Marketo - Excellent MarTech Solution (B2B)
Updated December 05, 2019

Marketo - Excellent MarTech Solution (B2B)

Ande Kempf | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Standard

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management
  • Marketo Sales Insight
  • Marketo Social Marketing

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Marketo is being used by our marketing department and we are integrated with Salesforce, which is mainly used by our sales department. Our company decided to use Marketo because they wanted to automate their marketing process, implement lead scoring, and track our marketing spending by campaign through their analytics and reporting.

Pros

  • Reporting and analytics provide excellent insight into our funnel.
  • Marketo Community is a wealth of knowledge.
  • Customer service is quick and helpful.
  • Marketo's annual summit is a wealth of knowledge and excellent for networking.
  • Event campaigns are super easy to use and integrate with webinar providers. We specifically use ON24 and have been able to implement custom object for easy status syncs.

Cons

  • Reporting dashboards are pretty generic. If you want real insight into your reporting the dashboard is not helpful and seems fruitless.
  • Database tiers are set up very broadly. I think it jumps from 50K to 100K. It would be nice to have the option of 75K.
  • Customer service has declined in quality over the years. Be prepared to troubleshoot your problems.
  • Product Launches
  • Upsell
  • Cross-Sell
  • Customer Service
  • Lead Management
One goal with Marketo is to manage upsell communications to clients. Of course, Marketo can handle sending promotional communications but it will also track engagements as they are related to lead scoring. As a client's lead score increases their stage in the lifecycle will change until they're ready for a sales rep to reach out.
Our company previously used Pardot before Marketo. They switched before I came to the company. However, I am told they made the switch because the SFDC\Pardot integration had too many sync errors.
100,000 to 250,000
B2B
Marketo is an excellent tool to control the order of operations for all data processing. In my experience a lot of clients experience race condition problems with their data processing and that is a significant problem when thousands of records are impacted. Marketo offers the ability to build a center of excellence to avoid race conditions.

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

8.4
WYSIWYG email editor
9
Dynamic content
9
Ability to test dynamic content
8
Landing pages
6
A/B testing
8
Email deliverability reporting
9
List management
9
Triggered drip sequences
9
8.8
Lead nurturing automation
9
Lead scoring and grading
7
Data quality management
9
Automated sales alerts and tasks
10
5.5
Calendaring
1
Event/webinar marketing
10
Social Media Marketing ()
Not Rated
3.0
Dashboards
1
Standard reports
4
Custom reports
4
10.0
API
10
Role-based workflow & approvals
10
Customizability
10
Integration with Salesforce.com
10

Learnings & Advice

When I first started using Marketo I underestimated what it could do. For a long time I treated it as an ESP - which is only one portion of what Marketo can handle. The most important lesson I've learned is that the tool is far more powerful and has the capability to handle much more. While this is a great discovery, the tool requires a lot of strategic planning - something most companies dismiss. If you are planning on purchasing a marketing automation platform you need to invest training for whoever is running the instance and possibly a consultant to set up the architecture of the instance.
Our company used a custom CRM. This integrated with Marketo, but all data/objects were stored in custom objects. We wanted to be able to display our audience's data in email communications but that is difficult to achieve with tokens and custom CRM objects. With the use of Email Tokens we were able to pull in data from custom objects into email communications.
The learning curve is steep. Network with other Marketo users in the community and take as much training as possible.
The community has a ton of information on use cases that product docs do not cover. Typically, if I have ran into a odd situation with Marketo I have searched in community and have found a dozen other folks with the same experience.
Marketo is a tool that requires strategy and collaboration with Marketing and Sales. Architectural changes in Marketo should be discussed upstream to ensure all reporting is not impacted.

Using Marketo's core features

  • Channels
  • Programs
  • Email Templates
  • Forms
  • Landing Pages
  • Smart Campaigns
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Sourcing
  • Segmentation
  • Lead Nurture
  • Reporting/Analytics
  • Tokens: These are a scalable solution to pulling in data into emails, landing pages or marketo smart campaign flow steps.
  • Smart Campaigns: Very basic feature of Marketo, but I use them daily/hourly to run processes in Marketo
  • LaunchPoint: Marketo can integrate with many other MarTech apps. This feature helps with transferring data from one app to Marketo.
Launchpoint services offer a robust solution to connect your marketing technology tools.
The Marketo community was very important to my understanding of email bouncing (soft/hard) and how to mitigate the complexities of error codes.
Marketo's ability to integrate with other marketing technology tools is much stronger than their competitors, especially CRMs.

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