Get Creative With Marketo
September 01, 2015
Get Creative With Marketo
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
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Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
We are currently using Marketo as our marketing automation system. Most of our marketing campaigns are managed through the system. Marketo is used only by Marketing and the data/results of our campaigns is synced over to Salesforce so that others in the organization can have visibility into what we are doing. Another key stakeholder for us is Sales. We do have Marketo Sales Insight installed in Salesforce, but it is currently being used on a limited basis. This is due to changes in the Sales organization. Marketo has allowed us to track more precisely the buyer journey and to create more interesting and personalized campaigns.
- Community and Help. The community of Marketo and learning resources available are a big strength for Marketo. Not only is there helpful information and answers to any question related to Marketo, there is also a forum for discussing best practices. Whenever I encounter a situation that I'm not sure how to handle, I go to the Marketo Community first.
- Customization of campaigns. There is a lot of flexibility in Marketo for listening to the CRM and creating campaigns based on activity.
- Smart Lists. You can gather so much information from Marketo Smart Lists! Being able to filter on past activity and all of the account, lead, contact and opportunity fields in SFDC, all in one place, makes these so powerful. I can't wait for the functionality of being able to subscribe to these!
- Segmentation & Dynamic content. So easy to learn and use!
- Salesforce Integration & Sales Insight. While our Salesforce admin was not happy with how many tabs Marketo took up (3), the information that is passed between these two systems is great. And with Sales Insight, we can equip our sales and management teams with useful information needed especially on key accounts.
- Landing page creation. Our team is not a fan of the WYSIWYG editor because we find the pages are not aesthetically pleasing. We have found a way to work around this that works for us though. We create a separate html template for each landing page and use a separate form for each (so that we can track form fill-outs accurately). This allowed us to create responsive landing pages, before Marketo had released that ability with the WYSIWYG editor. At first, this was a cumbersome process, but our team now has basic html skills with one expert supporting us and we are able to turn around landing pages fairly quickly.
- Account-Based Marketing. I've heard this is coming, which is good. But this is such a hot topic in Marketing right now, it would be nice to see this feature sooner rather than later.
- The new email editor. I find the new email editor very frustrating. It corrects html that worked with the last editor and makes text very hard to format. I have reverted back to the old one!
- Calendar. While this is definitely something every Marketing team needs, the cost is not effective and our team works on the fly quite a bit which makes using a calendar difficult. We use a calendar option in Salesforce because we need many stakeholders to have access to the calendar, not just the Marketing team.
- Revenue model for upsells & cross-sells. This may have just been a learning thing from our consultant when we had our implementation, but my understanding is that it is not possible to effectively track a customers entire journey on one model. This is important to us as we have a lot of upsell and cross-sell potential with our customers. It has been challenging to find ways to get around this and is hard to find the right answer for this with Marketo.
- We've definitely seen an increase in the number of leads we are able to gather.
- With the use of cloning, our 4 person team was able to crank out 24 webinars in 4 months. This included 1-2 invites, reminders, confirmations, 2 follow-up emails (no shows & attendees) and two landing pages with custom graphics.
- The negative impact was that it highlighted the inaccuracies and inconsistencies of the previous marketing team's use of Salesforce. We noticed that many people believed only the lead object was in use by Marketing which was not true. That being said, this has provided us with an opportunity to start fresh and really show our Sales team and other key stakeholders that we can provide good quality leads through the use of lead scoring.
HubSpot is more user-friendly and cost effective. The sales enablement tools also seem more user friendly. I haven't spent a lot of time evaluating the landing page and email designers in HubSpot, but based on the way we have been able to customize Marketo, it works for us nicely. While HubSpot has a great blog, the community available in Marketo is amazing. So much help and resources available.
For a B2B business, I think Marketo is the stronger option and with the launch of Account-Based Marketing coming soon, I think (and hope) this will continue to be the case.
For a B2B business, I think Marketo is the stronger option and with the launch of Account-Based Marketing coming soon, I think (and hope) this will continue to be the case.
25,000 to 100,000