Marketo

Avantages

Marketo is a great marketing tool that allows automating repetitive marketing activities. I am using Marketo since 4 years.
We use it to improve our lead generation process and we integrated Marketo with Salesforce. We are using Marketo Forms embedded on our website to get the personal information, track the activities done by leads and notify the sales reps. We are able to track campaigns (members are synced to Salesforce campaigns) and lead sources to measure effectiveness of marketing activities. We created a series of program templates that can be replicated to manage events, webinars, newsletters or email blastings. Cloning the templates all our marketers can start a new program easily customizing just the details, without errors and saving time. I want to mention a powerful feature that I use daily - smart lists - they allows to target a specific audience and continuously been fed with new members that match the criteria.

Inconvénients

- Integration with MS Dynamics: we started with MS dynamics CRM and the integration is not seamless as the integration with Salesforce. We had unresolved issues for 3 years until we decided to move our CRM to Salesforce.
- Consulting Services: we started our project with direct Marketo consulting services but our project manager was not responsive and we had the impression that each PM had too many customers to manage and do not have the time to dedicate the right effort to each project. For this reason, we moved our project to an external consultant firm and the results are much better.
- Support: the response time of the standard support is not quick and usually it takes some days to resolve it.
- Landing pages: it is missing a validation workflow on the thank you pages (to be sure that those who will access the thank you page have successfully filled-out the form included in the landing page)
- Reporting: the reports are very basics

Avantages

Marketo is consistently ranked by analysts as a top automation solution, and I can finally see why! As a marketer, it’s simple to use but also robust for program management from creation to reporting. On a day-to-day basis, I use Marketo within a B2B environment and we wouldn’t be able to function without it. It’s a key tool for my marketing strategy, one of our most used functionalities is cloning programs, tactics, and campaigns. This allows us to make fewer mistakes and maintain continuity from user-to-user, an efficiency for my nimble, growing team.

What I’d like to see is continued product improvement driven by customer voices. I’m excited for the new Mercury UI to debut in 2018!

Inconvénients

As an admin within a small team, the uptime to full functionality can be like climbing a steep hill on a cold day. Simply put, learning this tool can feel cumbersome if it’s not your only responsibility. Luckily, the Marketing Nation Community combined with the product docs and Marketo University prove to be helpful resources for growing your knowledge. Within a year I was able to confidently learn the tool, contribute new ideas, and become a Marketo Certified Expert (MCE).

Service/support - Compared to other automation platforms, there seems to be limited support and desire for accounts to have a 1:1 communication on a regular basis with an account rep. We’ve recently been assigned a new rep and we're making progress.

Avantages

Marketo is the "Porsche with a manual transmission" of marketing automation platforms. It's full of cool features and is incredibly powerful. The strengths: 1) Workflow flexibility that is unmatched by other platforms. Building complex data management, lead scoring, and organizational processes (such as lead routing) is very achievable in Marketo. They basically give you every function they can possibly code and let their customers piece them together as they like (more on this in #7). 2) The engagement programs, primarily meant for lead nurturing, are truly best-in-class. It's a little bit of an adjustment at first, but it really simplifies complex nurturing tracks and saves marketers from putting prospects into multiple tracks at once (which happens more than most admit) 3) The vision is impressive. Marketo has a clear, long-term vision that they continually deliver on. Examples being advances in personalization, ABM, ect. I'd bet on them to lead the way (or buy the way via Vista ) to whatever is next in marketing automation, such as AI or machine learning.

Inconvénients

I love Marketo. But, there are some things I don't love. 1) The landing page builder has made improvements but still, leaves some to be desired. Unless a template available for import matches what you'd like to do, you pretty much have to hire a developer to build your templates. 2) The reporting is somewhat overhyped. They REALLY sell revenue cycle analytics, but in reality, it's tough to implement and even tougher to accurately maintain. Since data is essentially timestamped and not stored in an external record (i.e. like Salesforce has for a campaign member), if you mess it up, you're SOL. Marketo's advice to me was "don't mess up."

Avantages

- UI Usability & design.
- Tracking of programs from creation to execution, including success and engagement across programs like webinars, events, web pages and multi-step or channel campaigns.
- Complex criteria for building out nurture programs based on targeted parameters and real-time interactions.
- Global partitions and platform internationalization.
- Real-time personalization

Inconvénients

- Search functionality could be a lot easier with keywords, or created date. I know the platform just updated to search based on URL, but it could use a bit more work to make it easier for newer employees who have tons of legacy items to sift through.
- Speed of platform is sometimes frustrating - it can be great at times...other times it lags beyond belief, when pulling lists, approving emails and landing pages, and just jumping from campaign to campaign. Sometimes I have to even restart or refresh the platform just to get it moving again.
- Campaign calendar layout is not intuitive and leaves marketing teams resorting to a Google Calendar or similar feature to track campaign sequencing and deliverables. It's usable if you spend some time in it, but it definitely could be better.

Avantages

I like almost everything about this amazing marketing automation tool. Some of the things that I like most about it is the following:

1. Marketo customer support team is very responsive and always available to help, this is something I like the most.

2. Marketo's simple and easy user interface is amazing and very easy to use. This is the second thing that I like about it.

3. Marketo's amazing dashboards and reports features are the 3rd things that I like most about it. It is very informatics.

Inconvénients

I want to share one thing that I dislike about it and that is Marketo is a little bit expensive compared to other tool but I must say that it is worth to spend on it.