Marketo is the choice for creating Epic Experiences for medium-to-large scale enterprises!
November 27, 2019
Marketo is the choice for creating Epic Experiences for medium-to-large scale enterprises!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Analytics
- Marketo Web Personalization
- Marketo Sales Insight
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
Marketo is used in a variety of ways at Walden University. First and foremost it is our center for customer communications and engagement across channels: email, SMS, and personalization. We use Marketo to communicate with both current and prospective students, as well as alumni. Beyond communications and nurturing, Marketo is used by our Sales organization to send messages, add customers to targeted campaigns, and view customer behaviors via Marketo Sales Insight. Additionally, Marketo is the centralized entry point for leads where we capture, scrub, score and qualify leads via a custom process we designed and deployed. Marketo is also our hub for a huge roster of marketing tech, database, and reporting application partners.
- Marketo is very simple to learn and affords quick time to value and a simple UI for those that are used to less capable or more tech-reliant competitor platforms.
- Marketo plays very well with Salesforce CRM in my experience, but be cautious with how you customize your Salesforce data model or architecture, as those decisions can have implications for Marketo.
- Smart campaigns and smart lists are an invaluable resource. They're like mini workflows at your fingertips, requiring no SQL or coding language. Just drag and drop; the possibilities are nearly endless! Example: In an email send campaign, drag and drop a step to exclude customers that have previously received an email related to a different campaign. The platform will recognize these leads in real time and remove them from the flow. It sounds elementary, but from experience, it is not easy, or not possible, to do things like that in other platforms.
- Little or no reliance on IT for support. Marketo allows Marketers and ops team members to administer the tool without needing developers.
- Marketo Sales Insight - I don't know where we'd be without this! Our organization relies on it heavily to send nicely-formatted templated emails to sales prospects, and quickly remind prospects of events and webinars of interest to them with just a few clicks from the sales owner.
- As easy as the UI is to use, it is a little dated. The good news is Marketo Sky UI is just around the corner and available in certain areas of the tool today.
- Analytics and reporting areas are very B2B centric, requiring workarounds for B2C applications. It's also a little slow loading, but that is on the roadmap to be improved in the coming year.
- The REST API will turn away certain kinds of posts with an error code; an example is a lead post where there are already existing duplicates with a matching email address in the database that drives a 1007 error and the data is not captured. I think it would be nice if the data would go to a staging table or something, just so it lands somewhere within the platform so admins could debug and mitigate issues.
- Product Launches
- Upsell
- Cross-Sell
- Customer Service
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
The primary goal for our Marketo implementation is customer engagement, like driving prospective students to apply and start courses at Walden. The second goal is retention, like creating a positive customer experience that drives students to finish their program. The third goal would be lead capture and qualification, and the fourth would be providing tools that allow for alignment between Marketing and Sales. Marketo fulfills all these areas very well for us.
Marketo works better than HubSpot for large enterprises and B2B. I don't have direct experience with HubSpot, but those I know that have used it really liked it and found it easy to use and fully-featured, if not very scalable.
I don't have direct experience with it, but Eloqua is very full-featured, and requires a ton of tech support. It's also on the higher-end of the pricing spectrum.
I used Salesforce Marketing Cloud for a year in 2017. Its main claim is its "direct" integration with Salesforce. They market it as a single platform. This is simply not true. My experience with Marketing Cloud is it is still just a rebranded version of ExactTarget. There are areas of the tool that were still accessible but no longer functioned. Integrating with Salesforce was a nightly batch, and Salesforce Support "didn't recommend" any more frequency than that, where Marketo has a near real-time native integration with Salesforce. Journey Builder was nice, but was missing some key flow actions. Managing events and webinars required a ton of custom Apex code.
I don't have direct experience with it, but Eloqua is very full-featured, and requires a ton of tech support. It's also on the higher-end of the pricing spectrum.
I used Salesforce Marketing Cloud for a year in 2017. Its main claim is its "direct" integration with Salesforce. They market it as a single platform. This is simply not true. My experience with Marketing Cloud is it is still just a rebranded version of ExactTarget. There are areas of the tool that were still accessible but no longer functioned. Integrating with Salesforce was a nightly batch, and Salesforce Support "didn't recommend" any more frequency than that, where Marketo has a near real-time native integration with Salesforce. Journey Builder was nice, but was missing some key flow actions. Managing events and webinars required a ton of custom Apex code.
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