For the B2B marketer, Marketo is the gift that keeps on giving
Updated August 28, 2019
For the B2B marketer, Marketo is the gift that keeps on giving
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Marketo Sales Insight
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
We generally use Marketo as our main email platform, but we also use it for automated email campaigns like marketing funnels, lead/behavior scoring, and online event management. We are Salesforce power-users, so we take advantage of all the SFDC compatibility and functionality frequently.
The marketing team and the content management team are the only two teams in the organization that use or have access to Marketo.
As a B2B subscription-based company, Marketo helps us manage our account-based digital relationships.
The marketing team and the content management team are the only two teams in the organization that use or have access to Marketo.
As a B2B subscription-based company, Marketo helps us manage our account-based digital relationships.
- Automation: whether it's an email welcome campaign, a reactivation campaign, or a traditional drip campaign, Marketo helps us execute.
- Behavior scoring: it's a fairly straightforward process to set up behavior scoring in Marketo and ensure we're sending high-quality leads to sales
- Event marketing: event programs in Marketo make it easy to manage every touchpoint in the customers' online event journey
- Learning curve: new hires can be a bit intimidated by Marketo if they've never used it before
- Proprietary terminology: Marketo uses a lot of in-house terminology to describe software features that might have a more obvious name on a different platform.
- Formal training has a cost: Marketo has some online resources to help people learn how to use it, but if you want to take a class expect to fork over some money
- Product Launches
- Upsell
- Cross-Sell
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
Product launches: helps us promote the new product/service with targeted campaigns
Upsell: we create marketing funnels for existing subscribers to entice them to sign up for a larger subscription package
Cross-sell: we also create marketing funnels for existing customers and encourage them to subscribe to similar, complimentary subscriptions
Lead management: We have a behavior scoring and lead escalation process set up and also leverage Marketo Sales Insight to give our sales team insight into the various touch points along the customer journey
Prospecting/NewBusiness: We often get new lists from attending industry conferences and events and upload these into marketo to target new prospects
Upsell: we create marketing funnels for existing subscribers to entice them to sign up for a larger subscription package
Cross-sell: we also create marketing funnels for existing customers and encourage them to subscribe to similar, complimentary subscriptions
Lead management: We have a behavior scoring and lead escalation process set up and also leverage Marketo Sales Insight to give our sales team insight into the various touch points along the customer journey
Prospecting/NewBusiness: We often get new lists from attending industry conferences and events and upload these into marketo to target new prospects
Pardot is great in that it has deeper integration with Salesforce, but Marketo feels like a more robust platform with more features. It's admittedly been a few years since I used Pardot, but I don't recall it having a specific feature for engagement programs and nurture streams, which Marketo excels at.
25,000 to 100,000
Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings
Learnings & Advice
Marketo has been very useful for us for a variety of activities—most notably automating communications for long-term campaigns such as sales funnels and market research studies. The most important lesson we've learned along the way is to truly consider Marketo's capabilities when planning campaigns to ensure we're taking advantage of the technology available to us on the platform.
Marketo has been a great tool for optimizing our workflow for our market research studies. It's compatibility with Salesforce allows us to create embedded forms on study landing pages that automatically add people to the campaigns we use to manage the studies. This also increases the ease of sending communications to members of the research studies, as we simply have to reference the SFDC campaign to create the distribution list.
Read up on the basic documentation that Marketo offers to get familiar with the core features, navigation, and user interface. I find that by googling the questions I have an making sure to include the word Marketo in the search terms often brings up the articles, Community posts, and resources that I need to find an answer or troubleshoot.
The Marketo Community has been extremely helpful to me when trying to learn new features or launch a new type of campaign. It's often the first place I go if I run into an issue or are trying to troubleshoot a problem. I have relied on community posts while working on cleaning up our database, launching engagement streams, and trying out new features.
The email templates in the design studio are great but I have found them very difficult to customize without an advanced knowledge of HTML and CSS—if you want to use one of the provided templates but envision changing the design dramatically, be prepared to ask for help from a developer.