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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SlapFive Customer Marketing Software
Score 9.5 out of 10
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SlapFive in Boston offers what they describe as a Customer-Generated Content Machine software tool, which aims to make it simple for companies, and enjoyable for company clients, to capture their voice and inject it into all aspects of the business to win and retain more customers.
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.
If you want to capture your customer's voice with ease and have a path to break the reels down into actionable insights for prospects that attach to their biggest questions, fears, and doubts, then this is what you are looking for. This is for those prospects that will not be "bothered" with marketing fluff or marketing speak. These are the types of buyers who want to drill into the heart of what they are trying to solve as a business and see and hear from personas and businesses which look like them.
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.
Agility in ease of acquiring new and relevant reference reels that attach to the go-to-market initiatives of the business and Acumatica Leadership team care the most about.
Open platform options to connect into. We have Smartsheet forms connected and HootSuite webhooks implemented for ease of sharing on social media.
Asset and Content management tool - we have a WEALTH of content on the platform and continually add more!
On-site event customer voice capture options via the Minute Booth.
Speed of the platform for users. This could be because we have a LOT of content, but it can at times be a pain point that we work to address together with the SlapFive team.
Ease of search function could get better. I have trouble doing searches and sometimes get time-out issues.
Having a "user portal" so we know when there might be bugs being worked on or a service issue that is being worked on without having to email someone each time. More for self-service and tracking.
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.
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
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.
For us, this was the solution Acumatica needed to be able to attach the marketing strategies that we care about the most all the way to a finite or micro-content level. It's not ALL about the BIG fancy marketing videos and story interviews. LOTS of incredible customer content is often left on the cutting room floor. This content gets NEW and continual life by using SlapFive. Plus, it's the MOST simple way to go after a compelling customer voice in areas of the business where you don't have it or there is a gap. The remote capture function option makes it a breeze - no matter where in the world your customers are. We are a global, growing organization, so we can't be hampered geographically by any tool we deploy. It has to work for everyone. SlapFive does work for everyone - all customers, big small, new, or seasoned pros. They have a "voice," no matter what.
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 have raised our portfolio even higher where we dominate our market when it comes to having the best relationship with our customers across everything we do. Website, peer-to-peer review sites, customer stories, customer references, and MORE. I believe it's because we BELIEVE in the same ETHOS as SlapFive, and we LIVE to make HEROS every day of our customers and infuse the sound of our customer's voices in everything we do.
Product Marketing DEPTH of customer's voice is beyond what anyone else in software technology businesses has done. It's typical that product goes and "does product" all day long, and customer marketing does its own separate work, and never the tween shall meet. Not so at Acumatica. Nothing leaves our Product Marketing teams desk without customer voice connected now. The ease of SlapFive Customer Marketing Software's platform and our broad adoption make this possible.
