Marketo LOVES its Customers and We Love Marketo
Updated November 05, 2015

Marketo LOVES its Customers and We Love Marketo

Kristi Eide | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Standard

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management
  • Marketo Sales Insight

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

  • Lead scoring - allows you to track behavior based on specific web page visits and score by product interest
  • Lead Generation- forms are used to build, use, and implement to draw in anonymous leads and turn them into known leads that you can score and contact down the road
  • Build campaigns and engagement streams- Marketo makes it easy to build campaigns and nurture/engage with your customer throughout the product life cycle.
  • Drag and Drop functionality- easy to build campaigns, associate costs, connect with webinar adapters, etc. You do not need an IT background to run this tool.
  • Analytics are a little limited in their ability to pull the needed information. Often times I use mutliple tools to get the information I need.
  • Reports/lists/etc. can take a while to run... needs faster processing time (though I hear this is a work in progress).
  • New member leads by acquisition program and the cost to acquire new leads
  • The number of anonymous leads vs. known leads over time and the cost to accumulate these
Eloqua, Pardot - We picked Marketo b/c of it's integration with SF, it's lead management tools, the features the system offered, and the price.
Marketo takes EXCELLENT care of its customers. They really make you feel special. And they are constantly innovating and at the forefront of technology. I would absolutely recommend Marketo to anyone out there who is looking at Marketing Automation systems. You will not be sorry!

Using Marketo

10 - We have 2 admins, one for each major division for our company, some Jr. admins who do many of the same functions, and also our sales team, who use a pretty basic version of the software to track behavioral patterns of the leads they are interested in.
3 - The admins are the ones who support the entire system. It does take a decent percentage of our time, but considering the size of our system, 3 people is a very low number and it is very manageable. One admin spends 100% of her time on Marketo, I spend about 60% of my time, and another admin spends only about 20% of her time on Marketo (mostly overseeing legalities of using the system).
  • Lead generation
  • Lead scoring
  • Product Scoring
  • Product Applications
  • New member acquisition by programs
  • New member cost
  • Initially, we never planned to use the system to segment out users who speak different languages so that we could target emails based on region and language, but now we send separate Spanish-translated emails to customers in Spanish speaking countries.
  • Marketo has social add-on buttons that make sharing things via Social networks (Facebook, Twitter) incredibly easy. You are also able to see who shares your information with other users. In 2010 when we first started using Marketo, we weren't even thinking about the social aspect of the system.
  • The GoToWebinar adapter that Marketo added in 2012 was a great addition- we now can have all webinar registrants fill out Marketo forms, rather than GoToWebinar forms, to participate in webinars. This streamlines the process and allows us to score points much easier since everything is running from one system.
  • Down the road we may integrate with a translation service of some sort to even further translate emails into various languages based on user preferences- right now we use in-house translators to do any translation services, and advanced segmentation to send the proper emails to the proper users.
  • We are just getting started with engagement streams (helps move customers through early, mid, late stage cycles during the buying process). Once a customers has exhausted all content from a certain engagement stream (say it's beginner stage) and they hit a set threshold (you set the threshold- let's say it's 'views 7 web pages in 1 week) they move into the mid-buying stage engagement stream (content catered to late-stage buyers). This has a lot of potential, we just need to generate and segment all of the content that we would like to use!
We will absolutely, without a doubt, continue to renew. We love Marketo.

Evaluating Marketo and Competitors

Yes - We previously had Vertical Response, but this system had no way to target and segment users, so every email sent from our company had to go out to all customers. This was very bad for increasing unsubscribe rates because the content was not specific for each user. Our unsubscribe rates have dropped greatly after switching to Marketo. Vertical Response did not have the ability to sync with Salesforce or to lead/product score users, both things that Marketo does exceptionally well.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
We needed a seamless SalesForce integration, the ability to score based on products and overall lead score, the ability to send alerts to sales once we hit certain pre-determined thresholds, and a way to analyze and track customers.
As you increase your knowledge of automation systems you know better which questions to ask. I would still base it on the same questions and factors, but I would look harder into the learning curve for using the system, ease of the user interface and reporting. I would still choose Marketo though!

Marketo Implementation

Think long and hard about how you want your background programs/campaigns to run (those that score people who come to your site- what scores you give them, what campaigns you bucket people into, etc.) These form the basis of your system and are not necessarily easy to change down the road because it can mess up your overall company analytics, so make sure you have a well thought-out solid plan in place before you begin to achieve maximum success.

Marketo Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
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.
Great training system- mostly just a matter of setting aside the time to get in there and learn the system.

Configuring Marketo

As Marketo grows in popularity, the company is constantly releasing updates and new features to allow the "older" users to continue growing with the product. For new users, there is plenty to get you up and running and TONS for you to grow into as your business matures with the product. The constant innovation is what keeps current Marketo users happy and long-term customers.

Marketo Support

Timely response and they ensure the issue is solved. More than one issue has been taken to an engineer to find an answer that the support rep couldn't resolve on their own. I appreciate this.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - We have standard support and I have never been disappointed with the response time. It is very timely.
Yes - Yes, Marketo likes to know when certain updates produce unexpected bugs in the system and is very timely about getting these resolved. The most common bugs do seem to come around product updates/releases, and they are usually small, quirky bugs that normally you wouldn't notice. Every time we have reported one it has been resolved in a few days.

Using Marketo

It does have a small learning curve, but the more you are in the product the easier it is to run. Compared to other products which needed someone who had a coding background, or an IT background, this product is an A+.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Drag and drop functionality for targeting lists based on filters, for creating landing pages and forms, and email creation.
  • The most difficult part about using Marketo is knowing how you are using your fields and data in SalesForce. Because we have everything flowing back and forth and our Sales team mainly uses Marketo, you must have a great understanding of how they are using SF contact/lead objects in order to pull the right fields for Marketo forms, scoring, etc. For maximum effectiveness, have your Marketo admin work closely with the sales team and SF admin and get a great understanding of that system before pulling and targeting lists in SF. This was very effective for us!
Yes - I rarely use it, except at tradeshows where we use it on an ipad for lead generation. In those aspects it has worked well.

Marketo Reliability

This is literally never an issue.
Pulling large lists takes more time than I think it should.. .sometimes loading emails, images, and other screens can take a decent amount of time.

Integrating Marketo

  • SalesForce
Our systems are very integrated and we have had success with this integration. It was pretty straight-forward. I would say the biggest hang-ups come with trying to integrate custom Marketo fields with custom objects in SF. We struggle with this a little bit, but are making positive headway. An out-of-the-box, or slightly customized SF instance will easily integrate with Marketo.
  • Google Analytics
Probably not- I am probably dreaming on that one :)

Relationship with Marketo

Again, I wasn't involved so I will not comment.