Marketo will get you there but not in style
February 18, 2021
Marketo will get you there but not in style
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Analytics
- Marketo Sales Insight
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
We use Marketo as the enterprise marketing solution for our subscription sales, ad sales, and marketing teams. It hosts our inquiry forms and gated downloads, newsletters, targeted mass mailings, and client and prospect auto-responders.
- Marketo's very flexible and robust when integrated with Salesforce. We have the power to control almost every aspect of a send from a nuanced/dynamic audience list to scheduled and triggered flows customized by business hours and recipient time zone to detailed tagging and reporting capabilities that make auditing and understanding impact a breeze.
- The bugs are bizarre, ubiquitous, and varied. We've run into everything from having CSV downloads totally misaligned with the records that appear in lists in Marketo to having a sync completely disabled for over a month with no errors because we changed a field type in Salesforce. The Salesforce syncs are particularly finicky and difficult to troubleshoot. Dealing with Support is maddening, and it generally takes over a week for them to grasp the issue and another to actually resolve it, if they every do. Usually we're able to figure it out ourselves using the forums before we get any kind of helpful response.
- Searching has gotten minimally better with the updated interface in 2020, but without a standard naming and foldering convention (and we've been using Marketo for a long time, so some of our legacy configs are all over the place), it can be impossible to locate old resources.
- The icons and standard features are unnecessarily unstandardized, without readily available help or hover text to make learning easier for a new or infrequent admin. Some of the auto-save/auto-draft functionality makes clicking the wrong thing scarier than it needs to be, too. Overall as a generally tech-savvy person who uses lots of different platforms in their daily admin work, I confidently think the Marketo interface leaves a lot to be desired in usability.
- Product Launches
- Upsell
- Cross-Sell
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
- Other
Primarily used to drive growth with free newsletters and targeting informational mailings, with a secondary heavy use for client management cadences and drip campaigns to engage opted-in prospects. In every case we're able to leverage most of the detailed information we have available through the integration with our CRM to set up campaigns as effective and nuanced as the imaginations of our marketing and sales operations staff.
250,000 to 1 million