Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 9
Author: Benjamin Jacquet

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Working in an agency, I found Marketo generally used nation/regionwide across variety of department such as marketing, CRM, customer experience, sometimes including sales.

Problem solving changes depending on the client but would generally revolve around areas such as:

Drive efficiency by automating repetitive tasks
Scale marketing practice to reduce execution time
Optimize Marketing practices by monitoring performance and running A/B tests
Push towards omni-channels strategy by integrating a variety of channels/campaigns within a single platform (Emails, SMS, Social, Events etc.)
Unifying a fragmented view of data by feeding it all in Marketo and generating holistic reports
Gaining visibility on Marketing initiatives performance and end-to-end customer journey
Helping align Sales and Marketing department and improving the lead generation process and conversion rates
Improve prospect/customer experience by building scalable yet highly personalised experiences
Allow foray into customer personas

Pros and Cons

Ease of use with virtually endless possibility
Great flexibility with very little constraints as to how your automation should work, further supported by APIs and webhooks
Marketo community and support is very knowledgeable and really help with overcoming roadblocks
Tokens allow to easily create very scalable program templates
Powerful integration with SalesForce (I haven't worked with Microsoft Dynamics)
Dynamic content is powerful and easy to use
Powerful out-of-the-box reporting with additional possibilities for power-users
Segmentations are easy to setup and scale

Dynamic content dependency on segmentation limits its use to largely-scalable criteria
Landing page editor isn’t very flexible (though it is meant to be updated with email editor 2.0-like capabilities)
CRMs other than SalesForce require much more work to set up

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

Product Launches
Upsell
Customer Service
Lead Management
Prospecting / New Business

Marketo offers more powerful automation and reporting and seems to be all around more oriented towards large enterprises needing of a very custom solution that can evolve and scale with them. On the other hand HubSpot wants to be an all-in-one solution that does it all but not as well. Choice really comes down to business size and need and what problem one is trying to solve.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Likelihood to Recommend

[It's] Well suited for businesses desiring a powerful platform they will be able to expand on and that will give them the flexibility to build automation the way they need it rather than how the platform wants them to do it. Particularly true if you are already using SalesForce If however your business has fairly simple needs or doesn’t have a CRM, other platforms like HubSpot might be a better choice.

Products Replaced

No

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation
Vendor Reputation
Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Third-party Reviews

Evaluation Lessons Learned

Would not change. Marketo prove to be a satisfying solution in the desired areas.

Support Rating

9

During 2 years of using Marketo I have been using Marketo support a lot! Not that I always need it as many answers can be found in the community but it consistently prove effective, getting replies generally within hours and them being very knowledged.
Support is very involve into providing us with the best and when faced with difficult situation, willing to make some research and/or escalate cases to the proper stakeholder.

Adobe Marketo Engage Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

Yes - Premium support allow to have a direct phone line to a consultant. While not always necessary it prove very helpful during large scale projects such as massive program roll-out or CRM migrations

Bug Resolution

Yes - While I encountered bugs in Marketo, these were always non-critical issues therefore I did not specifically monitor the resolution of these once raised. Bugs were ultimately solved but I wouldn't be able to report on how long it took.

Usability

8

The use of the platform is very streamlined and therefore many things can be learned once and applied to the whole platform.

Editors for emails, form and landing pages are quite easy to use (though landing pages somewhat lags behind the other two), and offer a lot of complex possibilities in a quite user friendly package.

The platform has a lot of out-of-the-box reporting really facilitating performance analysis for non-technical users.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Consistent Convenient Feel confident using	Slow to learn

Easy Tasks

Campaigns/automation build
Segmentation
Assets build (emails, landing pages, forms)
Administration tasks

Difficult Tasks

Marketing Calendar

Probably the best MAP for SalesForce users

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo