Did someone say Marketo?

At my company, the marketing team uses Marketo and our sales development team uses Marketo Sales Insight. It allows us to automate our email campaigns, nurture leads and identify warm prospects for our sales team.

We have had great success using Marketo to segment our email lists and create highly targeted email campaigns that leverage demographic, but more importantly, behavioral data to move prospects down the funnel. We also rely heavily on Marketo to successfully route and track MQLs so that we can ensure a smooth handoff to Sales and demonstrate the ROI of marketing initiatives.

The biggest lesson we have learned is the importance of email deliverability, because it can make or break the success of a campaign. We have hit a few bumps along the way and are getting better at using Marketo's tools to monitor and maintain good deliverability.

We use Marketo Engagement programs to nurture our leads differently depending on how engaged they are with us. For example, we have a separate program with distinct content for people who have only recently come into our database, so that we can educate them about what we do. This is different from the stream of content people receive if they have previously engaged with us. With Marketo we can tailor the experience even further by segmenting content not just according to engagement level but also what specific vertical or market the person is in.

I have two pieces of advice. One is to start small. Marketo is powerful, but the best way to harness that power is to be set up an infrastructure that can grow with you as you scale up. Create one solid engagement program and you'll be able to clone and adapt it down the line without too many hiccups. Trying to do everything at once is a recipe for disaster.

The second piece of advice is to take advantage of Marketo's training resources, whether that's their library of support documentation or especially the Marketo Community. If you run into a problem, chances are, someone else has had that exact same issue and the Marketo Community has helped them solve it. Search for the answers to any questions you have and if you don't find what you're looking for, post a question and you'll quickly get a response!

The best thing about the Marketo Community is that it allows all kinds of users with different levels of experience to come together and share what they know. For me, this has been incredibly useful when it comes to evaluating third party vendors that integrate with Marketo, whether it's a tool to verify email address validity or software that helps QA emails from a spam perspective. The Community has been particularly useful in troubleshooting the deliverability challenges we've encountered and has helped us avoid some disasters in the process!

I would definitely recommend creating program templates that you clone each time you want to start a new campaign. Templates will make it easy to customize the assets you need for individual campaigns, while also ensuring that your tracking and reporting stays consistent. The same goes for assets. Have one or two landing page templates and one or two email templates, so your team doesn't have to recreate the wheel every time and so that the brand experience stays consistent for your users.

A/B testing is a feature that we only started using more recently, but has helped us achieve higher performance with our emails. For example, when we are promoting a webinar, we now use A/B testing to try out different subject lines so that we can see what gets more engagement and roll our learnings into future campaigns.

Dynamic content is one area where we have relied on the Marketo Community for support when it comes to understanding some of the nuances of how it works. It's so easy to post a question and within a few hours get responses from people who have previously overcome the same challenge you are facing!

To be honest, my knowledge of other marketing automation software is a bit outdated, since I have exclusively used Marketo for the past 3 years. However, Marketo definitely has an advantage as a market leader when it comes to third party solutions. As our team and company has expanded, we have needed to add additional tools to manage specific initiatives like events or paid advertising or business intelligence, but we have always been able to find top-of-the-line solutions that integrate with Marketo and allow us to keep our tracking and reporting intact.

As a Marketo admin, the campaign inspector is an important tool for me, so that I can see what's running or scheduled to be run by someone on the team. It's been particularly useful when we've had to re-prioritize campaigns at the last minute. Another great tool for staying organized are channels and tags. By giving each of our programs a channel and other specific tags that align to our business needs, the team is able to easily find the programs they need and we are able to report more easily in a systematic way.