Marketo - the best SMB marketing tool out there
Updated November 13, 2018

Marketo - the best SMB marketing tool out there

Ben Beck | 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 across multiple departments: in sales, customer service, and marketing. Marketing owns the tool and does regular trainings with others across the organization.
  • Marketo is advanced - it let's you do complicated things that no other marketing automation tool does. For example, when you update a blog post on WordPress you can have Marketo automatically send an email to some user base with that post inline.
  • It is great for managing events - the clone event option is super quick and easy!
  • I love Marketo tokens - they allow you to easily clone a program, switch out a few data points and have a new program rolling in minutes.
  • The Marketo community is the best of all marketing automation suite communities. Most users are actively participating, sharing ideas for new features, contributing new ideas how to do things in a non-out-of-the-box method, etc.
  • Out of the top 3 marketing automation tools, it is one of the more expensive tools, but you get what you pay for!
  • Now that Adobe has acquired Marketo we may see changes. When one of their main competitors was acquired by a big enterprise player the competitor languished and has not been well developed... hoping that we don't see the same thing happen with Marketo. As I enjoy the great marketing analytics suite Adobe has built, I anticipate good things for their acquisition of Marketo, but I'm still not sure on the issue.
  • Product Launches
  • Customer Service
  • Lead Management
  • Prospecting / New Business
We've used Marketo for product launches and other product development related tasks, such as collecting customer feedback on new functionality. We have also integrated Marketo with ZenDesk (our customer support tool) and setup communications and access control between Marketo and ZenDesk to ensure new customers get accounts and expired accounts are locked out of support upon expiration of their accounts. We also use it for managing our lead input, our customer journey, prospecting efforts, and sales enablement.
We've used Marketo to attract the right customers, nurture new prospects and empower our sales team. It is a fabulous tool.
Marketo is the perfect match between performance and features and price. While not quite as robust as Eloqua, it is far more simple to use and has a much better price. It is more feature rich and customizable than both HubSpot and Infusionsoft - though both of those marketing automation engines are excellent choices for smaller companies. I would choose Infusionsoft if I was a small company that needed a retail shopping cart built in.
I've recommended Marketo to lots of friends and everyone that has gone ahead with the purchase has loved it. No regrets!

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
10
Dynamic content
9
Ability to test dynamic content
9
Landing pages
8
A/B testing
10
Mobile optimization
5
Email deliverability reporting
10
List management
10
Triggered drip sequences
10
Lead nurturing automation
10
Lead scoring and grading
10
Data quality management
8
Automated sales alerts and tasks
10
Calendaring
8
Event/webinar marketing
10
Social sharing and campaigns
10
Social profile integration
10
Dashboards
8
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
8
API
10
Role-based workflow & approvals
9
Customizability
10
Integration with Salesforce.com
10
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

Using Marketo's core features

  • Programs
  • Email Templates
  • Forms
  • Landing Pages
  • Smart Campaigns
  • Lead Scoring
  • Segmentation
  • Lead Nurture
  • Their smart campaigns are incredibly powerful and configurable.
  • Lead scoring is also the best in the industry. Very configurable and allows you to really set it up in any way you need.
  • The Marketo community, the other users working together to encourage new product development and share their own best practices, is a great place to share and gather info on how you can better use Marketo at your organization.
The dynamic tokens seem to be some of the more difficult functionality to learn, and yet they can be some of the most powerful that will truly help you do your job better. Setup tokens on your webinars so that you can quickly launch new webinars, and all you have to do is switch out a few tokens. Will save you hours and hours!
The Marketo community is one of the best out there. When I wanted to build an advanced subscription center that was GDPR compliant and helped maintain our email list the best way possible, I turned to the community for advice of peers. We were able to build a subscription center that works great and fills our needs.
Marketo is the best solution when you're looking for something a little more powerful, and thereby more configurable.
Each marketing automation platform has their own way of organizing programs and content. While they all have their pros and cons, I'm a big fan of the foldering system that Marketo uses.

Benefits of using some of Marketo's core features

We use the Google standardized UTM parameters and store them in their own custom fields we created in Marketo and Salesforce. Whenever someone submits a form we capture those parameters.
We use the main channels that Marketo has pre-defined: email, CPC, etc.
We track leads back to the channels, though our total addressable market is quite small so our lead numbers are also small and therefore not all that statistically significant. That said, it does provide us anecdotal learnings that have benefited our advertising activities.
Segmentation is extremely easy in Marketo and we are very pleased with this component of the product.
We have four product lines, and as such our segmentation needs are quite sophisticated. Based on what webinars people sign up for, or what content they consume, we are dropping them into segments particular to the individual products. From there, we can better market to those individuals.
We leverage Marketo's smart campaigns heavily. For example, our integration with ZenDesk watches a custom field in Salesforce and when that field is updated with a particular customer role it triggers some new customer onboarding materials to be sent out.
We love smart campaigns and use them regularly. Of all the marketing automation suites I believe Marketo has the fullest number of triggers and filters, which give marketers the flexibility they need to be smarter in their marketing segmentation and content distribution.
We do use the Marketo forms, and while they are very easy to setup, if you want to customize their appearance beyond the basics that Marketo allows, then you'll need to have someone on your team that knows HTML/CSS.
We use several of the Marketo provided templates and then use some of our own custom ones too. Several of our custom ones were actually Marketo base templates that we simply cloned and then tweaked out, saving us a lot of time of having to build out our own from the ground up.
The templates in Marketo are as powerful as you'll find. There wasn't anything that we wanted to do that we weren't able to with Marketo templates.