Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 9
Author: Eddie Morales

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marketo is being used for lead generation programs with online advertising being a major driver of lead volume (several thousand per month). In addition to this since we're a B2B company we manage lead lifecycle status, sync with SalesForce, nurture email campaigns, import lists from events, data management, data hygiene, reporting, analytics, landing page creation, email campaigns, A/B testing, and more.

Marketo is used within the demand generation team and is split between programs (lead acquisition) and operations (lead management).

Pros and Cons

Marketo enables us to do lead generation through online advertising (Google Adwords, Facebook, Linkedin, etc..) and capture these leads through acquisition programs that sync to SalesForce CRM and map them to SalesForce campaigns.
Marketo does a really good job of enabling lead data management operations and data hygiene campaigns.
Marketo does a really good job of enabling email campaigns with advanced options to personalize and customize emails.

Marketo can improve its integrations with AdTech. Some of the AdTech integrations like Google Adwords aren't as robust as I would like it to be.
Marketo can improve its reporting and analytics console. They provide a decent baseline of performance metrics of leads moving through the funnel, but once you start asking tough questions about what's happening in the funnel it's difficult to answer with their out-of-the box solutions. So pulling reports directly from SalesForce and exporting to CSV and pivoting on the data is what you'll have to do once you start getting really sophisticated with reporting requirements.
Marketo can improve the design studio for landing page creation. We've run into several challenges there that required our in house web developers to customize CSS to enable better function landing pages, including load speed.

Alternatives Considered

I've used Eloqua in the past and found it's not very user friendly. I think Marketo's UI/UX friendliness makes it "easy" to pick up on. Marketo also has a robust user community that is engaged in really great educational conversations, webinars, events and more which helps you learn about different ways to leverage the tool for your benefit.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Likelihood to Recommend

Marketo is well suited for the high volume and high velocity lead generation use cases, well at least that's what worked well for me. The thing about using most marketing technology tools, especially marketing automation, is that it's really important understand what you're trying to accomplish for your business with the tool.

When it comes to lead acquisition, lead management, and syncing with SalesForce to help manage the lifecycle of the lead then it does a great job as long as you know what you're doing. What it's not good for is account based (ABM) type of marketing that's more targeted based on the "account object in SalesForce". Marketo is good for leads and contacts, not accounts (at least not yet).

Marketo for High Volume and High Velocity B2B Demand Generation

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo