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My Review
Updated September 09, 2019

My Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Standard

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

My organization uses Marketo for a multitude of marketing initiatives as well as database management. Marketo is where we house all Marketing campaign structures across 3 business units and ~15 different products. We utilize the tool for customer marketing, demand generation, data de-duplication, data enrichment, lifecycle marketing, event management and so much more. It solves the problem of targeting our audiences with strategic and contextual messages that resonate with them.
  • Lead Scoring - using tokens we are able to build an extremely robust lead scoring model across different products
  • Dynamic content - we segment our database by language preference which allows us to communicate with our customers in a language they understand
  • Integrations - Marketo allows for so many integrations into their platform to allow marketers to target audiences, drive engagement and so much more in a contextual way
  • The overall organization of Marketing Activities is very confusing
  • Content management
  • Product Launches
  • Upsell
  • Cross-Sell
  • Lead Management
  • Prospecting / New Business
For product launches, upsell and cross-sell we are looking to improve customer engagement within each of our tools and to delight our customers by keeping them informed of product updates and other tools in our product-suite that may be helpful.

For lead management, we are looking to have a cleaner and more complete database. Filling the gaps with data enrichment processes and de-duping.

Prospecting/new business, we are looking to drive leads for Sales to engage with and ideally sell to.
I would say that in terms of ease of use Marketo lies right in the middle of Eloqua and HubSpot (probably closer to Eloqua). Eloqua is an extremely robust tool requiring a number of tech ops professionals to manage the tool along with marketing to run it. HubSpot is best suited for marketers just starting out in a smaller company with a small database. Marketo falls in the middle of the two, allowing for very customized programs and extremely large databases.
More than 5 million
B2B
  1. Marketo is extremely well suited for companies looking to build robust nurture programs
  2. I would not recommend Marketo to smaller companies. The tool is robust which is beneficial but is a lot to manage for 1-2 person automation teams

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

7.9
WYSIWYG email editor
5
Dynamic content
10
Ability to test dynamic content
10
Landing pages
8
A/B testing
9
Mobile optimization
1
Email deliverability reporting
9
List management
9
Triggered drip sequences
10
9.3
Lead nurturing automation
10
Lead scoring and grading
10
Data quality management
8
Automated sales alerts and tasks
9
7.0
Calendaring
5
Event/webinar marketing
9
3.5
Social sharing and campaigns
3
Social profile integration
4
8.3
Dashboards
9
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
9
8.0
API
7
Role-based workflow & approvals
Not Rated
Customizability
Not Rated
Integration with Salesforce.com
9
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

Learnings & Advice

Marketo has allowed our teams to customize communications across different audiences whether that be customer vs prospects or across different languages. This has been a game changer as we are a global company. I’ve learned also that there are many ways to accomplish the same or similar result within Marketo which gives us a range of options on how to accomplish a task.
We utilize customer objects quite heavily in Marketo. We have product subscription data that lives on these objects which allows us to target customers for one or multiple of our 15 different products. These objects also contain information regarding product usage which helps us determine which nurture/engagement paths to send someone through.
Take the time to learn the tool. Marketo is quite expansive and they are always improving it. Utilize the community as there are some very smart Marketo pros out there. If you are trying to accomplish something in Marketo and can’t figure out how, 100% chance that someone else has already figured it out. Utilize those resources!
As I said previously, the community is a great knowledge base as there are countless Marketo pros out there who have done or tried to accomplish similar tasks that you are looking to do. The community has saved me hours when I could not figure something out on my own.
Start small with simple trigger campaigns using Marketo forms and landing pages. Then move on to more advanced flow steps within your trigger campaigns. Send batch emails to a subset of your database to better understand smart list criteria. Take the time to get to know smart list filters as they can sometimes be confusing.

Using Marketo's core features

  • Channels
  • Programs
  • Email Templates
  • Forms
  • Landing Pages
  • Smart Campaigns
  • Lead Scoring
  • Segmentation
  • Lead Nurture
  • Segmentation - create a better line of communication with our audiences
  • Lead nurture - Engagement programs are crucial for our business
  • A/B testing for emails
Engagement programs. My current organization relies on them so heavily and I've learned so much about what you can do. In my past organization we did not take advantage of these and I regret that. The customization is amazing.
Again, with engagement programs. I learned how to skip and accelerate people through programs within my streams and that has been a game changer!
Most things :) The customizability is unmatched.
The foldering. While I don't love how everything lives in one place, once you figure out a dedicated foldering system, it makes a lot more sense and it is easier to find what you're looking for. The search function is also great! And the campaign queue!

Benefits of using some of Marketo's core features

We like to understand where our leads come from so that we can optimize for that specific channel or source.
Email
Event
Tradeshow
List purchase
social
Content syndication
These help us better understand which types of campaign convert the highest and at what value
It is extremely easy to segment the database. We do only rely on one segmentation currently and looking for other ways to segment a large database currently.
Language preference to send translated emails.
We use smart campaigns to update fields, update program statuses, send email, sync with Salesforce etc.
The smart lists are key!
We use forms to allow customers and leads to sign up for events and download content. With those forms we are able to gain more demographic and firmographic information for our database.
We recently created a newsletter template that has been adopted across multiple business units.
Ease of use and re-peatability

Using Marketo

16 - Marketing Automation specialists and managers - running campaigns with Marketo at the center
Marketing Technology Operations - managing the platform, setting up integrations, managing the database, etc.
5 - Technical skills are a must! People in these roles must be critical and quick thinkers.
  • Database management
  • Lead nurturing
  • Customer onboarding
  • Re-engagement campaigns
  • Our organization has created a very robust lead management system
  • Lead scoring
  • Account based marketing
  • Reporting and analytics
We just migrated from one Marketo instance to another instance with a 40 million person database. If I'm being frank, Marketo is an extremely sticky product. Though the tool is better suited for us than any others so the choice is also out of loyalty.
  • Increased employee efficiency
  • Faster lead conversion
  • Overall demand generation
  • Customer engagement