Powerful platform if you have a solid strategy!
Updated December 18, 2020
Powerful platform if you have a solid strategy!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Standard
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- Marketo Real-Time Analytics
- Real-time Personalization
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
We're using Marketo internally to house our lead management "funnel" architecture as well as perpetual lead nurturing efforts. Marketo contains all of the logic that moves leads through the funnel stages (leveraging a combination of activity and demographic-based scoring) and collects all of the necessary data to allow us to report on funnel metrics (lead velocity, conversion rates, volume, and revenue impact via an integration with SFDC). We've built out our nurturing as well, using advanced logic to ensure people receive content that is mapped to their specific role and their place in the buying cycle.
- With the robust logic capabilities, you can pretty much design your nurturing and lead management framework to function in any way you need it to. So it's a very scalable platform.
- Integration with SFDC is pretty seamless. The bi-directional sync of data between platforms happens every 5 minutes or so.
- I've worked at multiple companies that use Marketo, and in all cases our sales reps were huge fans of the visibility Marketo Sales Insight provides them. When added to the page layouts in SFDC the reps can view a feed of a lead's website activity, email activity, scoring changes, and "interesting moments" (which are customizable and show key activity that we deem note-worthy).
- The robustness of the platform means that if you start using Marketo without a well thought-out strategy, you may not get the return you're hoping for. The reports and functionality that are often shown in Marketo's product demos and webinars are great, but for those to work properly an overall architecture and governance really need to be in place. Also, if your business plans to make an investment in Marketo, definitely be sure you have people (or are able to hire people) who will be able to support it.
- Upsell
- Cross-Sell
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
We've moved away from one-off "batch and blast" campaigns, and have more of a perpetual ongoing approach with our outbound efforts. We've mapped all of our content to persona's, and also to our different lead funnel stages. When a new lead is created via form submission, we have "listening campaigns" that look at what information the person has provided via progressive profiling, and then adds them to an appropriate place in our nurture program. The goal of the content in the nurture program is to "nurture forward" to the next stage of the funnel (which they'd achieve by consuming more content, entering more progressive profiling data, and thus increasing their score). When this happens, we have more "listening campaigns" that remove them from their previous spot in the nurture program and place them further down. The eventual goal is to have them reach a "Qualified Lead" threshold, which is the point sales is notified to follow-up in SFDC, and hopefully, a closed won opportunity comes of it.
I've done some analysis for clients as to why an enterprise MAP such as Marketo is necessary and the main thing it comes down to is the logic capabilities. Marketo is completely customizable and can be architected to suit the needs of a particular business. This is necessary for scalability.
250,000 to 1 million
Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings
Learnings & Advice
A few tips to be successful with Marketo:
1) Before you build your architecture, plan out the strategy behind it based on business goals, reporting needs, etc. then work backwards to determine what/how you need to build to achieve these goals in the most efficient and scalable way.
2) Enforce governance on your Marketo team. Ensure anyone who has access is properly trained, both on Marketo and how your organization uses it. Control user access with user profile permissions.
3) Document your Marketo configurations. This will be useful for training purposes, for reference when changes need to be made in the future, and when there is team turnover.
4) Test anything you build before you go live with it.
1) Before you build your architecture, plan out the strategy behind it based on business goals, reporting needs, etc. then work backwards to determine what/how you need to build to achieve these goals in the most efficient and scalable way.
2) Enforce governance on your Marketo team. Ensure anyone who has access is properly trained, both on Marketo and how your organization uses it. Control user access with user profile permissions.
3) Document your Marketo configurations. This will be useful for training purposes, for reference when changes need to be made in the future, and when there is team turnover.
4) Test anything you build before you go live with it.
I've heard Marketo described as an email platform or email automation platform, but I would say a logic platform is a more accurate description. There's a lot you can do with smart campaigns to maintain data consistency/normalization, and correct bad data automatically when it enters the system.
Be aware that Marketo (any marketing automation platform) will never be a "buy it and turn it on" type of solution. To get the most out of your investment there will need to be a well-designed strategy, and people on your team who have the Marketo knowlege to implement and maintain this strategy.
Anytime I have a question about how to do something in Marketo, odds are someone else has asked it first on the community. It's a great resource for tips and advice from fellow users!
1) Document your Marketo configurations. This will be useful for training purposes, for reference when changes need to be made in the future, and when there is team turnover.
2) Test anything you build before you go live with it.
2) Test anything you build before you go live with it.
Using Marketo's core features
- Channels
- Programs
- Email Templates
- Forms
- Landing Pages
- Smart Campaigns
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Sourcing
- Segmentation
- Lead Nurture
- Reporting/Analytics
- The trigger and batch workflow logic (smart campaigns) possibilities are endless and they are able to run in real-time without slowing down the instance (an issue I've seen with real-time automation in some other platforms)
- SFDC integration is every 5 minutes - one of the fastest out there
- Engagement streams - make it really easy to build and manage drip email nurture
Static list imports to scale testing. We test all the automation we build in Marketo, and for a long time we were making manual updates to our test records to complete the test steps. We've been able to scale this quite a bit by organizing our test scenarios, and using static lists to make data updates to a group of records all at once. (We can also get really fancy by exporting the list back into excel and using VLOOKUPs to check test results).