If you’re looking to enhance your overall sales, marketing, and customer service processes while saving time and money, you’ve likely explored different types of marketing automation software. Established in 2006, Marketo aims to simplify, streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows to boost efficiency and drive revenue growth.
With this Marketo review we will find out how powerful marketing automation can be.
Do What Gets Results
We all know about the 80/20 rule by now. In short, 20 percent of our hard work gives us 80 percent of our results. Marketo seeks to help you know what 20 percent is working best for your business and then helps your business optimize and automate these processes and channels. Marketo’s marketing automation software includes many different functions to support inbound and outbound marketing, such as email marketing, landing page & form creation, lead management, CRM integration, social marketing, event marketing, marketing budgeting, and marketing analytics. It also has convenient cloning features so you can easily copy successful emails, landing pages, and even entire programs.
Marketing Software that is Easy, Powerful, and Complete
Marketo offers many features that will help improve, streamline and automate your marketing. Let’s go over a few of the features:
- Analytics – Without useful reports and analytics, you won’t know which programs are most effective at hitting your goals. It’s imperative to know which programs are performing the best, and which are bringing in the most qualified leads and converting them to actual business revenue. Marketo offers all that plus standard reports on email, landing pages, campaign performance, web tracking, and more, as well as the ability to fully customize reports.
- CRM – Customer relationship management integration is an essential component to successful marketing automation, allowing tracking and reporting on the entire sales cycle, from first contact with potential clients/customers. What’s more, if you make a change in your CRM or Marketo it will sync and make changes in both areas, ensuring consistent data and cutting down on duplicate data entry. Currently integration is available for a wide variety of CRM tools like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Oracle and Sugar CRM.
- Email Marketing – You can easily design emails with a drag and drop interface that anyone can use. All the lovely scheduling features of other email marketing programs are also available along with great reporting features so that you know if it’s working or not.
- Landing Pages – Landing pages are critical – without an easy to build landing page to capture incoming leads, the best programs can ultimately flop. Landing pages are critical. Like the email feature, its drag and drop interface makes creating excellent landing pages and forms easy and fun. Marketo offers various testing abilities and personalization features that other landing page templates do not allow, making this feature topnotch.
- Lead Management – You’ll be able to score and nurture leads based on demographics, behavior and engagement, product of interest, and much more. For instance if a lead downloads a white paper, the system automatically notices and can then can deliver a targeted followup relevant to that topic. You can also set up alerts to let sales reps know when a lead shows buying behaviors and even send automatic emails from your sales reps.
- Social Marketing – Today every marketer knows the importance of including social media into their marketing channels. Marketo makes it easy to get a social lift on every program with their easy to use social marketing features. You’ll be able to conduct referral campaigns, sweepstakes, contests, and other social campaigns to keep your database engaged and promoting your message for your.
The Basics: What Does it Look Like?
Marketo looks clean and visually pleasing. But, it’s also user-friendly in that it’s not hard to find what you need. The visual editors are especially awesome, so creating emails and landing pages is simple and they look fabulous.
General Marketo Lead Management Marketing Activities View
Social Dashboard View
Marketo Sales Insight View
Reporting Analytics Program Cost View (your reports can be customized)
It’s An Awesome Investment
Marketo is an investment, but those who have budgets that allow the expense will not be disappointed. This software provides everything any marketer would want in a marketing automation software. It does what it says it does, and it’s simple to set up and easy to use. The advantages of having Marketo are enormous, and while it’s not cheap, the price is right in line with comparable software. While medium to large sized businesses will likely see a good return on investment it can be a bit harder for very small businesses to get the full impact from software as robust as Marketo. But, if you use a CRM and are trying to optimize your marketing spend and processes, then Marketo cannot be beat.
Will it Fit your Budget?
The barrier to entry is always the budget, but if you have a good marketing budget and want to make the most of it, and can start out around $1200 a month to use all the features and get all the benefits from this marketing automation software then it’s for you. If you’re a sole proprietor or a very small business it probably isn’t for you.
Is it For You?
As mentioned previously if you already use Salesforce or some of the other CRM’s mentioned then yes, you should give Marketo a test. At the very least, experience their terrific Demo with knowledgeable sales staff who can help you see how Marketo can benefit your organization.
Ratings: ease of use 5/5, features 5/5, value 4.5/5 and ease of deployment 4.5/5