Marketo is the most efficient and sophisticated marketing automation tool out there

We use Marketo within our Enterprise Marketing team for the specific purpose of prospecting and generating leads for Enterprise sized businesses. It helps us prospect leads at scale, nurture leads, leverage an MQL scoring model, etc. We also use it to send internal alerts to our sales teams so they can have visibility into what the leads they own are engaging with in terms of marketing.

I've had many successes with Marketo. The first success is using Marketo to automate marketing processes and process hundreds, thousands, and even millions of records through these processes at any given time. The second success is that Marketo allows you to easily customize fields and require field information on all leads (such as lead source or lead source detail) so you can effectively report on which channels are driving the most successful leads (KPIs such as MQLs, closed won ops, etc.). The third success is that Marketo has baked in functionality that allows you to automate A/B testing for email sends, which is a foundational marketing channel for many of our marketing efforts.

One of the most important lessons I've learned in Marketo is to make sure you're intentional with adding in key data steps to your Marketo program creation process and list upload process. Marketo sets up the infrastructure for you to accomplish key reporting, however you must be sure to upload/add important values such as lead source, lead source detail, and acquisition program to all of your leads either via the list upload process and/or Marketo smart campaigns. Marketo sets you up with the ability to write this information to fields, however, this isn't done automatically so you must be intentional with adding this step into your processes.

One creative way we use Marketo is with Printing For Less. We integrate Marketo with Printing For Less (PFL) to send out direct mail to prospects and customers via automation. We identify the audience in Marketo and then trigger a webhook to PFL to fulfill the direct mail send.

I recommend to keep learning something new about Marketo's core functionality and stay current on all of the quarterly releases. Because the software is constantly changing (and so is the industry), it's important to always stay up to date. Also, take advantage of online resources like the Marketo community because many questions are asked and answered here. The Marketo community is very helpful!

I've learned about the Known Visitor functionality on Marketo forms. I even found a Marketo-fluent JavaScript developer from the Marketo community that helped enable this functionality on our forms. In general, I come to Marketo community whenever I have a question about how to set up something or combat an issue I have internally (that I'm hoping can be solved with Marketo!).

I recommend going to Marketo community to get all of your questions answered. I also recommend attending the Marketo Summit (Adobe Conference) to keep learning how other Enterprises are using Marketo. I also attend Marketo webinars and have quarterly release reviews with our Marketo CSM to make sure we're using all relevant (and new) functionality that could help our marketing processes.