Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 6
Author: Doug Sumner

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marketo is the primary email management platform here and is used for both marketing content and current state-of-business content with our clients. In addition to providing the platform for email customization/personalization, we are currently using it for the nurture/engagement program functionality, and Marketo forms are integrated with our website as part of the lead funnel.

Pros and Cons

Email management: This is the primary use case, and while I'm not directly involved in designing and sending emails, Marketo handles all of those needs for the organization.
Lead forms: Marketo is also primarily responsible for form fills and generally handles this function well.

CRM synchronization: While Marketo does sync to our Salesforce.com instance for sales and marketing purposes, it can only interact with standard Salesforce objects. We have significant customization in Salesforce, which means less-than-perfect workarounds to get Marketo to interact with all of the custom objects.
Filtering and report: While Marketo does have fairly robust UI reporting tools, I find they are missing some key features for me as a database and API user. For example, you can't search or built a report based on a person ID, which makes validation information between systems difficult.
The API is pretty severely lacking in some very important areas. Some information is not exposed to the API at all, and some of the information that is uses only IDs rather than names, which is a headache for building reports.

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

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

Marketo is used for most of our prospect and client-facing communications, with primary goals of lead generation, upselling, and client satisfaction/retention. I'm only involved in reporting though, and not the best person to review its efficacy for these functions.

Alternatives Considered

Marketo was already a fully established tool when I joined.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

More than 5 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it's important to mention that I am not one of the primary users of Marketo at our organization for the purposes of interacting with its primary use case of emails and the lead form management. My perspective is as a supporting user responsible for integrating data sources, such as Marketo, to our integrated reporting database and I primarily interact with Marketo through the API. My general perception is the Marketo performs well in its primary use case, but for our organization's needs, the API is severally lacking in key pieces of functionality that, in some cases, require time-consuming manual workarounds to get simple information and sometimes prevent certain reports entirely. Overall, Marketo is functional, and many of my issues may not be encountered in a less complex organization.

Marketo from an API User Perspective

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo