Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

[Adobe] Marketo [Engage] serves us as a place to collect and store leads, nurture them in a personalized manner, and assign them scores based on their demographic and behavioral characteristics. It is also a place for all email marketing activities and resources. Overall, Marketo is an integral part of our B2B marketing software ecosystem, everything else is built around and on top of it.

Pros and Cons

Super flexible for setting up campaigns or any ad hoc actions with leads
Integrates well with other software via web-hooks
Detailed logging of user activities on your website
Out-of-the box Salesforce integration
Allows to build any workflow on top of it

UI is very slow, and visually it's a thing from the 90s
Customer support is terrible, super slow and not willing to help
Pricing grows quickly with 6-9% uplifts year over year
Downtimes happen often, though they're usually short

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

Product Launches
Upsell
Cross-Sell
Lead Management

Our main use case for [Adobe] Marketo [Engage] is to capture the leads early in the buying cycle and keep them interested over the long term by sending them automated email chains (drip nurtures) with personalized content (by industry, job type, language). We also score leads based on their activities and supply them to salespeople. For this purpose, we've received positive reviews. Also, we're upselling to current customers based on their interests using the same technique. It also worked well, based on [the] specifics of our products.

Alternatives Considered

Pardot, Mailchimp, eSputnik and HubSpot Marketing Hub

[Adobe] Marketo [Engage] is one of the most expensive tools, but it wins thanks to its flexibility. Most of the other tools have a lot of pre-built functionality that [Adobe] Marketo [Engage] doesn't. [Adobe] Marketo [Engage] has the building blocks for you to build it yourself. But since these building blocks are exposed, you can build literally anything, and much more than these tools have.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

100,000 to 250,000

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Key Insights

Do you think Adobe Marketo Engage delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Adobe Marketo Engage's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Marketo Engage live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Adobe Marketo Engage go as expected?

Would you buy Adobe Marketo Engage again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

It would work really well if you're looking for a truly customizable solution for B2B, with a focus on email marketing. The best thing is that you can really do anything with Marketo - it depends on how much effort you want to commit. Also, it's really convenient that the data can easily be thrown into Salesforce - so that salespeople can see the activity of leads on the website. This integration is really quick to set up. On the flip side, there's not much for social media integrations and support. You have to work around your own solutions. It's mostly focused on email. The analytics bit is scarce, we preferred to download the activity logs and analyze them on our own side. The SEO part is not strong, it's better to use specialized tools. Also, the learning curve for average marketers may be higher than with other tools.

Flexible and powerful, coming at a cost to buy and implement

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Marketo Engage