Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 9
Author: Matt Davidson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marketo is our primary marketing operation platform. It is used as our first line of defense for all things leads, demand gen, and marketing automation. Its main users are in the Marketing and Operations departments. Marketo is used for all of our lead scoring processes and automation flows. Another main purpose of Marketo is to act as a filter for duplication and incomplete records from reaching sales processes.

Pros and Cons

Expansive and customizable.
User-friendly for both Ops and Marketing.
Capable of handling very complex interactions and stacks.

It would be nice to have an expansive view of all active triggers and flows.
Some reporting functions can take quite a bit of time to execute if they use too much data.
Some error codes and mistakes can take time to uncover/solve.

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

Lead Management
Prospecting / New Business

The main focus of Marketo for us is to capture lead information and create the right records for the sales process. We also use it for creating and executing prospecting/nurture lists to target based on criteria that our marketing team deems valuable as part of our target audience. Lead management is really important for us being a mostly inbound organization.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, HubSpot CRM, Salesforce CMS and Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)

Marketo is really expansive and customizable. One of the toughest parts of choosing software that will be the backbone of your marketing and operations departments is the fact that you have to account for all things you need right now, as well as prepare for future growth plans. Marketo covered all bases while providing security for all of our lead and customer-sensitive data.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say that you'd have a hard time finding a better overall system for most circumstances. Marketo is very customizable, and you can spend a lifetime learning all of its use cases and features. The larger the organization's needs, the better that Marketo will be a fit. The only time I would not advise Marketo is for smaller organizations that might not be able to derive full value from the software. It can be very expensive.

Expansive, Customizable, and Relatively Affordable

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo