Marketo - the leader for marketing automation

Our entire organization is leveraging Marketo, and we have found it to be incredibly helpful in terms of putting processes in place and allowing us to refine our pipeline. We are now able to run basic, run-of-the-mill to advanced reports, manage our lead database, and run campaigns to generate more brand awareness and more importantly, drive more conversions for our sales team. In addition to that, the new ABM (account-based marketing) feature will allow us to cater our messaging to specific accounts/verticals, which resonates more with the target audience.

Marketo has been instrumental in helping our org streamline processes for campaign management & deployment. We are able to keep historical data of all of our email, email link performance metrics and look at how each program is performing over time. It's also been great for database management.

With all of these powerful capabilities at your disposal, it's important to keep in mind how we need to set the campaign up for and consequently measure success. That means for example ensuring that appropriate competitors are blacklisted from receiving our emails, understanding the difference between the different metrics and its impact on our content strategy, etc.

One of the most frequently used and slightly unusual out of box functionality in Marketo is the random sample flow action, which allows us to run a/b testing for our emails without having to use the email program dashboard. It's great in that we can still create separate versions of the emails & it would allow for us to efficiently track the same way while still keeping the advanced filters in the smart list section intact. With a/b testing via email program dashboard, we only had the option to use all logic for the smart list filters, which was a bit inconvenient when we wanted to include either/or groups vs. all of the groups.

I would take advantage of all of the free resources out there regarding Marketo usage, including the Marketo community and video tutorials. It's certainly helped me gain some footing in the system and enjoy marketing ops because there are so many things to learn.

I've learned that no question is a dumb question, and that there are power users who will be willing to guide you to the end in any kind of scenario. Lead scoring tips & tricks are also abundant, so it's great that we're able to leverage the community to learn who's involved in the scoring process [sales and marketing], how to set up for success [lead scoring templates from Marketo are life savers!] and where the handoff should be from marketing to sales.

Know your audience before you dive into Marketo. Make sure that everyone is comfortable with the definitions of the buyer personas, so it's easier to set up nurture programs and understand the buyer journey from known lead -> MQL for instance via lead scoring and dynamic content.