Small business? RUN AWAY. Marketo will do you zero favors.
March 06, 2019
Small business? RUN AWAY. Marketo will do you zero favors.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Analytics
- Marketo Web Personalization
- Marketo ABM
- Marketo Ad Bridge
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo ContentAI
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
I replaced another totally antiquated marketing automation platform with Marketo in order to take advantage of all of the bells and whistles that Marketo offers. Primarily, we were using it for outbound email marketing campaigns, lead scoring, lead intelligence, landing pages, as well as client communications. It was being used solely by our marketing team but on behalf of the entire organization. In theory, it should have solved a lot of business problems and given us profound marketing insights. That was really not the case for a small, time-constrained marketing organization.
- Excellent at helping marketers create very intricate/complex lead cycles with variable tokens
- The Marketo community is MASSIVE and there is a ton of support
- Integration with critical platforms such as Salesforce, and really ANY CRM with a multi-directional sync
- Delivers automated lead delivery and sales visibility
- It's really expensive and out of reach for the majority of small businesses with lean budgets or bootstrapped companies
- It's overly complicated - if you have a lean team and without a technical resource who is very well versed in the Marketo language, forget it
- Unless you are a big company with greater resources, including developer/engineering resources, you will likely not be able to take full advantage of all that Marketo has to offer, which means you are overpaying for something you could easily get from another platform
- Product Launches
- Upsell
- Cross-Sell
- Customer Service
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
We used Marketo for two focused areas - lead generation as well as delighting the customer. And it was not always about the upsell and cross-sell. It was also about down-selling when the client did not really need everything they thought they did. Or, if we could see that they were financially struggling before they discontinued services, we would instead offer them free for a while or put them in a more suitable product. These two things, bringing new customers in and then nurturing them was the heart of what we used this tool for.
Overall, I think Marketo is overpriced, complex, and not user-friendly. Their customer service was atrocious, so thank goodness we had the robust Marketo community. Their turn over rates for the person managing our account was gone every, so we were constantly having to retrain a person on who we were. I ended up dropping Marketo in favor of Pardot which lightened our load as a team significantly. It's user-friendly, anyone can figure it out, and it had a more accessible price tag.
25,000 to 100,000