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Adobe Marketo Engage

Adobe Marketo Engage

Overview

What is Adobe Marketo Engage?

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…

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 26 features
  • Lead nurturing automation (924)
    8.8
    88%
  • List management (946)
    8.8
    88%
  • Email deliverability reporting (949)
    8.1
    81%
  • Standard reports (931)
    7.8
    78%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

4 videos

Adobe Marketo Engage Review | Tracking and Managing Leads
04:05
Adobe Marketo Engage Review | The Power of Marketo Sales Insights
05:33
Nurture Leads for Demand Generation | Adobe Marketo Engage User Review
04:09
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Adobe Marketo Engage?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
    Optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://business.adobe.com/products/mar…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.

What is OutboundEngine?

OutboundEngine provides a hands-off way for small business owners to market and grow their business. The product aims to provide small businesses with what big companies have achieved with marketing automation. The service aims to help users keep in touch with clients and prospects with…

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Features

Email & Online Marketing

Using software to manage lists, send emails, automate email campaigns, and track results.

8.1
Avg 7.8

Lead Management

The process of tracking and managing prospective customers from lead generation to conversion.

8.8
Avg 7.7

Campaign Management

Users can schedule campaigns and/or events with reminders, announcements, etc.

7.9
Avg 7.6

Social Media Marketing

Using social media networks to help amplify marketing endeavors.

7.4
Avg 7.5

Reporting & Analytics

Users can report on and analyze usage, performance, ROI, and/or other metrics of success.

7.5
Avg 7.5

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

8.5
Avg 7.6
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Product Details

What is Adobe Marketo Engage?

Adobe Marketo Engage, from Adobe since 2018, aims to help marketing teams drive demand and growth in their companies by delivering exceptional experiences in concert with sales at every stage of the customer journey.

The challenge these teams face is that everyone today expects a personalized experience whenever they interact with a company - they don’t have patience for generic marketing and the last thing they want is a cold call from sales. So to stay competitive, marketing teams are scrambling to understand customers better, so they can give them a better experience, because this is disrupting entire industries. And a big part of what’s needed is figuring out how marketing and sales can do a better job together.

Adobe Marketo Engage aims to redefine Marketing Automation by helping these companies bring together the customer data, content, automation and analytics needed for marketing and sales to coordinate engagement with customers that’s personalized and measurable at every touchpoint - and do it with efficiency and scale.

Adobe Marketo Engage Features

Email & Online Marketing Features

  • Supported: WYSIWYG email editor
  • Supported: Dynamic content
  • Supported: Ability to test dynamic content
  • Supported: Landing pages
  • Supported: A/B testing
  • Supported: Mobile optimization
  • Supported: Email deliverability reporting
  • Supported: List management
  • Supported: Triggered drip sequences

Lead Management Features

  • Supported: Lead nurturing automation
  • Supported: Lead scoring and grading
  • Supported: Data quality management
  • Supported: Automated sales alerts and tasks

Campaign Management Features

  • Supported: Calendaring
  • Supported: Event/webinar marketing

Social Media Marketing Features

  • Supported: Social sharing and campaigns

Reporting & Analytics Features

  • Supported: Dashboards
  • Supported: Standard reports
  • Supported: Custom reports

Platform & Infrastructure Features

  • Supported: API
  • Supported: Role-based workflow & approvals
  • Supported: Customizability
  • Supported: Integration with Salesforce.com
  • Supported: Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  • Supported: Integration with SugarCRM

Adobe Marketo Engage Screenshots

Screenshot of Marketo Lead Scoring - Marketo dynamically scores leads in real-time and can trigger a timely sales call based on website or other activity. Lead scores are integrated with a connected CRM.Screenshot of Marketo Moments - A mobile app designed to deliver timely, actionable insights.Screenshot of Simple or advanced workflows, built using drag-and-dropScreenshot of Lead nurturing can be performed without having to be a programmerScreenshot of Visualizations - display the revenue influence of each program and channelScreenshot of Marketo Sales Insight, which filters out the noiseScreenshot of All areas of the platform can be accessed in one placeScreenshot of Automated field mapping which begins after entering login credentials

Adobe Marketo Engage Video

Engagement Platform: Marketing Automation

Adobe Marketo Engage Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Oracle Marketing, HubSpot Marketing Hub, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are common alternatives for Adobe Marketo Engage.

Reviewers rate Integration with Salesforce.com highest, with a score of 9.1.

The most common users of Adobe Marketo Engage are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(2599)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(726-750 of 1130)
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March 28, 2018

Marketo User

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our marketing team is currently using the Marketo platform on a daily/weekly basis. We use Marketo for our lead nurturing programs, email design/scheduling/automation, and lead database.
  • Database management
  • Lead nurturing
  • Email scheduling
  • I found the learning curve to get comfortable with using Marketo to be quite difficult
  • Functionality isn't as intuitive as you'd expect
It's a global solution and can be scaled and customized to fit a diverse set of needs.
Nichole Ekkert-Vine | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is being used by SurveyMonkey as a whole, but I use Marketo in a smaller role for SurveyMonkey Apply. For SurveyMonkey Apply, Marketo helps us keep track of leads, save time contacting leads, and measuring the success of our email marketing campaigns. It also helps us intake lead information with the ability to host forms on our website that redirect into Marketo. This way, all of our inbound lead information is kept in one space.
  • Marketo is great for email campaigns! Easy to customize with either text or HTML, and easy to set your audience, send time and preferences.
  • I find the Salesforce integration really helpful. With the integration, we can target very specific leads based on their activities in Salesforce alone.
  • Marketo has a very accurate way of tracking leads that come through your website when you're using a Marketo form. This helps us draw clear findings that we can trust.
  • I found Marketo quite difficult to pick up. The tool itself is so incredibly powerful, but not overly user friendly. It can be intimidating at times.
  • The way you save and sort data in Marketo isn't always the clearest. Since they use a typical folder system, things can get lost or easily dragged into the wrong spot.
  • We have a lot of data stored in Marketo, and sometimes it takes a few seconds longer than you'd like to load information. The processing can take some time.
Marketo is great if you're looking to manage lead data and information, send out an email blast, or schedule emails to go out in a campaign. Marketo is not however the best tool to use if you're working with an inbound sales team who needs to be involved in the emails you are sending and have a say in which prospects get emails. Email campaigns are extremely helpful, however right now our inbound team has no way of taking prospects out of a campaign. If something needs to be done in Marketo, the marketing team needs to assist since it's not intuitive enough for an everyday user to pick up.
Sule Arifagaoglu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is often used in my organization by marketers and sales development representative (SDRs). We don't have scoring in place because we have adapted an account based marketing approach.

Marketers creates their email campaigns, webinars etc. SDRs use the sales insight plug-in in their Outlook, and we track their activities with this add-on.

We should give more and more value to nurture programs.
  • Great tool when compared to other marketing automation tools
  • Community page is really good - I always check the community before opening up a case, and most of the time find the answer!
  • SSL Team is great! Karl Schneider and his team are excllent!
  • Power of Smart Campaigns!
  • Horrible Customer Success team, you guys are really lucky to have great product but I strongly suggest you to address .
  • I always need to send 2 emails (most of the time 3 emails) to remind them to get back to me. Generally, they don't get back to my emails which isn't pleasant customer experience while a c-level person waits for an answer. It is not good
  • You need to put together different kinds of training sessions
I love marketo because I (mainly :) ) can figure it out how to use it. Marketo usage will be defined by your business needs. This is the beauty of it.
Kris Winter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Marketo for one of our client partners.
  • I guess it works great if you use Salesforce CRM
  • Marketo is only for those companies that are Salesforce CRM users. They do not support any other CRMS. If you're not using a CRM at all or if it's not Salesforce, you need to try another marketing automation platform. Do NOT let a Marketo sales person tell you there are easy integrations for other CRM's because there are not.
  • Marketo is only for very large enterprise organizations that have both large marketing and IT departments to manage the work it takes to use the software successfully.
  • Marketo also requires prior experience with another platform as their platform is not intuitive for the first time user. On-boarding was terrible the the first time; we expressed our disappointment, so we were giving another opportunity. The second on-boarding was better, but that was the end of any customer support.
  • We now hear from someone at Marketo only when it's time to renew the contract. We've spent so much time and outside consulting dollars to get up to speed, it has been hard to leave.
I recommend Marketo only if you are using Salesforce and have a large support team.
Travis Johnson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're currently using Marketo within the marketing department primarily. Our sales team accesses Marketo information through the Interesting Moments module in Salesforce, but our Marketing Operations team are essentially the only ones who are in Marketo on a day to day basis. I am in Marketo every day for campaign building, maintenance, and ROI reporting.
  • Lead tracking - there are lots of useful reports that enable a user to get many views of how leads progress through single programs or overall. I always track lead lifecycles, revenue stages, and engagement rates right from various Marketo reports within the programs themselves.
  • Program performance reporting - I use Revenue Cycle Explorer a lot and have gathered a ton of useful data from it. You can get very creative in terms of comparing programs, looking at ROI, and many other types of reports.
  • Scalability - We have increased our marketing activity by a significant amount over the past 18 months and we've been able to evolve our Marketo instance to support numerous additional webinar, live event, tradeshow, email, and other programs each month.
  • Pulling larger lists - I find Salesforce a lot quicker and efficient to use when needing to pull a large list of leads or accounts. There are times in Marketo where it can take a length of time to pull larger lists whereas in Salesforce it's usually instantaneous.
  • Form design - I've found Marketo Forms 2.0 to be very useful, but I think it could be more customizable in terms of form design. This is probably a pretty narrow example, but we recently were trying to make a two-column form with progressive profiling and found that there wasn't a built-in way to do that. Again, very useful form system overall but some room for improvement here and there.
I've found that as our company has grown and started implementing more and more marketing activities, Marketo has become the more apparent correct solution for our needs. I think when I first started at my company the total cost of ownership for Marketo was probably a bit high for what we were trying to accomplish, but as we've scaled upward Marketo's scalability has been a great asset to us.
February 14, 2018

Marks for Marketo

Dina Flees | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use marketo for nurture campaigns to leads in order to provide warm leads to our sales team. It is mainly the marketing department that uses it but we are working to bring in communications from other departments so that all our correspondences will be in one system. By implementing Marketo we now have a 360 view of leads and contacts activities and can see what assets are performing well.
  • Marketo does a great bod of tracking a leads activity. You can see what they have done and in what order and track their behavior easily.
  • It is very simple and easy to segment your audience and only talk to the exact people you want to. So targeting emails is very convenient.
  • The new Email 2.0 format is great. It is very nice to have a build your own email bar. You can have one long master template and decide what elements you want in each email. This allows for all the emails to have common elements, but each one can be tailored to your needs.
  • Sending emails to one person is a bit of a challenge. You have to create an entire campaign just to send it to one person, which is a lot of work.
  • If you want to create dynamic content you have to segment your audience. You can only have 20 segments in your system. So if you want to make something dynamic you have to use something that is limited. So if you just want to segment off of being a sponsor that might not be something that you always need. So it feels like a waste and lots of extra work to do it.
  • Logic and filtering can be repetitive. You cannot keep logic saved for repetitive use. You have to create new logic every time. this can lead to silly mistakes and take up lots of time.
Marketo is great if you use Salesforce and have reliable data. This will allow for easy setup and use. Making segments or targeting emails to specific audiences will be easy to set up and use. However, if you use a CRM other than Salesforce or if your data is dirty Marketo will be a bit cumbersome. If you have to do list uploads it will take away lots of functionality and automation that make Marketo a great choice.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Marketo to run our lifecycle email programs and send other one-off email communications. We also maintain our lead database in Marketo. This helps us maintain our engagement strategy with clients.
  • Marketo email editor makes it easy to make changes
  • Marketo holds large files that often can't be hosted on our content sites.
  • Marketo database is a blackhole - it's really hard to know what is going on. And the data is not always up to date, which makes it hard to trust the information in the system.
  • Marketo support is terrible. I have submitted 4 cases in the past 3 months and none of them have been resolved. I've always ended up resolving them myself after trying to get the technical engineer's attention.
  • Email functionality is relatively low. I cannot set up simple A/B tests or set up automated sending easily.
Marketo may be better suited for a B2B company without much sophistication.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo has been integral is helping our organization effectively utilize marketing automation to target prospects and engage customers. Through Marketo, we have been able to see an increase in our click through rate as well as increased web traffic to our site. Marketo is also a huge part of the success of our sales team through using the Sales Insight functionality to stay engaged with their customers and stay up to date on the latest solution offerings.
  • Marketing Automation
  • Analytics
  • Lead Database
  • Sales Engagement
  • Accessibility
  • Ease of use
  • Downtime
Marketo is great for lead database management, as well as email and nurture campaigns and engagement with your sales team. Marketo may not be ideal for super small businesses that only have a couple hundreds leads with no need to for nurturing.
Sarah Mayer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is being used mainly by our Marketing department and enables the Sales department. We use it mainly for email marketing and tracking intent data activity. We also use the Analytics tool to measure how our emails are performing, we pass activity data to Salesforce, and we analyze our Blog activity.
  • Lead segmentation, dynamically placing contacts in appropriate groups
  • Email marketing automated workflows
  • Tracking web activity
  • Inbound strategy
  • Analytics is very basic, needs more capabilities without buying a whole separate platform
  • Tracking where leads come from
It's best for mid-to-large businesses who utilize email marketing heavily. In conjunction with Salesforce, you can get great insights into your database. I would not recommend this product for small businesses, as it can be quite robust.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is used by our marketing team to empower our sales team. Marketo provides us with the tools to market effectively via email, social, digital and events. We fuel our instance with a seamless SalesForce integration.
  • Automated email nurturing
  • Lead funnel targeting and analysis
  • Robust backend functionality
  • UX/UI
  • Data management
  • Third party integrations
Marketo is well suited for a detailed and robust marketing operation that thrives on targeted data. Marketo shouldn't be used by marketers simply looking to send emails.
January 30, 2018

Marketo for the Win!

Kenzi Stewart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We're using Marketo for all of our marketing needs: drip campaigns, prospect and client scoring, etc.
  • Retaining client information
  • Love the landing pages! Super easy to build and customize.
  • N/A
Marketo is highly customizable, and basically has everything anyone could ever want in a marketing platform. They provide great support and training. If you're new to marketing platforms, this may not be the best option for you.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Marketo across our entire organization. We use it to send automated emails, publish landing pages, host files, sync data to Salesforce, and manage our lead process.
  • Workflow capabilities through smart campaigns with robust logic
  • Program attribution and capturing lead source data
  • Customization of fields, workflows, programs, and other assets including dynamic content and personalization that is easy to use
  • User interface is not very user-friendly
  • Audit trail sometimes lacking and difficult to see what objects may be connected and how
Marketo is a robust marketing automation tool for any enterprise in need of complex rules, comprehensive lead management, and a supported integration with a CRM tool. We integrate ours with Salesforce and use Marketo’s capabilities to add lead source information to Salesforce for our sales team. We also use it to qualify our leads through Marketo’s lead scoring to send them to the sales team at the right time.
Jordan Roach | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is used across the marketing department. My team uses it mostly to sync with campaigns from salesforce, catch leads, store images, and create landing pages and emails. I'm sure other departments are using it for other things, but that's what I primarily use it for. It helps automate a lot of things - I can schedule email sends to certain lists and not have to think about it. I also can schedule reminder emails and confirmation emails that send automatically. It also lets me use third parties to get registrants and syncs with other software. I love it.
  • Marketo makes creating emails really easy. I don't have to hard-code them (but I can if I want to) and I can brand them and send them out as if I were sending it and not Marketo. Because of all the images and files that Marketo can store, I can use any image I want to in my emails. I use our logo as well as speaker photos to really enhance our emails and make them look professional.
  • Campaigns are easy to create, and it's fairly easy to set up complex logic on the campaigns.
  • Easy to create landing pages. You don't have to hard code anything and it's also nice because you can brand the page, customize the URL, and connect it to other software. I connect mine to ON24 so that when people register on Marketo, it shows up in ON24.
  • Marketo has had a few issues since I've used it. Sometimes emails don't go out.
  • It can be easy to miss a step on campaign logic and have the entire thing not work. A lot of that is due to human error, but it's easy to miss things.
  • I honestly don't have much more bad to say about Marketo. I haven't had many issues with it.
It is best to use Marketo when you need to track email sends, opens, and campaigns that need to sync with other software. I also think it's best to use on a big scale - in a scenario where an entire department or company can use it. I would say that it's too complex to use as just an email platform or just by a few people.
January 09, 2018

Marketo Review

Kara Pietrykowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have used Marketo as Marketing Automation Manager in my current role and previous role. Currently I work in real estate industry and previously I worked in the software industry. Marketo is used by both companies to support the marketing campaign activities across the organisation and used for lead generation, lead nurturing, customer acquisition and nurturing and to give real time insight and metrics on marketing campaign activities and investment.
  • User interface is easy to understand and very minimal distractions.
  • Email 2.0 templates and modules - great for marketer who does not have coding background or a developer on hand.
  • Marketo Community site is a great platform for finding documentation, networking with users and other users are always helpful in answering questions and discussions.
  • That all campaign assets, logic and reports are all under the one program and not in different areas/sections of the product
  • Documentation for new features can follow the availability of features which is a little frustrating.
  • Melbourne User Group is quarterly and it would be great if this could be held more often, eg every 8 weeks.
Marketo is a world-leader in marketing automation space with over a decade of development and improvements. Marketo has been designed for B2B businesses but is adding functionality to support B2C engagements especially social media. Marketo works well with Salesforce in terms of bi-directional data synching and the Marketing Sales Insight module. Marketo has a wealth of functionality that marketing can take advantage of to improve their prospect and customer engagement and should not be considered as just an EDM tool.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
For many of our customers, and for ourselves, Marketo serves as the central hub for all marketing efforts. It provides us with in-depth, cross-channel insights and data that we weren't able to aggregate efficiently in the past.
  • Connects cross-channel marketing initiatives to provide a full picture of the customer journey.
  • It "listens" to customer behaviors cross-channel and provides triggering capabilities.
  • It allows for easy measurement of program success.
  • Their reporting isn't extremely customizable.
It's an amazing tool if the cost is justifiable.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My former company was in the process of rolling out Marketo when I joined and 3 years later, I'm now in my new role, helping implement the platform, train marketers on usage, help guide program development and build workflows based on business needs. Although the L2RM strategy is no stranger to the U.S. market, my current employer is based in the Europe and marketing automation is still being adopted throughout and understood throughout. With my company's recent shift to L2RM, we really needed the right infrastructure in place to support the entire organization and Marketo really solves about 90% of the needs that were brought up in planning stages such as how to become a more data-driven organization, how to put metrics behind marketing programs, how to ensure sales executives are making the best use of their time by following up on leads that are ready to engage, how to better gauge how much interest our content is producing and how to attribute deals that are won to the correct place. Marketo isn't just an email service provider. It's really a one-stop shop for so much and their robust partner community really makes it easy to continue building your MarTech and scaling your business to take over the world.
  • Scores leads according to your business and so your team can focus on closing and winning the accounts that are ready to engage further
  • Marketing can really personalize outreach with robust and advanced segmentation capabilities
  • Analytics is top-notch so you can keep a pulse on attribution, ROI, database changes etc...
  • Marketo ABM was a real pain-point for me. We paid A LOT of money for a feature that was barely more valuable than what we already had with the standard Marketo package.
I think Marketo really shines in a B2B environment. It really gives you robust capabilities to do a variety of marketing and sales functions for companies in a variety of stages of growth.
Loren Posendek | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Marketo is key to many departments across our organization - marketing, sales and customer success. It provides real-time information that's shared with our marketing and sales teams for maximum engagement. Specifically, Marketo's lead management, qualification and sales insight capabilities allow us to route records in a timely manner to the appropriate team. We also utilize Marketo webhooks for a plethora of data management initiatives, lead generation tactics and more.
  • Lead Management + Nurturing. Marketo Engagement Programs are truly the gold standard for lead nurturing. In addition, the ability to create unique workflows that route leads appropriately is subpar from its competitors.
  • Data Management. Marketo smart lists really set the bar as far as slicing and dicing data. They're easily the most valuable Marketo feature. Combine this with Marketo tokens that are easily used to update and append data, it really sets Marketo apart from other MAPs.
  • Marketo Community + Support. Marketo support is not only helpful, but they respond in a relatively timely manner. I often find myself browsing the Marketo Community to research a new program and/or troubleshoot. The self-discovery of the Marketo Community is wonderful!
  • Marketo's lead scoring tool isn't the most robust in the industry. It gets the job done for most organizations, but could be much more robust.
  • System Performance. Lately, the system has been less reliable. There have been a few outages, but overall not a true 'con.'
Marketo is by far the best marketing automation platform in the industry. Its interface, robust data management and integration with multiple systems makes it a leader. It's suitable for organizations of all sizes - large and small. It's an investment, but well worth the investment. Though all features may not be used the same by every organization, it's adaptable.
Aslihan Ayan Harvell, Marketo Certified Expert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have been a Marketo user since 2012. The tool was brought by my previous employer and initially used to replace the ESP, however the tool provided much more than that. I have used the tool with the other organizations I worked in. The most significant impact is to align our sales organization with our marketing efforts. Marketo opens the conversation within the organization and standardizes the taxonomy used in the lead lifecycle. The common terminology improves not only the internal communication but also impacts the reporting and insights. Now you know where to put your marketing budget and how to support sales to increase your ROI.
  • Revenue Model: Aligning your lead lifecycle journey with your marketing efforts.
  • RTP (Real Time Personalization): Providing content and ads that align with your persona and their lifecycle stage.
  • Community: You need answers to your challenges, Marketo users and employees are there to help.
  • Revenue Explorer: The analytics capability can be improved. There are limitations around the power of the report.
  • Currency: Marketo does not support multiple currencies. For global organizations this is a challenge.
Before you embark into marketing automation, you need to make sure you have the content to support.
December 21, 2017

Marketo Review

Carol Foote | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is being used by the marketing department for all marketing campaigns as well as across the whole company. Marketo does not address problems for us because we have been using it since the beginning, there never was a problem to address.
  • Out-of-the-box nurture programs that are easy to use and work well.
  • Automated Sales Alerts. Allow us to enable our sales team with what is happening with our customers and prospects.
  • Lead Scoreing - behavioural and demographics lead scoring that allows us to save leads until they are sales ready before we send them to the sales team.
  • More Out Of the Box Reporting - Reporting could be improved. There is so much data we can get out of Marketo, but not often have to export to work with it.
  • System can be slow at times. Speed could be improved.
Marketo is perfect for managing and sending email campaigns. Also great for lead scoring and lead nurturing. Not well suited for cominications that require a personal individual touch.
Carey Picklesimer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Teams from the marketing department log into Marketo and use it on a daily basis, but the information is shared extensively within the Sales and Operations departments.
  • Unlimited options for creating automation - from simple auto-responders to complex lead routing rules
  • Nurturing programs using the engagement engine. There is no other platform on the market that offers out-of-the-box nurturing programs that function so well.
  • Tools that help bridge the gap between the marketing and sales teams, such as sales insights, automated sales alerts, lead scoring and interesting moments
  • Very active user community which includes the Marketo Community forum for asking and answering questions, in-person event and the annual Summit
  • Vastly updated training and support documentation
  • Steep learning curve - Because Marketo is so customizable, it also means that it can be hard to learn and get running quickly.
  • Can be challenging to maintain well - Because of the steep learning curve and the open options to build it from scratch, it is also easy to create automation that are cumbersome and slow the system down. It requires an intelligent, experienced marketer to truly run it effectively.
  • Adequate reporting, but room for improvement - There is a ton of data within Marketo, but often you'll need to export the information you need to Excel to truly present it in a usable format to management
I've been a Marketo user for nearly five years and am a huge advocate. Marketo is well suited to growing SMBs or enterprise-level organizations that understand their marketing goals and how marketing automation will help get them there. I have seen businesses struggle to make Marketo work for them if they don't have their off-line practices squared away, such as the lead lifecycle or a good understanding of how to nurture. Marketo is not as user-friendly out of the box which is why smaller companies may not find it as useful. There is no limit to what Marketo can do, so it can be a powerful tool if you have a strong marketing strategy.
Anthony Figgins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is the Hub for all our marketing efforts. We leverage Marketo to capture leads, capture activity, and push alerts to those who need them. We use Marketo for Marketing, Sales and Customer Success communication and tracking. All of our efforts circle around the capabilities of Marketo. For example, we run direct mail campaigns for sales that include activity tracking and engagement. We also utilize it for building our NPS program, Customer onboarding, customer renewal and training needs.
  • Listens to activity and reacts to it. We are able to build programs that are based on lack of activity, or actions that help the user move along the journey and do not get left behind.
  • Follows the lead across the funnel that alerts those who need it and maintains SLA's with Marketing and Sales.
  • Helps the Marketing team understand what makes a qualified lead and gives tools to adjust the definition.
  • Connects to other tools through various ways to allow a seamless mar-tech stack.
  • The landing page experience needs to be more flexible as they are still more or less static. We are able to code as needed, however, it does require a developer to build a template and even then they have limitations.
  • Needs to open up some of the processes to allow for more robust workflows
  • Custom Objects are great, however not being able to update them via workflows or forms is a miss.
I look at Marketo as a mid sized organization Marketing Automation tool. Once you get into the Enterprise level you start to run into issues if you try to host everything under one instance. I am seeing more companies use multiple instances of Marketo to help clean up the business units and activity across the organization.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is primarily used by our Marketing team to solve many issues. These include understanding the lead lifecycle, scoring, behaviors of leads, ROI of various activities, and reporting. The goal of us purchasing Marketo was to have better campaign management, consistent marketing content (through emails/outreaches), and use automation to change lead scores based on their behavior so that the email alert functionality could enable our internal sales folks to better address hand-raises/demo requests from marketing-driven leads online.
  • Marketo configures and automates lead scoring well, in that we are able to track lead behavior and associate scores with particular behaviors so that our sales team can address the needs of the highest scoring leads instead of wasting their time picking out what they subjectively believe to be "important" leads.
  • Marketo defines the lead lifecycle and the status of leads before, during, and after engagement with our company/website/products.
  • Marketo has an excellent organizational aspect to it - folders are used heavily by our team and Marketo has the ability to organize campaigns, operational activities, etc. in a visually understandable way.
  • There are sometimes too many campaigns interacting with one lead at the same time; as a result, it would be great if Marketo provided a proactive way to show us any campaigns or activities or triggers that overlap and may be performing the same function as another trigger which causes slow data or data queues to occur.
  • The level of support is sometimes poor because we use Salesforce among many other services/products, and the Marketo support team only works out of Marketo, so explaining the interaction between a Marketo process and Salesforce data/processes is difficult when the Marketo support team can't gain access into Salesforce.
  • Many times the Marketo instance we have moves too slowly - wait time for a lead or contact to change something about its record by Marketo can be upwards of 20 minutes, and trying to figure out how to shorten this time was painful when working with the Marketo support team who didn't know how our instance was interacting with 10+ other lead/contact-related systems.
Marketo is well suited if you have the funds to support the product as well as access to their support team. It's also well suited for organizations with more than one Salesforce admin (or whomever acts as the administrator for business systems) because there's a lot of knowledge to gain prior to using Marketo and it can be a lot if there is only one admin for all of the business systems.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Marketo is used across various divisions of my organization to generate leads and personalize content to deliver relevant information to the user. As different arms of the org. have different platforms, implementation is not wide-spread.
  • Marketo is fairly easy to use, designed for non-technical users in mind. With little training, a user with a digital background should be able to get started building campaigns and targeting users. I say this though as a technical user, so my view may be clouded.
  • The out of the box lifecycle management does everything that a user should need to get started to take a user from a lead to a customer.
  • The automation inherent to the platform will save your organization time. Put the time in to building the right campaigns and the right automation, and you will benefit long-term.
  • Smaller teams may need to partner with someone as while there is much within the war chest, to really unlock the potential of Marketo you need to build much from scratch.
  • Editors for emails and landing pages are pretty basic. If your design team has a strict eye or specific branding needs, it could be difficult for you to achieve it with what they have set if you elect to use the editor.
  • Tracking is weak and not a suitable alternative to GA data, in fact I would not recommend even looking at it. I would instead ensure you have proper tracking set for GA, or another analytics platform.
Marketo is best suited for a company with multiple resources to support it: design, development, and marketing. To really make it worth your organization's dollar, this is the only way. A marketer alone cannot make this transformative tool alone, or if they did, it would be their full-time job and in an industry where automation has not caught on.
Ashish Tewari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Marketo across the entire organization, all regions and product lines. It's primarily used for:
1. Email marketing: as a single source of all records data including email id and optin status, plus tracking email campaign performance.
2. Lead generator: this is applied in both creating landing pages for email campaigns (and others) and also forms to be used on websites.
3. Lead scorer: to rate and evaluate individual leads based on activity and data gathered.
4. Lead assigner: run programs to identify use cases for each lead and assign to appropriate Salesforce programs / users accordingly.
  • Complex programs that are easy to build
  • Easy asset creation - forms, landing pages, emails, etc
  • Global access and compatibility across a variety of sites / platforms
  • Excellent support
  • Boolean if-then-else functions are a big missing piece in program building - without these, we are forced to translate into sequential choices
  • Cookie based parameters have been hard to implement and do not coexist with parametric urls
  • Form customization (eg. responsive embeds, inherited css properties) is difficult, and templated forms would be great in places where we frequently reuse
It's expensive, so obviously not meant for smaller SMEs. Ideal for automation (obviously) in terms of nurture programs and scenario identification, but not a full CRM (i.e. once a lead is responded to, you also need to have a Salesforce-type CRM which can be used to assign leads) rather than within marketo itself. It's not smart enough to run heuristic identification, so you have to be very exact - eg. USA and U.S.A would be considered different things. Be prepared to do some really, really deep and extensive preplanning before setup to avoid messing up your data - it's immensely powerful, so a high risk of carelessness having very far-reaching consequences.
Romy Ribitzky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Marketo for lead generation, prospect and customer nurturing. Marketo helps us stay in touch with our marketable community at scale with personalized messages.
  • Marketo allows us to stay in touch with prospects and customers using personalized messages.
  • Marketo allows us to track interactions with different content types to quantify ROI.
  • Marketo allows us to send multiple elements of a campaign by engaging with users who engage with us and enabling us to reach those who aren't engaged in a different method.
  • Marketo's lead scoring tool leaves much to be desired. This is especially true with the rise of bots clicking within assets and emails. Rules are difficult to set up and get around ever more clever technologies set up to outsmart marketing automation.
  • The interface is not user-friendly or intuitive. Setting up our instance was laborious and making changes often requires a developer, Marketo premiere support, and outside contractors.
  • Marketo's premiere support is not knowledgable about the product, often gives incorrect information and downgrades tickets to make it seem as if it responds within the SLAs required.
Marketo is well suited for enterprise marketing teams who have multiple resources to address marketing automation, including developers, strategists, and those who will execute campaigns. It is easy to see why some of the largest brands use this tool. However, for smaller teams who need to be nimble and affect change for their marketing departments, Marketo is a clunky email marketing tool that is difficult to navigate and control.
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