Marketo is great, one of the best tools for marketing automation I've had the opportunity to use.
Updated September 07, 2019
Marketo is great, one of the best tools for marketing automation I've had the opportunity to use.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Analytics
- Marketo Ad Bridge
- Marketo Sales Insight
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
We utilize Marketo throughout the Marketing and Sales departments. Specifically, our marketing team is using the platform to deploy email messages to our target audience, as well as build nurture streams on content areas that are of interest to our audience or organization. Within sales, we utilize the MSI add on for lead scoring.
- Marketo is amazing in it's flexibility. My ability to build campaigns that are watching the actions of our audience, or changes to their CRM record, and can design targeted actions, scores, or campaigns to deploy based on those changes is unlike any other platform I've used.
- Marketo manages to be extremely flexible and detailed, while keeping the general user interface simple and straightforward.
- Script tokens are an absolutely fantastic layer to Marketo, which allows us to do more detailed personalized content based on several rules or conditions for each lead record.
- I with there were more A/B testing and optimization opportunities for landing pages.
- Drag and drop editing for landing pages that take more of a WYSIWYG approach like Unbound would be fantastic.
- Reporting on A/B email tests is lack-luster. There's no way to export a campaign member list to dig into which version of the email each lead received to model trends in responder types and A/B email performance.
- A more visual workflow tool (similar to journey build) could be helpful, even if it's just a planning tool. Writing smart campaigns to manage the directions users go when they are engaging (or not engaging) with a content stream.
Marketo is more mature than HubSpot, and easier to use and more flexible than both Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Journey builder is a nice feature of SFMC, as you can create decision trees that relate to content pieces, wait times, etc., that are all relative to the individual lead's progression through a nurture campaign, but you need someone to be dedicated to utilizing that tool and managing those streams. Marketo is much better at allowing those kinds of activities and managing overlap and audiences via their segmentation rules that are built right within Marketo, instead of inside SFDC.
Journey builder is a nice feature of SFMC, as you can create decision trees that relate to content pieces, wait times, etc., that are all relative to the individual lead's progression through a nurture campaign, but you need someone to be dedicated to utilizing that tool and managing those streams. Marketo is much better at allowing those kinds of activities and managing overlap and audiences via their segmentation rules that are built right within Marketo, instead of inside SFDC.
Learnings & Advice
Marketo has truly enabled our marketing organization to execute more sophisticated and targeted campaigns without the need for additional headcount. The platform is unbelievably flexible, planning your workflows or desired logic before building is helpful for planning complex automated campaigns.
Email script tokens in Marketo allow for almost endless personalization using deep integration with data in custom objects in your CRM. With some development work, we have created extremely complex emails that use a combination of ~12 variables and selections within each to keep individual contacts in our CRM updated on the latest things that matter to them most. I've never worked in an automation platform that allows that level of complexity without completely building the solution on top of the infrastructure of the platform. Marketo has it baked right in.
Marketo is a blank canvas, which can be both good and bad. Without discipline, instances can become disorganized, cluttered, and finding things can be difficult. My advice is to be strict with making conventions and folder structures from the start to keep everything well organized!
If you have a question, the Marketo community had likely answered it. It's possibly the best resource there is for troubleshooting specific things in Marketo. The community is well supported and very active! I myself am an active participant of the community almost every day!
Get creative. The core functionality of Smart Lists is incredible, but only if you think creatively about how you can read and manipulate your data in order to enable your instance. Getting good at advanced filter logic, and using choices in flow steps creatively can usually serve to consolidate many one-off programs into a single task in Marketo.