Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 9
Author: Melinda Cormier

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our field marketing and demand generation teams use Marketo to manage our global leads and marketing campaigns. Marketo helps us automate many processes including triggered email follow-ups, email nurturing (drip campaigns), lead scoring, lead status changes, alert notifications for our business development and sales teams, campaign management, database segmentation and more.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Smart Campaigns - batch or triggered campaigns that use smart lists and flow steps
Segmentation - quickly and easily set up segmentation rules to use across campaigns, lists, and more
Integrations - native integrations and custom webhooks/APIs are easily accessible and enable connections to other critical business systems

Cons

Reporting - there is still room for quite a bit of improvement here which means we're often exporting data and working with it in Excel
Custom fields and field types - once a custom field is created, it can only be hidden. If you want to remove it completely, you must contact support. Also, there are no formula fields which makes scoring a bit more cumbersome.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot and Pardot

Marketo was already in place when I joined, but having come from using HubSpot and Pardot, I can say that Marketo has superior capabilities.

Likelihood to Recommend

Marketo is well suited for mid-sized to enterprise organizations that need more advanced capabilities around automation rules, integrations, and lead management. However the system can quickly become overwhelming and disorganized with multiple users unless there are explicit guidelines around best practices for naming conventions, folder structure, cloning, and channel use.

Learnings & Advice

Lessons for Success

Marketo has helped us increase our MQL conversion rate and overall engagement rate with prospects and customers, as well as identify specific activities that trigger follow up tasks for our BDRs and sales teams to act upon. The real-time notification helps ensure we meet our SLAs for engagement and task completion.

Initial setup is probably the most difficult part, as there's quite a bit of journey mapping that occurs between the website and Marketo. Your team must agree upon what's important, how to classify "Interesting Moments", and scoring (if applicable).

Comments

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Steep learning curve, but worth the investment

Modules Used