Marketo for all your marketing needs
Updated October 04, 2019

Marketo for all your marketing needs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Global Enterprise

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management
  • Marketo Sales Insight

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Currently, we are using Marketo for our corporate marketing efforts as well as for sending emails in other departments. This helps us send mass emails, integration with Salesforce, social media, web activity, forms and automated messages. Marketing owns the Marketo relationship but the tool is used throughout the organization in different capacities.

Pros

  • Mass Email Sends
  • Database Marketing
  • Forms
  • Salesforce Integration

Cons

  • We have millions of records in our database so the speed of the tool when running reports and lists it can be a little slow and even time out at times.
  • Again with our millions of records, the sync with Salesforce can get backlogged at times and there are no alerts to let the admin know.
  • Customer service is really good but if you pay for premier support from our experience you are not getting anything special. I wouldn't waste the money.
  • Product Launches
  • Upsell
  • Cross-Sell
  • Customer Service
  • Lead Management
  • Prospecting / New Business
The main goal of Marketo for us is to create opportunities in Salesforce for sales. We use forms, lead scoring, campaigns, etc., to qualify leads for sales to call.
From my experience and the way these tools were used, Marketo was much more powerful.
More than 5 million
B2B
Marketo is a very powerful tool and I would absolutely recommend the tool. Saying that I would say that it is important to find the tool that fits your needs. If you only want to send emails I would not recommend Marketo. Marketo is meant to be used in a holistic marketing sense where you can connect multiple tools and software to create a very powerful marketing tool. If you have a medium to large database and want to integrate to get a whole picture of what your clients/prospects are doing I would say give Marketo a try but if you just want a simple email/landing page tool there are cheaper options out there.

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

8.8
WYSIWYG email editor
9
Dynamic content
9
Ability to test dynamic content
9
Landing pages
6
A/B testing
8
Mobile optimization
9
Email deliverability reporting
9
List management
10
Triggered drip sequences
10
9.5
Lead nurturing automation
9
Lead scoring and grading
10
Data quality management
9
Automated sales alerts and tasks
10
6.0
Calendaring
Not Rated
Event/webinar marketing
6
6.0
Social sharing and campaigns
6
Social profile integration
6
7.0
Dashboards
8
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
3
7.0
API
9
Role-based workflow & approvals
6
Customizability
6
Integration with Salesforce.com
7
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

Learnings & Advice

We have seen great successes with automating triggered emails and lead scoring.
One advanced thing we do is creating custom activities in Salesforce using Marketo. Out of the box Marketo is not very flexible when creating tasks with custom fields so we use a webhook and third party service to send over all the correct fields and values and then that creates the task in Salesforce.
Start slow. Marketo is very powerful and can do a lot but knowing the basics will be your best friend now matter what you are doing in the platform. The other thing i look at everyday is the activity section of the record, make sure you know how to access that.
The Marketo community is great! 99% of the time if you have a question someone else has had it and it has been answered in the community. But if the question isn't there, there are tons of other Marketo users willing to help. I usually see an answer to my questions within 1 hour.
If you are new or experienced live in the community. It will be your best friend for learning and figuring out issues.

Using Marketo's core features

  • Channels
  • Programs
  • Email Templates
  • Forms
  • Landing Pages
  • Smart Campaigns
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Nurture
  • Reporting/Analytics
  • The API is a great feature that marketo has. Being able to leverage those features third party features is a game changer.
  • Email templates are huge. Being able to have people work in marketo that don’t have coding experience makes things so much easier.
  • Smart campaigns are great. Easy to use and understand
Webhooks. This features opens up marketo and marketing automation to any/all products that have an api.
The community is incredible. Support can only help you by the boom but the community helps where support can’t on things like work arounds and outside the box thinking.
Ease of use. Their user interface is simple and straight forward. I’ve started teaching marketo to people who have very little coding experience.
The ability to creat a folder sctructure. Having a folder for years or months while being able to archive things keeps things clean and organized

Benefits of using some of Marketo's core features

We track lead sourcing so that we can have the complete customer journey. It is important to us that we know where the lead started so we can look back to see what was our biggest lead generator and what source created the highest quality leads.
Our Marketo instance has channels depending on the goals for the campaign or audience. For example if it a survey campaign we have a survey channel. We have also channels for audiences in case we have an audience specific message.
Using channels allows us to be able to search on specific things fast.
I love their segmentation capabilities. It is super easy to use and to train other teammates. They dont need to know SQL, it is just a simple drag and drop
We segment people by things like campaign ID, State, Salesforce status and if they are opted in.
We just smart campaigns for triggering off thank you emails. We have it set up when someone is added to a list and the campaigns IDs match. If it correctly meets both those rules then it triggers off the thank you email. If it does not then an alert email is sent to certain members of the team to look further into why.
Marketo makes the drag and drop process of setting up campaigns very easy. The user interface is easy to learn and train which is huge when trying to delegate work across the team. As long as the data points are there its very easy.
We do not use Marketo forms. The reason we do not use Marketo forms is because with Ad blocker on Chrome the forms do not work correctly. We use a third party platform to collect email addresses and then send them into Marketo via API.
We mostly use plain text email templates because it feels more personal. We have also seen with heavy HTML templates if the person doesn't download images then they never get the full experience of the email.
We have created a templated version of a plain text template but templates in general provide a quick way of setting up emails by someone who doesnt know HTML or CSS.

Using Marketo

22 - Marketing and our Salesforce team
1 - Marketo experts. I was brought in to manage the Marketo system to make sure we are using it correctly.
  • Sending Marketing Emails
  • Lead Scoring
  • Salesforce Integration
  • We've had to use a lot of third party platforms with Marketo to make sure we have full access to our very custom Salesforce environment
  • We use a good amount of webhooks to integrate with our backend systems
  • Engagement streams
  • Using Salesforce data instead of pulling lists outside of Marketo/Salesforce integration
It gives us everything we need and the only reason we wouldnt would be if another tool came along and gave us more.
  • We have the ability to get leads to sales fast. It is all about timing and we can get leads to the sales team and on the phone with them within 5 minutes

Evaluating Marketo and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
How many integrations they have and how flexible the API is.
I would push harder on the Salesforce integration because that needs some upgrading to keep up with other products.

Comments

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