Marketo Review: Features, Pros, Cons & Best Alternatives

What is Marketo?

Marketo is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses manage and automate various aspects of their marketing efforts. as a matter of fact, it is the most used connected engagement or email marketing tool.It is also one of the best open marketing platforms ever designed.

In addition, this tool specializes in lead management, campaigning, digital marketing/advertising, reporting, real-time personalization, marketing automation, account based marketing, lead scoring, Return on Investment marketing, email marketing, and event marketing, among other things.

Any serious or successful marketer needs this tool to initiate their day’s proceedings.

Marketo’s Pioneering Role in Marketing Automation

Gartner and Forrester, analyst firms, both recognize Adobe Marketo as a leader in the industry, and customers confirm as much. It is important to note that this mostly deals with B2B transactions, but can easily handle B2C as well.

This engagement platform has laid a proper foundation by partnering up with Chapman Bright, which uses MarTech to drive customers to your doorstep and promote the growth of your business.

This extensive level of success has made this CRM integration tools a market leader in ABM (Account Based Marketing) and B2B (Business to Business).

This marketing analytics tool automation features are royalty standards, and they function to give you total control over your marketing and sales departments through the afforded ability to integrate them. This marketing automation platform is especially popular for its scalable and collaborative capacity.

Marketo Engage allows you to duplicate your campaigns and globally cooperate in the Center of Excellence. Its wide-ranging contact profiles that have a lengthy history of engagement mannerisms allow you to easily increase your customer base and rapidly grow your business. Besides, on an individual level, you get to learn a lot about effective ways through which you can leverage that data to attain cutting-edge personalization and engagement breakdown.

It will provide your business with anything it desires, and give you complete governance over all your processes. If you are new, no need to worry. it still allows you to learn on the job through their very detailed and effective templates.

As you grow and become better skilled in marketing automation, you can easily transition to using more advanced and customized features.

Reasons why you should choose Adobe Marketo

• It has simple, and easy to understand/navigate CRM Integrations
• It is an impeccable choice for ABM
• You get extensive customization and segmentation options
• Access to the highly profitable contact profiling option
• It is a scalable platform
• It generates excellent lead management and outstanding sales flow
• Adobe Marketo offers you a platform for multi-channel marketing
• It allows marketing return on investment provenance reporting
• It is ideal for businesses looking to expand internationally as it offers tools for international marketing
• Since it specializes in B2B, it has the perfect features for running large campaigns
• It spearheads the marketing technology front with such tech as the Gartner Magic Quadrant
• Users have paid access to various extrapolative AI features
• Although its features are quite advanced, they are really easy to use, making it ideal for all users

Adobe Marketo’s Features

this Software offers a wide variety of highly useful features, all of which allow you to provide your clients with appropriate content at the actual time. If you are looking to explore cross-channel marketing, this CRM integration tool has the exact automation tools you need.

With Adobe Marketo, you can easily increase engagement for your business as well as the conversion rates for all your ads. Their robust reporting analytics allow you to establish the value of your marketing strategies.

Keep reading to understand all the valuable features you have access to when you subscribe.

1. Cross-Channel Marketing

Marketo Engage allows you to synchronize engagement through various channels. You can do this individually or through online engagement. It allows you to always know your customers’ progress from the moment they start their journey with you. Cross-channel marketing allows you to connect with your customers in a relevant manner each time.

2. Sales and Marketing Alliances

Integrating your sales and marketing departments effectively allows you to create a seamless, customized experience for your customers. Strategically employing marketing tactics such as customer insights, prioritized leads, and intelligent content automatically boosts your sales through increased conversions.

3. Content Intelligence

Content intelligence features allow you to develop content that assures customers that you understand their needs as they arise. This feature utilizes real-time mannerisms collected from customer profiles both when online and offline. The platform also gives AI features that allow you to pinpoint and provide the finest and most effective content to give your customers scaled personalized experiences.

4. Data and Insights

Marketo efficiently provides you with all the relevant data to help you establish the value of each campaign, channel, and content. In turn, this allows you to understand your marketing efforts in detail, and how they contribute to your business growth. As such, you can easily know the ones that are not performing and figure out a way to improve them.

Marketo Pricing

It is important to note that this marketing analytics tool does not offer free trials. You also have to understand that to access certain pricing information, you must have subscribed to Marketo’s membership plans as the platform does not avail all its pricing information to the public.

When subscribing to this Software, it is important to understand that their pricing is based on the product quantity within a marketing database as opposed to using it.

Spark Membership Plan

It is a basic membership plan, and it goes for $895 monthly. It allows no more than 10,000 contacts. Other factors available to users on this plan include:

• Email Marketing
• Customer Interaction Engine
• Communication Limits
• SEO
• Marketing Calendar
• Webinars And Event Marketing
• Lead Generation/Management
• CRM Integration
• 5 Sales Insight Users
• 5 Marketing Calendar Users
• Social Boost

Standard Membership Plan

This plan goes for $1,795 a month, and it offers all the features of the Spark membership plus more. Other features offered on the Standard membership include:

• A/B Testing
• Advanced Dynamic Content
• Progressive Forms Profiling
• Revenue Analyzers
• Revenue Cycle Modeler
• Extended Integrations and API
• Marketing Program Analyzer
• Advanced Lead Scoring
• 5 Additional Sales Insight Users

Select Membership Plan

It is the most expensive plan, and it goes for a whopping $3,195 monthly. With this plan, you get all the features available on the standard membership and then some. The extra features accessible on this platform include:

• Advanced revenue analytics
• Role-oriented permissions and access
• Time-series data warehouse
• Advanced email analytics
• Advanced custom reports
• Social sweepstakes and referrals
• An additional 10 sales insight users (to make a total of 20)

Pros and Cons of Adobe Marketo

The designers behind it are simply geniuses! Pardot is the platform’s lead competitor. and most users prefer it to Pardot due to Marketo’s usability and its design. Keep reading to figure out all the advantages and disadvantages of using this Software.

Pros

• Ease of use and intuition: It must be the best platform of its kind in terms of usability. Although its user interface may be a tad bit unimpressive in terms of aesthetics, it is quite well organized with clear labels that make the platform quite easy to navigate.
• It is easy and fast to set up: Its ease of use makes quite the safe choice in terms of the time it takes you to learn and start using it effectively. Its competitors are quite a bit more difficult to implement and run.
• Excellent integration with Salesforce: Marketo and Salesforce assimilate beautifully to give users the most productive features. The initial integration process can be quite cumbersome and time-consuming, but once it’s done using the synced version becomes quite effortless and tenfold productive.
• Outstanding customer support and community: The customer support team at the market is extremely efficient and works effectively with users to avail total and complete support. A very active pool of users helps in creating support by assisting with campaigns or any arising technical issues.

Cons

• Deficient landing page/form builder: Adobe Marketo was originally designed for lead management, and even though the tool has over time undergone a series of updates, its landing page builder remains cumbersome and hard to use.
• Reports and analytics: Most users find that its analytics and reporting capacity needs major improvement. You always need extensions to help you develop reports that should be easily generated with the click of a button.
• Precipitous hikes in pricing: Upgrading from one Marketo membership to another is quite expensive. The three pricing tiers are valued at $895, $1,795, and $3,175 monthly. As such, it proves quite expensive to pay an extra $900 to $1,400 monthly just to access a few more features.

Conclusion

Any top rated product will reflect high charges for its tools. this CRM integration tool is an excellent option for your business. If you can afford their charges, it is the best platform for all your marketing and engagement needs. You will get value for your money with this platform!