Marketo Web Personalization (Marketo RTP) vs. SmartFocus, now part of Actito

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

Before we used SmartFocus we had a simple bespoke drag and drop builder, where we could add as many "templates" as we wanted. In SmartFocus, the drag and drop builder is smoother and better, but you can't add your own templates. If you are happy with the provided templates, then building newsletters will be really good experience.

Incentivized

• 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

• Push newsletters to customers
• Managing campaigns
• Drag and drop builder

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

• Drag and drop builder
• 2-factor authentication
• Internal integration (the system is too big for an average user what make it hard to use sometimes)
• Image gallery reliability

Incentivized

I'm not the person in charge of this.

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

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

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

We need a service where we can have support when necessary and a system that will handle a high amount of campaigns, with the functionality where even a junior member of the team can create a campaign from assets provided by the graphic team. SmartFocus has that.

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.

• By using Smart Focus we massively cut the cost of creating a new e-mail campaign
• On the other hand, the cost of SmartFocus is much higher than a competitor

Incentivized