Marketo - The choice for small to mid-size businesses looking to get into marketing automation
March 21, 2017

Marketo - The choice for small to mid-size businesses looking to get into marketing automation

Alden Dale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

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Modules Used

  • Marketo Sales Insight
  • Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Marketo is used most by our marketing department, but sales and web dev end up interacting with it from time to time as well. The two main business problems it addresses are individual user tracking through digital properties and execution (either directly or through tools they provide) of marketing campaigns; often based on behaviors exhibited.
  • Marketo provides reliable email functionality. If you can dream of doing it with email, Marketo will offer the tools to get it done.
  • Marketo's API support allows for a lot of creative marketing, even more than the sales reps promise you can do.
  • Marketo allows for in-depth tracking of leads throughout the sales cycle. Unlike some limitations with CRM objects, Marketo allows cross-object (leads & contact) tracking seamlessly.
  • My biggest complaint used to be email send time issues with larger drops. That being said, since the implementation of the "head start" for large email programs, a lot of the issues have gone away. Since some of our emails are dropped from smart campaigns instead of email programs, it would be great to be able to pre-spool emails within smart campaigns similar to the head start on email programs.
  • Overall, I feel that Marketo is excellent at rolling out exciting new features, but sometimes there are key pieces of functionality that are a part of their core package that sometimes get ignored from an engineering standpoint. Its usually not the "big things" but often times, small things that would be bit quality of life improvements that customers request for years get glossed over. E.g. Having the ability to add or subtract something other than a static value from a lead score would be immensely helpful, and its been asked for for a number of years. The work-around is to sync the field to your CRM for the heavy lifting, but even that's kind of clunky.
  • Their support of high-end users (people who interact via the API primarily) is solid, and the support for the out-of-box solutions is good, but I feel there is a middle ground of "I can't totally do custom API work but I need more than forms 2.0" type users often get glossed over by support and the community (but that's the reason I've got a job as a consultant too... so I'm not complaining about having more work for myself).
  • Product Launches
  • Upsell
  • Cross-Sell
  • Lead Management
  • Prospecting / New Business
Product launches is about information.

Upsell is about increasing conversion for the PM teams.

Cross-sell is about increasing conversion for the PM teams.

Lead management is about funnel stage conversion rates, and ultimately closed/won opp revenue.

Prospecting is about net new lead count and total net revenue about 180 days.
- Marketo has more attractive pricing for smaller database size (it appears the break-even point between the offerings is usually around 500,000 active leads/contacts).

- Marketo's UI is a bit easier to user for people unfamiliar with marketing automation.

- Marketo has a really robust organic community of users.
It does great with small to midsize businesses. I feel there are still a number of frustrations faced by the really large clients (1M+ active users in the database) that aren't always served best based on Marketo's server architecture (or pricing model... Eloqua, while more expensive for the smaller clients scales better for the much larger clients).

Overall, I think they offer a really solid package for SMBs and mid-size businesses. A more robust API developer community and support might make it more attractive for the larger customers.

The 4 marketing automation platforms I recommend are ActiveCampaign (for the really small and budget minded), Act-On (for the small business), Marketo (for small to mid-size businesses) and Eloqua (for the extremely large with robust web-dev teams).

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
3
Dynamic content
6
Ability to test dynamic content
9
Landing pages
5
A/B testing
3
Mobile optimization
3
Email deliverability reporting
8
List management
10
Triggered drip sequences
10
Lead nurturing automation
10
Lead scoring and grading
9
Data quality management
7
Automated sales alerts and tasks
8
Calendaring
4
Event/webinar marketing
8
Social sharing and campaigns
5
Social profile integration
5
Dashboards
4
Standard reports
8
Custom reports
6
API
7
Role-based workflow & approvals
6
Customizability
10
Integration with Salesforce.com
9
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
7
Integration with SugarCRM
7