How to choose between Marketo, Eloqua and Adobe Campaign
Updated October 02, 2019

How to choose between Marketo, Eloqua and Adobe Campaign

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management
  • Marketo Analytics
  • Marketo ABM
  • Marketo Ad Bridge

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Marketo is being used across the organization to segment and target the universe of emailable contacts, as the source of truth for emailable logic (GDPR) and the central intake of new responses. This is email comms (batch, wave, and event). Data collected from activities needs to be shared with our marketing database and contacts need to be taken in from other systems like sales comms, chat, etc. All of these need to be processes that have standard data appends and validation and then predictive scoring for prioritization.
  • Workflow and interface are intuitive to marketers. These are huge from the user perspective to ensure engagement and adoption. I had a user revolt from the last platform. Marketo was accepted with open arms.
  • Love the data tracking at the individual field level. You know when and what the value changes were. This really helps with troubleshooting and when there are unexpected issues with synching or automation. Few other systems have this. Most just have a single data stamp for the entire record.
  • Great partner network that has plugin functionality in Marketo. Largest I've seen on any automation platform. You can easily extend capabilities from a huge pool of partners/products.
  • Data model. Let me synch custom objects (by synch I mean read/write...).
  • Let me define new tables and how they link to existing tables.
  • Let me have more durable fields to manage opt-in status (null, opt-out, opt-in, double opt-in).
  • More control over synch, like an interface to map fields.
  • Product Launches
  • Upsell
  • Cross-Sell
  • Customer Service
  • Lead Management
  • Prospecting / New Business
As with many marketing teams, new logo acquisition is the beginning. We have programs to help onboard new customers and get them into our products and start using. Cross-sell is also core to communication we send. We use it for email comms and audience selection for retargeting on display with Adbridge.
None are perfect. They cater to different needs and organizational maturity. In terms of customizability, Adobe Campaign v7 and Eloqua are at the top but give up some ease of use compared to Marketo. So depending on the needs of the organization (breadth of features and future goals), I could recommend any one of these three. The community and support are best on Marketo which, again, really helps with adoption and entrenchment with the user's base.
Marketo is great for an org that doesn't have complex, mature, custom needs. There are lots of forms with lots of flow steps where you need to update and add a new step is a pain as you have to do it individually and not bulk.

But for a team that won't have many hundreds or thousands of forms and email folders etc., Marketo is very easy. Like Apple... it works well as designed but if you want to heavily customize, Android would be better.

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
8
Dynamic content
7
Ability to test dynamic content
7
Landing pages
8
A/B testing
8
List management
6
Triggered drip sequences
8
Lead nurturing automation
8
Lead scoring and grading
7
Social sharing and campaigns
6
Dashboards
6
Standard reports
6
API
7
Role-based workflow & approvals
7
Customizability
5
Integration with Salesforce.com
5

Learnings & Advice

We were able to roll out to a global team in less than 3 months. As you migrate to a new platform there is a period of adjustment where you learn the new platforms quirks and features... sometimes you find area that are much more advanced or user friendly and other time you find assumptions you had from you previous platform need to be re-examined. Some areas we had to examine:

Data Structure / Synchs - We have alot of custom tables in our SFDC and our previous platform Adobe Campaign took care of alot of the logic for updating values. Re-examine these work flows and shift the automation to other apps. Being a B2B company we had alot of Company specific data and Marketo is centered around Contacts/people... this also need to be rethought as that data is used for targeting and segmenting.

Templates - With more democratized access you will need to make it easier for everyone to be doing things the "right" way... standard templates for look and feel and ways of doing things

User Access - with improved usability there can be a broader user base which is great for productivity but is also means you must think about training and control and mass update procedure as Marketo has a decentralized control philosophy.

Graduated Access levels - this is manual but create levels for users to graduate to... more access has to be earned and quality of work is peer reviewed.
Velocity scripting is a great way to add scale to your work... use it to create dynamically personalized emails for each recipient by pull the content from Custom table in Marketo linked to the Person. In the custom table the content can be populated for that person from an external source in the form of a JSON object... The external source should be used across all channels so that you can have consistent messaging across channels. The Velocity Script in the emails unpack the JSON object extracting the pieces of content it need for this particular email. You will no longer need to have manually created versions of email that are aligned to segments... emails can now we personalized to each individual for true 1:1 marketing.
If you are migrating from another MAP... document all your processes... this will guide a consulting team or you training you will need to execute your migration. This give you a clear migration road map and when you start to run out of time gives you a check list of items that can be moved to another phase. Some processes will need to be completely changed or moved to other systems. This is also a chance to remove some "bad practices" and re-evaluate processes. 3rd part Agency / integrators have wonderful expertise for you to tap into (especially around limitations and processes that need to be moved. I like the 3rd party folks because they will have a broader view that Marketo or the Adobe ecosystem. Make sure the can talk at the detail implementation level not just high level...
It is so wonderful to have a large vibrant community. They are able to fill in cracks that no support team can hope to completely cover in a timely manner. Any thing you might be dream has likely been faced or at least dream by someone else... so getting help is only a few click away and most folks are super helpful and friendly. We got alot of help from a very active member that is one of the authorities on Marketo and Velocity. This is one of the most powerful things about leading platforms like Marketo, Adobe Creative Cloud and SFDC... the users are so active and friendly.
Re-examine all you processes... since you a overhauling your tech... also look at your human processes as they go hand in hand.

Some areas we had to examine (from earlier response):

Data Structure / Synchs - We have alot of custom tables in our SFDC and our previous platform Adobe Campaign took care of alot of the logic for updating values. Re-examine these work flows and shift the automation to other apps. Being a B2B company we had alot of Company specific data and Marketo is centered around Contacts/people... this also need to be rethought as that data is used for targeting and segmenting.

Templates - With more democratized access you will need to make it easier for everyone to be doing things the "right" way... standard templates for look and feel and ways of doing things

User Access - with improved usability there can be a broader user base which is great for productivity but is also means you must think about training and control and mass update procedure as Marketo has a decentralized control philosophy.

Graduated Access levels - this is manual but create levels for users to graduate to... more access has to be earned and quality of work is peer reviewed.