Why Marketo Works for Us

We use Marketo across multiple business lanes that support our domestic and international marketing efforts. From lead capturing and scoring, to internal communications, B2B, and B2C efforts it is a multifaceted tool that is one of, if not the most flexible tool in its industry.

Marketo has brought both professional and personal success. It has helped to define and put into action a qualifying multi touch attribution strategy, implement multiple data sources, and work rather fluidly with salesforce to support sales initiatives with MQL. Marketo's strongest functionality is that if its not available in the core product, it likely has a workaround available via its robust industry leading API set to insure that no matter what you need, it can be accomplished. This does come with the caveat that its not the most user friendly interface to new users.

Lessons to learn quickly is to bring in a qualified marketo certified expert to insure you are establishing your instance successfully on day one. This will save you a lot of headaches down the road when you have proper data mapping, data management, integrations, deliverability management etc all running seamlessly rather than parsing through duplicate data and half baked programs.

Marketo has a robust API set and webhook capability that allows you to harness the power of various out of the box integrations, custom integrations, and workarounds to meet your needs. This can be as "easy" as referencing custom objects in Salesforce CRM or as advanced as injecting java script to run custom commands. It can have custom html stored in json format in fields to populate or hidden fields to capture data behind the scenes. The opportunities for customization are extensive. An example of a customization can be integrating with a wordpress plugin to push and pull subscriber data from a blog to insure a weekly email send contains custom curated content from the blog that is related to their subscription preferences.

Insure you establish your instance successfully and pull in a marketo certified expert or partner agency. If this is not an option do extensive research in the marketo community to review best practices. This initial setup or deep audit of an existing instance will save you headaches down the road by implementing sound data, measurement, and security practices early on.

The marketo community is arguably one of the best or at the very least in the same league as the top digital communities out there. There is a huge audience based that is constantly sharing their ideas, best practices, and questions for everyone to learn from. Marketo's product and support team are also active in the community and can help you solve a variety of issues. I have had countless questions answered and even hopped on calls with other users to bounce ideas off of. Its a great community!

Over communicate with internal members that could be impacted by your marketo setup. Internal communication and team alignment are huge when working with such a powerful tool like Marketo in your lead funnel. Sales, marketing, and IT need to all be in lock step on how the system is functioning to insure success by all teams. This is not just a marketing product but a team product that impacts revenue in a positive manner when used correctly.