Developer's Perspective of Marketo
Updated September 05, 2019
Developer's Perspective of Marketo
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
It is a great tool currently used at our organization for admins to customize emails, build workflows and marketing paths to help drive traffic down the funnel. It is mostly used by the marketing department, but we are now trying to leverage it more across the organization and provide visibility to those outside of marketing.
- Customize emails
- Build workflows based on certain trigger criteria and help facilitate a guided path to conversion
- Basic integrations with salesforce
- Very limited API functionality
- Support doesn't seem to understand their own product beyond simple declarative functionality, e.g. APIs
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
- Lead Management - track leads and overall activity across various marketo campaigns and marketing activities
- Prospecting/New Business - Build campaigns around new prospects and contacts and help drive them into salesforce for further lead development
Honestly marketo was implemented at both SaaS based companies that I have worked for before I got there, but it seems to have a clear dominant stake hold here in the midwest.
More than 5 million
Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings
Using Marketo's core features
- Reporting/Analytics
- The automatic integration into Salesforce is a very useful feature, pending the system's ability to process the queue in an efficient manner. This is helpful in removing potential ETL/data engineering involvement.
- Frankly I am really excited about the Adobe acquisition of Marketo because I foresee this enabling tracking with web pixels capturing behavior from the initial "anonymous behaviors" up through filling out Marketo forms and converting the lead into Salesforce.
- Marketo's ability to provide insights and identify hot leads is also very useful in helping marketing automation and sales automation optimize their workflows.
Marketo's batch API was super helpful to have learned, and had I learned it earlier would have allowed me to not consume as much of the API limits. Without this, we were dangerously close to or exceeded our API limit rather frequently in ill-attempts to create custom integrations, as well as integrate with other SaaS MarTech platforms.
Honestly no. The Marketo community and support are rarely helpful. Hopefully with time the documentation and customer feedback will build up a useful repository that can be more readily used.
Their forms are fairly flexible and usable in a variety of environments without imposing constraints when implementing and testing these forms.
The search capabilities allow to find needed resources fairly easily without having to traverse down into multiple folders to find those resources.
Benefits of using some of Marketo's core features
We have gated content on our web pages that funnels lead content into marketo, qualifies and filters those leads, and then delivers those qualified leads into our CRM portal. This helps optimize and maximize productivity of sales reps to engage with our leads most likely to convert.
We have used channels to distinguish between direct mails, Nurture engagement programs, content syndication, email blast, etc. types of marketing activities.
With every marketing effort, we try to measure and attribute its relative impact to the overall revenue being generated for the company. It is reasonably safe to say that Marketo as a whole is a sure win to remain in the MarTech ecosystem at our company. However, the granularity in reporting that we are able to introduce via marketo channels is essential to truly attributing revenue to the most impactful Marketo efforts.
It is fairly intuitive to segment audience's with Marketo's segmentation capabilities, given that your data is clean and reliable. However, when dealing with semi-consistent data, the reality is that it will feel really difficult to segment your audience effectively because of those inconsistencies across your database of records.
We had some segmentations in the EMEA region and other segmentations in preparation of GDPR when getting ready to send out the needed content to ensure compliance. Due to send limits, and preventing potentially being blacklisted, etc. there were several segments requisite to effectively sending out all the needed content.
We use smart campaigns all the time for automating workflows. For instance we have nurture segments where based on the lead's stage in the lifecycle they would be placed in different nurture segments that would have content tailored to what that lead is likely considering, hung up on, or needing that could help them progress to the next stage of the lifecycle preparatory to converting into a qualified sales opportunity.
I have also used smart campaigns for updating salesforce records. This is essential to maintaining consistent reporting across key SaaS platforms, and preventing duplication of "lead/contact" records and inaccurate reporting.
The standard form is easy to use, but more often that not we needed to embed additional tracking variables and logic that wasn't innately supported by Marketo. So instead we created essentially custom forms, that would also send data to the same endpoints that marketo's form would to replicate the same behavior while also accounting for the custom tracking.
When our field events teams are out at micro events, they often will use Marketo forms at their events, but will format these forms to better align with the event they are presenting at e.g. Microsoft Ignite.
Consistency. Consistency is key especially as the amount of emails, segments, channels increase so does the risk of creating leads without all the needed data..
Using Marketo
30 - Marketing Campaign/Email Automation
Marketo Administration
Marketing Analytics
Marketo Administration
Marketing Analytics
30 - Email/Marketing Automation
System Administration
ETL
APIs
System Administration
ETL
APIs
- Marketing Email Automation
- Preferences Center
- Lead Generation
- Centralize communication into a Communications Hub by seeing how performant and responsive people are to Marketo content as compared to content sent out via other platforms
- Predictive Analytics supply dynamic content for Marketo to then send personalized emails to a target user group
- End to End tracking of user behavior pre-conversion, to lead capture, to marketing content interaction, to sales conversion (salesforce)
- Increased efficiencies in pushing marketing content
- Better tracking and understanding of lead engagement
- Leads likely convert much faster with optimized workflows across multiple systems
Marketo Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Kept well informed | Slow Resolution Poor followup Less knowledgeable Problems left unsolved Difficult to get immediate help Need to explain problems multiple times Slow Initial Response |
Yes - Premium support was elected for to try and receive better and more responsive support when tickets are submitted
I would if I could