Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marketo is being used by the Marketing departments, spread across all of our business units. We are currently using this system as mostly an email marketing system. We are currently still implementing things such as sales insight and dynamic content. We went live on Marketo in March, so we have been slowly learning the ropes ever since then.

The business problems it addresses for me personally, are mostly in the realm of live events and webcasts. Previously I needed to tag customers as registered and attended in SFDC by hand. Marketo has stepped in and automated this process for me as well as the sending of emails, etc.

Our data is not very good as of now, and it is getting better each month. We still have a long way to go before we can begin to use Marketo the way it should be used.

Pros and Cons

Automation. Everything is done smoothly and without hesitation.
Syncing with Salesforce. The data (as long as it is prompted to come over from our operations team) is all there at our fingertips. This really helps us on the back end with not having to create reports within Salesforce and helps clean up the amount of info we have in there as well.

I would love to be able to report more easily within Marketo. Right now as it stands, I try and run all my reports to be able to show up within Salesforce rather than Marketo. It is very hard to go into Marketo and see a list of people who clicked on a link right away. I am not a fan of the reporting and analytic section.
The new community is horrendous. I didn't think the old one was all that great, but I cannot find a single topic I look up. All of the comments are so specific to certain businesses and companies. There has never been a great new user how-to guide in place. I would love to see more beginner-focused topics on there. Also, more general topics rather than users asking questions that are specific to their campaigns and programs.

Return on Investment

We definitely have increased employee efficiency, personally on my end I have never been able to get events run so fast!
It is still too soon to tell since we just went live in March how our ROI on the whole looks, though.

Alternatives Considered

Silverpop Engage

Marketo can do way more than Silverpop ever could in terms of automation, events, webcasts, etc. Silverpop was extremely archaic in its UI and was very unpredictable. Marketo is always WYSIWYG and we have no issues with our templates coming back wrong in sample emails, etc. (Sometimes Silverpop would send you an email and in the template it would look great and then sample email would come back distorted and in 3 different fonts, colors, etc.)

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Marketo flourishes for small companies who don't have many hands in the pot. We are a massive company and we have to have everything approved by corporate and have things made for us (for instance - we can't even make our own snippets / edit them). I would love to be able to work on things on my own. I think Marketo is appropriate for next-generation marketers. We are still stuck in the "email, call, email, call, email, call" mentality. Marketing is changing as marketers need to adjust with it. Nurture programs are the way to go and we are just not able to get that worked out within our massive company quite yet.

We're Marketo Wannabe's!

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo