The user interface is not user friendly. There are icons that are in the interface that have no hover definitions, so users do not know what the icons are for.
Usability is a real strength. It is very easy to learn and train others on the system. The UI is quite intuitive, especially for anyone who already uses SFDC.
Most marketers can learn to use Marketo quickly for daily tasks like getting an email out or building a webinar system. However, there are a lot of steps involved, so people tend to say that Marketo isn't "easy" for that reason. A good Marketo Expert can take away alot of those steps for daily use.
Marketo can do a lot, and I think it is amazing at what it does. That being said, it is a beast to learn and take full advantage of! Even more than a year later, I feel like I am barely scratching the surface of some capabilities. It is difficult to master, especially if you are new to marketing engines.
The usability is super poor, even their support team has trouble helping you with it. It takes numerous clicks to accomplish simple tasks. It's so frustrating that there are several different ways to get to a certain thing, such as resizing an image or changing a font, and yet, things revert to make it hard to do this. I once spent 3 hours trying to prevent text from becoming gray every time I changed the text. Could be the worst Ux I've ever seen.
Takes some time to learn, but once you get used to it, you realize that there are many opportunities to be creative and do complex things. But, there are still many things that are difficult even for an advanced user.
I think that its a great tool, but takes a while to learn. A lot of people can be brought up to a certain level but full training is hard and takes a long time. I do think it's a great tool overall and is good to use as an Admin.
It's a robust tool that seems to be favoured by Marketing Ops practitioners than by other Marketing practitioners, which speaks to some usability issues. Robust software that has a steep learning curve.
There's a fair amount of flexibility, but as you start moving beyond the basics and get into more complex programs, it gets a bit cumbersome; for example, flexible drip campaigns that can customize / change content based on triggers after the initial start. Some way of normalizing scoring so older, less intensive users don't overshadow newer, more-intense users. Etc. For a basic setup and taking control of the user flow from contact to lead without leaks, Marketo is awesome, once you've got the core data governance and standardized processes in place. Template design is difficult - designers find it restrictive and there is a LOT of debugging needed, with finished templates sometimes behaving very oddly in some environments - adding / deleting code snippets, disabling some scripts - not enough to break it, but definitely some odd behaviors.
Marketo is best used for enterprise companies with large Marketing staffs who can attend to the multiple needs of the platform. A developer and designer are best to maximize the use of the platform.
I do believe Marketo is really intuitive and easy to use. It provides the flexibility to push the boundaries while providing the guidelines and best practices thru their community.
The use of the platform is very streamlined and therefore many things can be learned once and applied to the whole platform.
Editors for emails, form and landing pages are quite easy to use (though landing pages somewhat lags behind the other two), and offer a lot of complex possibilities in a quite user friendly package.
The platform has a lot of out-of-the-box reporting really facilitating performance analysis for non-technical users.
I have been working with Marketo for about two years and am a Marketo System Administrator (technical user) so with my experience and background I find it easy to use and navigate. However, non-technical users have a hard time using the system.
Marketo Engage 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.
The vendor states Marketo Engage redefines 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.