. If you have the time to really learn Marketo, it has much more to offer as well as many more options to customize the solution to your exact needs.
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.
Improved efficiency across teams in the business. When you don't have to manually send out emails, you gain more time back!
More targeted lead nurture has led to faster lead conversion and real-time engagement. In today's day and age, customers want the right CTA at their fingertips and Marketo can provide that.
