Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 9
Author: Courtney Grimes

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a marketing technology consultancy that is platform agnostic but chooses to work extensively with Marketo—both as our in-house platform for marketing automation as well as with our clients. Internally, we use Marketo to drive demand generation, digital marketing initiatives, customer journey management, nurturing and prospect acceleration. With our clients, we deploy, configure, optimize, integrate and implement Marketo in a with a diverse group of companies, including B2B/B2C/B2B2C and verticals such as higher education, financial services, transportation, consumer goods, and SaaS platforms among others.

Our clients use Marketo in different ways, but some key business outcomes we see folks commonly tackle with Marketo include:

Message-based marketing (email, SMS, push notification), both in ad-hoc and structured nurture varieties.
Web content and lead ingestion via forms and landing pages.
Customer journey measurement/tracking.
Event management (webinars, live events, virtual events).
Sales enablement through marketing messaging (Marketo Sales Insight/Engage).
Targeted digital advertising through connected Marketo data.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Flexibility of use - compared to other marketing automation platforms, Marketo is fairly open-ended in how a user can approach a business problem and tackle it. This can be both a positive and negative attribute based on a team's digital skills, however.
Marketer control - Marketo is the only platform I have worked with that can be set up to delegate creative control and asset creation to a marketing department without needing much handle-holding from technical users: marketers can create professional-looking emails, landing pages, forms, and campaigns without much asisstance after an inital ramp-up period. The setup is also quite flexible, allowing marketers to take creative liberties as desired.
Sales enablement - The sharing of messaging, ranked prospect lists, information on prospect behavior and other parts of the Marketo Sales Insight platform are second to none.
Integrations - From a developer's point of view, working with Marketo is more straightforward than other marketing automation platforms, something reflected both in work built directly for a company and the wide variety of platforms that integrate with Marketo.

Cons

Reporting - Although Marketo reports can answer surface questions and some canned concepts, drilling down and customizing reports is still problematic and is best served through big data and BI visualization.
Maintenance - The system is not very forgiving for non-technical users working at scale and often requires intervention as performance degrades over time.

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

Product Launches
Upsell
Cross-Sell
Customer Service
Lead Management
Prospecting / New Business
Other

Number of Contacts (List Size)

More than 5 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Likelihood to Recommend

Marketo particularly excels in companies where there is either some in-house technical knowledge or a willingness to partner with an agency to customize setup—the freedom and frustration of Marketo are that is not prescriptive in how you handle business procedures—there are even multiple ways to do something as straightforward as sending an email! Those who need customization will find quite a bit here, but smaller companies, those with fewer resources or less mature marketing departments may find the initial effort needed to be daunting compared to other marketing automation providers.

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

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Flexibility at Scale to Tackle Your Company's Digital Needs

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