Adobe Marketo Engage vs. Marketo Web Personalization (Marketo RTP)

Adobe Marketo Engage is great for lead gen because of the out of box solutions. We import leads from Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Tradeshows, and web forms. It allows me to track leads from the moment they enter the system to the point where they become customers. I use it to score leads, segment them, and nurture them with targeted content. It's especially useful as a B2B organization.

Incentivized

Marketo RTP is great for companies in later stages that require greater customization or API integrations with their own marketing/sales tools. The integration with Salesforce also makes it worthwhile for companies that already have Salesforce setup in some workflows. As stated before, Marketo is quite expensive, so it might not be suitable for earlier-stage companies and startups that are just getting started with marketing and sales.

Incentivized

• Like I have said Marketo has been very helpful by helping us to connect us with our customers and keeps them coming back, hence saving time, effort and resources.
• Let AI build predictive audience and segments easily.
• Personalize experience with active listening and triggered content.
• 24/7 responsive support and service team.

• Segment website users into qualifying groups.
• Target segmented groups based on multiple aspects.
• Campaign generation through their UI.
• Measurement of campaign success.
• AB testing of campaigns.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Building segments is harder than it should be and you can only create simplistic segments.
• Building overlays (pop-ups) needs to be done outside of the tool and default selections look dated.

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

I'm not the person in charge of this.

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

It is complex to set up and maintain and not intuitive.

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.

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

We actually had a very good onboarding process. The rep from Marketo was very knowledgable and set up regular meetings with us to make sure we understood how to use everything. He gave us ideas for potential personalizations and had best-practice tips. Unfortunately, his knowledge was not enough to overcome some of the biggest issues with the solution.

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

I'm well-versed in Marketo's RTP module and HubSpot's smart content offering, and HubSpot's smart content has ultimately become my personalization tool of choice. Here's why:

• HubSpot's smart content tools are simple to grasp and easy to implement from start to finish. There's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to ease of use and overall user experience within Marketo's RTP module.
• For less tech-savvy marketers, HubSpot's training documentation and support team is an absolute lifesaver. Marketo has failed us time and time again on this front, despite the fact that we pay an additional fee for Premier Support and quarterly consulting.
• Marketo's tool is more robust and more powerful, but they don't take the time to create supporting documentation to help end-users leverage RTP, nor do they take the time to train their support staff on how it works. HubSpot's smart content does what we need it to do, and we don't burn time in the process trying to figure out how to use it.

Incentivized

The total cost is a little bit higher than we expected.

Incentivized

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.

• Generated a 35% higher return on investment (ROI) in demand generation in the company.
• The focus on the accounts that presented a greater sales potential, allowed us to prioritize and reduce costs by 20 Million USD.
• Being personal and optimized. reduced efforts towards a more personalized customer experience, in working hours by almost 100 h.

Incentivized

• More leads. Customized content has generated more form fill outs from the target website visitors.
• Personalization of the website - more unique experience and feel of our brand for different website visitors.
• Named account analytics - we can now track how we are doing against the goal of increasing awareness of our products among our named accounts.