Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 8
Author: Michael Weissberg

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marketo is primarily used by the Marketing department for engagement and one-off campaigns, as well as lead management. We have a 1:1 back and forth sync with Salesforce so both can be used for lead management. In short, marketing inputs all leads that we acquire into Marketo, sales inputs all of theirs into Salesforce, and both have the same full database. We market to both our leads and the sales team's leads, as well as manually inputting additional leads we get from other sources for follow-up.

Pros and Cons

It's very easy to see lead acquisition from multiple sources with ROI, so it can be calculated where marketing budget is best spent
Engagement streams are easy to build, with multiple if -> then conditions built into a stream for easy segmentation, getting the right message to the right person at the right time
There's a massive amount of partners and integrations available - if there's something you want to do that isn't baked in, there's probably a provider that has a software for that
Marketo's Revenue Explorer dashboard has a built in cost per new name tracking, also easily divisible by program, for easy deciding.
The ability to segment users by any combinations of fields is intuitive for emailing, syncing to an ad partner, or just viewing who you have in your database.

There's a bit of a learning curve. Without significant training, even an experienced marketer might stumble around a bit. There's a lot of different ways to do one thing, but it's not always clear what best practices or implications may be for one way over another.
There doesn't appear to be an easy baked-in way to de-duplicate records (though it can only send out one email to duplicates). That's something we're dealing with now and may have to use a third party.
The ideal would be some direct integration into ad platforms - if it's there, I don't know it.

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

Product Launches
Upsell
Cross-Sell
Customer Service
Prospecting / New Business

We're trying to get the right message to the right user at the right time - whether it's a new product launch for people who have been previously interested in the group or just nudging someone along we haven't heard from in a few months, or even a welcome email, nobody gets ignored and everyone gets a relevant, personalized message based on how they interacted with us and what we know about them.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Eloqua

Oracle Eloqua seems to work well with a lot of what we're trying to do, but it works best in an all-Oracle ecosystem, which we were not at the time of signing on. So far, it appears that Oracle plays well with Oracle and some others, but Marketo plays well with just about everybody. Admittedly, the Eloqua drag and drop page building seems to be a bit more robust, but we're using entirely custom builds, so that's a bit irrelevant. The biggest difference is that Marketo plays very well with custom opportunity objects in Salesforce. When we last evaluated Eloqua, either it didn't have that ability or didn't play as nicely.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Likelihood to Recommend

Marketo is great at segmentation and lead nurturing - if you want to create a thousand nurture streams for every possible condition, you can do that with some robust tools. However, there doesn't appear to be an automated way to do this. You would have to personally create one thousand nurture streams. (But there's a partner that can do something like this.)
Reporting is easy and built-in. There's thousands of partners in a very wide network. Any use case or crazy thing you want to do, like automate ad buys so you don't need your own DSP, there's someone that has done that and can do that for you. It's not just Marketo itself you'd be buying into - it's a vast well-resourced ecosystem.

Lessons for Success

It's important to have a good partner, have a strategy, and make sure sales and marketing are on the same page. For a long time, we used Marketo just as an email batch program - not looking at cost per acquisition, not looking at cost per acquisition reporting, and not utilizing the fullest extent of Marketo's capabilities.

Special Use Case

We recently created a series of smart lists to AB test audiences based on a few variables, segmented the programs further looking for UTMs, then synced them to various ad platforms for use in acquisition and messaging campaigns. Using Marketo audiences outside of Marketo is only a few clicks.

Onboarding Wisdom

Definitely sync yourself up between marketing and sales - find the sales goals and cascade them down into marketing goals. Get sales invested in marketing metrics, agree on who you want to target and the messaging, and talk to them about the possibilities and what they want to do.

Learning from the Community

A little bit of personalization can go a long way. I had a great conversation with someone completely outside of my vertical, not even B2B, but they told me how a minor personalization change doubled their results, and it was a quick, easy, painless, and free implementation. Personalize! You can!

Tips & Tricks

Play around with reporting and Revenue Explorer. Theres a ton of stuff in there that is pretty easy to use, pre-built, and can automate reporting sent to key stakeholders about key performance indicators.

Marketo is an entire ecosystem

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo