Marketo is all you need to manage marketing activities
Updated December 15, 2015
Marketo is all you need to manage marketing activities
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Standard
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo Social Marketing
- Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
I am using Marketo Marketing Automation for the tracking and coordination of all marketing activities for our North America division. It is also in place with our marketing team in the UK, who are in the process of transitioning to the software. Our Sales team uses pieces of Marketo, like Marketo Sales Insight, for reviewing contact activity prior to contacting a lead to ensure we're not duplicating efforts and to also touch on talking points based on history. It addresses several business problems, like helping to ensure our data is accurate, automating workflows that would otherwise be painstakingly manual, and attributing costs to specific marketing programs.
- Advanced Trigger Campaigns - One of the reasons I first selected Marketo years ago was because I could set up advanced "if/then" statements for my trigger campaigns and their flows. In other software I'd used, each if/then statement had to be in different campaigns, which made organization difficult.
- Tracking - I love that I can get fairly detailed when it comes to tracking without having to incorporate extra code onto my website. For example, I like to keep the main Lead Source field, but then have another field that pulls in a Google Campaign Code that I've set up for specific links. That way, I can always tell how they originally heard about us, while maintaining a record of the most recent campaign they inquired from. All of this can be set up quickly on a Marketo form, whereas this required lots of HTML/Javascript knowledge with other providers.
- Nurturing - The way Marketo has created their nurture campaigns makes it extremely easy to set up. Once content is completed, you just have to add it to the flow and call it a day, whereas in the past, you had to add it to a campaign and hope nothing got messed up in the process. It's practically fool-proof now and you can focus more on the content itself than the logistics behind presenting it.
- There is a steep learning curve. I think Marketo has addressed that pretty well with all the training they provide, but it sounds daunting to a busy marketing team who may be pressured to be up-and-running within days or weeks.
- The price tiers are a bit aggravating, as there is a huge jump from 30k to 100k, leaving anyone who's in the 50-60k range stuck paying a much higher prices for space they may not use that year.
- The Community search could use some improving to help find relevant articles and discussions better. I think Marketo did mention they were working on this, but that was awhile ago.
- Pardot,ExactTarget
It has been awhile since I've used these other services, but I switched to Marketo because others became too cumbersome to maintain. There was too much custom work that needed to be done by developers for what should have been simple, and multiple campaigns were needed for advanced nurturing. They did a lot, but the training wasn't there, so I remember contacting help lines pretty frequently.
25,000 to 100,000
- Email marketing
- Lead nurturing
- Lead scoring and grading
- Landing pages
- List segmentation
- Sales intelligence
- Sales campaigns
- Integration with CRM system
- Integration with webinar system
Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings
Using Marketo
3 - This number represents only marketing team members using the system. Our sales team also uses Marketo Sales Insight within Salesforce for activity and contact history, while people higher up in the organization use data that I've pulled out of Marketo to track campaign and content successes.
1 - A background in web design and digital marketing was extremely useful for me because it made implementation easier. Knowing key marketing terms (ie: being able to differentiate between leads, opportunities, and contacts) really helps when planning any campaign and is crucial for marketing automation. I would also recommend at least some basic analytical skills and a basic understanding of Excel so you can understand data and manipulate it into custom reports outside of Marketo, if needed.
- Lead Management
- Marketing Communications
- Workflows
- Tracking
- Some basic data cleansing. For example, when we first imported our data into Salesforce (which happened at the same time we implemented Marketo), I was able to run a batch campaign to streamline all instances of "USA, US, United States, etc" to just "USA".
- Sending trackable press release emails to prospects thanks to Sales Insight. In the past, I've converted press releases to PDFs or generated emails within SFDC. Now, our sales team can just send what I've already created for our media contacts in Marketo, which saves everyone time and allows for better tracking.
- We're in the process of generating a lot of content, so we're hoping to dive more into the nurture campaigns in the near future.
- I'm looking forward to the day we eventually purchase the real-time personalization add-on.
- More qualified leads passed to sales (automatically thanks to lead scoring)
- Faster data reporting
- Less time analyzing whether or not specific content or a campaign worked