Beware hidden fees with Marketo -- 5-10% stealth increase YoY
Updated December 15, 2015
Beware hidden fees with Marketo -- 5-10% stealth increase YoY
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Select
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- Marketo Real-Time Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
We use both Marketo and HubSpot for marketing automation, landing page creation, and email marketing across the organization.
- Large User Community
- Third Party Support
- Salesforce Integration
- $70K+ of my marketing budget goes to Marketo. Make sure you read the fine print in their renewal agreement, as they customarily raise the rates by 5-10% each year without any kind of justification (few new features, zero performance improvements). In the SaaS world this is called "uplift".
- The user experience is disjointed. It is nearly impossible to find anything -- an email, a landing page, a report -- and when you try to search across the whole site, they make you retype your query.
- If you like watching a spinning ball, Marketo is the system for you. Even the simplest queries (like an email program with 10 recipients) takes more than a minute to show the results. I'm told that this will be fixed when they change out the back end database this year.
- Unlike HubSpot, Marketo has lost all interest in helping their users get more out the system. As the VP of Marketing (even after losing my Marketo Power User) the only phone call I get is the once-a-year renewal call. HubSpot calls me every quarter (minimum) to make sure I am happy and using all of my features.
We use both HubSpot and Marketo. Marketo holds a slim lead in marketing automation and email features, although the system slowness is nearly unbearable. HubSpot is rapidly closing the feature gap, has an amazing blogging application, robust social integration (Twitter, Linkedin), and has a huge focus on their customers. I didn't select Marketo and if I had been part of the selection team, I probably would not have recommended it.
250,000 to 1 million
Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings
Using Marketo
5 - Marketing
2 - Campaign management and analytics.
- Email marketing
- Retargeting
- Landing page creation
- Lead score
- I'll speak to the category of marketing automation rather than Marketo specifically. If you decide you want to deploy a marketing automation system, you will see faster lead conversion, increased employee efficiency, or better customer service.
- Marketing automation will give you behavioral lead scoring, which will help you determine the best leads to contact. Marketo lacks predictive analytics and we use Infer to provide demographic/firmographic lead scoring. HubSpot claims to have this out-of-the-box, but I have not used it at this time.
- Marketo Smart Campaigns allow us to make changes to our Salesforce Lead and Contact records, including reassigning ownership based on business rules. We have been more flexible and our data has been cleaned and normalized as a result.
- There are a number of features that we are not taking advantage of. My Marketo team has committed to help us maximize the use of these features.
Evaluating Marketo and Competitors
Marketo Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Kept well informed Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Escalation required Need to explain problems multiple times |