A Complete Marketo Guide:
Are you struggling with understanding your customers and increasing conversion rates and sales? Are you wondering if there is a one-stop solution that not only helps you personalise content but also automates campaigns, and targets only those leads who qualify to be your potential customers? What if you had a tool that gives you an in-depth idea of customer behaviour, their demographic features, things they like about you, and also the ones that make them bounce back quickly? If this got you reading, then don’t stop, for we know what you are looking for!
What is Marketo?
Of course, apart from doing all of the above, Marketo is a SaaS (software as a service) platform that helps B2B and B2C marketers with their digital marketing by assessing and automating marketing tasks through multiple channels including email, video, mobile devices, website, and so on. The areas where this platform will help you grow exponentially are lead management, email marketing, customer-based marketing, mobile marketing, and consumer marketing.
Marketo is one of the best-in-class software that has solutions to every digital marketing need right from acquisition to advocacy while providing tangible and measurable results! So, doesn’t matter if you’re a high growth business or a big enterprise, Marketo serves every customer well. Some of the big companies that use Marketo are - Panasonic, CenturyLink, Charles Schwab, Fujitsu, and so on.
Who Can Benefit From Marketo?
Marketo is an all-encompassing software and thus, there is not just one team in a company that uses it. Broadly, there are three categories of people who use Marketo. These are:
- Inbound Marketers: To build campaigns and operationalise nurturing strategies.
- Sales reps: To get insights into customer behaviour and have better control over lead management.
- Digital Marketing executives: To co-relate the investment made with the ROI generated.
There are several industries that are benefiting from Marketo’s wide range of personalised products, such as IT, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, higher education, and media. Most of the Marketo’s clients are US-based companies (63%), 7% are in India, and 6% in the UK.
Speaking in terms of industries, Marketo has generated a big lot of happy customers across a wide range of industries all around the world such as Computer software & hardware, Retail, Health Care, Financial services, Staffing and recruiting, Information Technology, Construction, Management Consulting, and so on. Well, this is not an exhaustive list and there are many more sectors that use Marketo extensively.
Why B2B Businesses Use Marketo?
B2B businesses are content-focused that require a lot of understanding of what the customer wants or the prospect expects. Their needs and expectations guide one to strategise campaigns and create personalised content to drive in more prospects, nurture qualified leads, close them into customers, and retain them. All this is fabulously managed by a good marketing automation platform. Marketo offers a multi-feature automation platform that can be simultaneously used by the marketing and sales teams. Here are a few reasons why we love Marketo:
- Simple and easy to use.
- Sophisticated and flexible.
- Does not require you to have HTML skills to create email templates.
- Simplifies email marketing by enabling users to send pre-defined action, time and steps-based emails.
- Easy integration of email and social marketing.
- Email testing to test various templates and find out the ones that work best for you.
- Drag and drop interface with a lot of pre-designed templates to choose from that make landing page creation a smooth task.
- Quick and smooth profiling of potential leads through data capturing forms.
- Allows to customise and tweak the landing pages and later on converting them into other social media pages.
- Helps bring together the marketing and sales teams through easy CRM integration with leading platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft.
- Offers a comprehensive lead management process by gathering data based on pre-defined criteria, sales feedback, lead score, and prospect behaviour.
- Good analytics system that provides information based on a customisable landing page and email performances.
Marketo Features - Why We Boast About it So Much!
Marketo delivers its outstanding services through various world-class features. The marketing features of Marketo are as listed below:
- Marketing automation, Email and SMS marketing, Web activity tracking
- Lead scoring and lead generation, Email and campaign management, B2B marketing
- Bulk social media posting, Lead management, Inbound marketing
- Event marketing, Omni-channel strategy, Content and email personalisation
- Real-time sales alerts, Consumer-based marketing, Cross-sell and up-sell
- Loyalty marketing, Measuring and optimising ROI, Optimising Ad Spend, Budgeting
- Marketing calendar, Predictive analytics
All these features are outstanding but Marketo is not the only one with such great services. Let’s compare Marketo’s features with its alternatives that are available to businesses.
Marketo vs HubSpot
HubSpot is also a buzzword in the marketing sector, which is an all-in-one platform that provides marketing automation solutions to organisations across the world. There are no single criteria to decide which one is better. It all depends on your company size, budget, expertise on-board, priority of use, and the stage of growth your company is in.
Marketo and HubSpot both are easy to use and intuitive platforms. Both deliver services that focus on a multi-channel strategy for marketing. Marketo and HubSpot both have some in-built features, such as lead nurturing, A/B testing, event-based triggers, email marketing, optimisation tools, monitoring and analysing data, and tracking and managing social media marketing efforts.
Despite all these common functions, Marketo and HubSpot are indeed different in some aspects. Though Marketo provides a range of features, some of them need integration with other platforms, such as Salesforce. HubSpot, on the other hand, provides an all-in-one package with built-in CRM. Marketo provides services to enterprises and thus, if you have a dedicated marketing automation specialist, you’ll get the most out of the platform. However, if you’re getting your hands on marketing automation for the first time, HubSpot might prove to be the best option. Marketo’s primary focus is on lead nurturing, and hence, it’s great for B2B companies. However, HubSpot works best for both, B2C and B2B companies as this software works mostly in inbound marketing.
Marketo vs Pardot
Pardot is also one of the alternatives available in the market to businesses, which delivers effective lead capturing. It offers to build customised landing pages and auto-synching customer data. Users have found Marketo’s landing pages a little rigid that need personalisation and improvement.
Pardot doesn’t have the ball in its court when it comes to customer retention. It offers drip campaigns by keeping the prospects in touch with the product and gradually educating them till they convert. However, unlike Marketo, Pardot offers a limited range of email blasts and newsletters and the users have to build them from scratch.
Marketo doesn’t need IT support in sending personalised content and building automated campaigns to drive leads. Marketo’s good user interface and a more personalised approach to email marketing give it better rating than Pardot in terms of customer retention. Pardot also lacks at enabling the users with A/B testing, which is only available for “pro” users and not the “basic” or “standard” ones. However, with Pardot, users can build and manage all their inbound and outbound campaigns in one place. It can also personalise, send and modify email messages based on contact engagement. Marketo also offers great user experience with sending relevant content the moment a visitor interacts with the user website, landing pages or social shares.
Pardot’s pricing is quite straightforward. Marketo, on the other hand, is a little expensive for companies that are in the initial stages of their growth.
Marketo vs Salesforce
Salesforce is also one of the strongest contenders and most popular CRM solutions in the market. Both Marketo and Salesforce work best for enterprises. It’s not a rigid boundary but Marketo was developed initially for B2B companies and Salesforce for B2C. While Marketo provides easy setup and navigation, it’s one of the shortcomings in the case of Salesforce. Also, with Salesforce, certain add-on purchases are needed for it to work to its maximum potential. However, talking about data storage, Marketo stores everything in a master database and works best when data is not huge. In Salesforce, data segmentation is done and it gets easier to manage large data but it needs technical expertise.
Salesforce has Journey Builder with a drag and drop interface that helps in bringing cross-channel communications, such as mobile, email, social media, etc to a single customer journey and simultaneously track all the multi-touch campaigns. In the case of Marketo, Engagement Programs are mostly focused on emails and require custom setups for including other channels.
Since Marketo was built on the Salesforce platform itself, most of their features are similar except that Marketo has CRM integration with Salesforce. However, Marketo offers additional integrations with MS Dynamics, Oracle Eloqua, SAP and so on.
One big advantage that Salesforce has over Marketo is that it supports multiple languages. On the other hand, Marketo supports only English.
Marketo Training by Transfunnel - Complete Marketo Integration and Support
At Transfunnel, we have world-class Marketo consultants who stay by your side and help you achieve your business goals by working closely with your marketing and sales teams. You can leverage the full power of Marketo with us as our experts support you at each step of its integration, data migration, and custom integration until it’s complete and also provide Marketo support through and through.
Our experts will help you build a roadmap through their outstanding technical and strategic guidance to let you measure MQL and ROI-based performance. By closely looking at your current marketing tech stack, we will help you plan out ways to improve current processes and deliver new ones to fast track your company’s growth. Apart from this, we also provide Marketo training for you to be able to work with it more efficiently.
Get in touch and learn how to get the best out of Marketo with us!
