Marketo Review: Your Must-Have Marketing Solution (2023)

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Converting customers is tough.

You need a lot more than just an awesome website and a great product.

With so many options to choose from, today’s customers need to be convinced that your solution is the best one on the market.

So, how do you show them how amazing you are?

Simple. Use a comprehensive marketing tool.

Marketo is more than just your answer to easy email marketing. It’s a comprehensive solution designed to cover all the components of your consumer journey.

Wherever there’s a touch point where you’ll need to connect with your customer, Marketo steps in to make the interaction count.

So, is it the right tool for you?

Let’s find out.

Marketo’s Top Features

marketo review - homepage

Marketo is an automated marketing software program intended to provide answers to virtually every marketing need. While most people refer to Marketo as an email marketing tool, it offers a wide variety of services, including:

  • Mobile marketing: Tailor your campaigns to meet the behaviors and needs of your audience members.
  • Consumer marketing: Deliver super-specific campaigns to your customers to meet their individual needs and expectations.
  • Customer base marketing: Create campaigns that reach your online audience via social media, mobile apps, and email.
  • Lead management: Attract leads and nurture them all the way to purchase.
  • Marketing AI: Create content based on artificial intelligence and analytics.
  • Analytics and reporting: Get to the bottom of what’s helping your advertising campaigns to thrive!

So, who is Marketo for?

Companies that want to automate, track, and optimize all the various components of a complete digital marketing campaign.

Let’s take a look at each feature in closer detail.

Email Marketing

Let’s start with the basics, email marketing.

As Marketo states on their website, people receive about 2,900 marketing messages each day. If you want to stand out amongst the clutter, then you’re going to need a solid automated strategy.

Marketo gives you everything you need to build one-on-one in-depth relationships with your customer via email, using a smart 360-degree marketing database. The database allows you to see all of the information you have about a customer through their interactions with you on social, mobile, web, and email.

Once you’ve got the complete information you need about each of your potential clients, you can use those profiles to segment your audience into specific groups. That means that it’s easy to create relevant and highly personalized content to each group.

So, what can you do to delight your email audience?

  • Create email campaigns in a drag-and-drop interface
  • Send triggered emails based on audience behavior in real-time
  • Optimize your campaigns with A/B testing
  • Track your ROI with simple dashboard and reporting

Consumer Marketing

The customer experience goes way beyond email these days.

If you want to connect with your target audience, then you have to communicate with them in virtually every touchpoint you can think of.

“Consumer Marketing” is Marketo’s automated marketing solution, designed to help you listen to engagement, deliver relevant messages, and gather information.

You can listen to your customers at every stage of their buyer journey through an “omnichannel” strategy for attracting and acquiring customer interest. Marketo also makes it easy to retain customers with continued conversations via social media, mobile apps, email and more.

Here’s what the “Consumer marketing” module gives you:

  • Omnichannel communications on mobile apps, web, email, and social media
  • Automated listening tools to capture insights about your brand
  • A single contact management platform to help convert customers into advocates
  • Analytics and reporting that includes insights into audience engagement.

Account-based Marketing / Customer Base Marketing

Marketo is all about improving your marketing relationships.

That doesn’t just mean building conversations with new customers.

It also means selling more to your existing customers and developing their loyalty too.

With the account-based-marketing services, you can validate your campaigns using artificial intelligence, to ensure that you’re targeting the right customers with the best content. There’s also the option to deliver account-level personalization – perfect for B2B marketing.

  • Maintain a seamless omnichannel experience for your customers
  • Use AI to personalize web experiences, ads, mobile experiences, events and more
  • Measure and optimize campaigns from a single dashboard
  • Get direct Marketo support to execute targeted campaigns in a matter of days

You can also use the data you gather in your account based marketing to ensure that you’re selling more to your existing audience.

Marketo offers lead scoring insights across firmographics, demographics and behavioral information so that you can target your best growth opportunities. When you know exactly where to focus your efforts, you improve your ROI and reduce the amount of time your sales teams wastes on unsuccessful campaigns.

All the while, you’re gaining a better brand reputation by delivering amazing customer experience.

Mobile Marketing

marketo mobile marketing

Let’s go mobile – after all, all your customers are already using their devices to go online.

Around 5.1 billion customers have access to an internet-connected mobile phone these days.

More often than not, your users will prefer to connect with you over mobile in today’s fast-paced marketplace. Fortunately, Marketo can help with that.

Through a complete mobile marketing strategy, Marketo ensures that you can reach individual customers wherever they are. You’ll be able to:

  • Create your own app and reach loyal customers wherever they are
  • Gather in-depth insights from your mobile efforts
  • Deliver push notifications in real-time
  • Increase retention by connecting with customers on multiple touch points

You can even deliver more compelling mobile experiences by sending location-relevant messages based on where your customers are.

Using beacon and geo-fencing technology, you can ensure that your customers are always aware when they’re close to one of your brick-and-mortar stores.

Lead Management

As a complete solution for marketing automation, Marketo wants to ensure that you can connect with your audience wherever they are.

That doesn’t just mean tracking your customers across different channels and devices.

Marketo also allows you to adapt your strategy based on where your audience is in the buying funnel.

When your people are at the top of the funnel, you can attract them deeper into your campaigns using state-of-the-art landing pages that you drag-and-drop into creation. Marketo also offers options to create progressive forms, inbound and outbound programs and more.

With lead management you can:

  • Develop and qualify leads with personalized nurturing campaigns
  • Score your leads for your sales team
  • Convert customers with custom-built landing pages
  • Gather customer context and combine it with CRM insights from Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce
  • Improve your promotional efforts by measuring what matters with reporting

Even better?

You can scale your campaigns however and whenever you choose.

You have complete control.

Other Digital Marketing Features

Aside from the options already mentioned above, Marketo also offers a host of other solutions designed to make your campaigns more effective.

For instance, thanks to their Artificial Intelligence investments, the company can offer intelligent insights into how to connect with your audience.

How about predictive content, for example?

Marketo can crawl through your website and automatically identify the assets that are right for your audience based on their experiences with your company so far.

Machine learning and predictive analytics ensure that you get the most relevant content in front of your audience at the right time, boosting your ROI and results in the process.

Other digital marketing features include:

  • Vertical-focused marketing campaigns for healthcare, technology, media, manufacturing, financial services, and more
  • Pricing and packaging support
  • Social media marketing
  • Digital ads and display ads
  • Web marketing

Marketo also offers “Sales Engage,” to combine the benefits of better marketing with better sales too!

The Sales Engage system works by empowering your sales reps with the best information to enhance their inbound and outbound engagements. This way, you can easily find the best prospects, keep prospects engaged, and coordinate the connections between your marketing and sales teams.

Marketo Analytics

Marketo has a lot to offer.

However, one of our favorite features by far has to be its analytics.

When it comes to giving you an in-depth view of what’s going on with your audience, Marketo does go above and beyond. The attribution solution measures every touchpoint in your buyer journey so you can determine which of your campaigns and channels are driving the highest possible ROI.

With Marketo analytics, you can finally get your dispersed marketing data out of different silos like “social” and “mobile” and bring them together into the same environment.

What does that mean?

Well, less time spent on tedious report structuring for one.

It also means you can:

  • Map and measure the entire customer journey with in-depth insights
  • Adjust your reporting models to suit your needs
  • Infuse your analytics with artificial intelligence

Marketo Ease of Use

So, how easy is it to use all of these features?

Well, compared to some other tools, it’s going to take a little getting used to.

If you’ve only ever worked with email marketing strategies before, then it can be overwhelming to have a complete set of tools suddenly available to you.

For more complex things like account-based marketing and predictive marketing, you might need a little support from the service team – just to get you started.

The good news?

Most of the basic marketing solutions, like building landing pages, email campaigns, and online ads, are incredibly easy to use.

They generally come with drag-and-drop functionality, so building a campaign takes minutes, rather than hours. Plus, once you’re ready to see how your campaigns are performing, it helps to have all of your reports combined on the same page.

When you need a complete picture of what’s going on with your target audience, Marketo is a great choice.

However, for people who are new to omnichannel marketing campaigns, don’t be surprised if it takes you a while to figure out how to make the most of this tool.

Marketo Pricing

marketo pricing

Marketo is not a budget marketing tool.

If you’re looking for something cheap and cheerful, look elsewhere.

Although you can find different packages to suit your individual needs, you’re going to need to pay a decent amount to get this many features in a single package.

Importantly, the prices for Marketo aren’t available on their website, so you’ll need to contact the sales team. From what we’ve learned, there are three basic tiers to choose from:

  • Basic at $895 per month – access to most main features including sales intelligence, calendar, social marketing, SEO, and so on.
  • Pro at $1,795 per month – access to various additional features including predictive content, campaign analysis, and digital ads.
  • Elite at $3,195 per month – access to everything in Pro, including a revenue modeler, success plan analyzer, retargeting features and more.

If you want to use all of the features that Marketo has to offer, then you’ve got a big investment ahead of you.

It’s not the best tool on the market for small companies on a budget.

Typically, Marketo will be best-suited to bigger b2b companies that want to upgrade their analytics and advertising strategies.

Despite this, Marketo does claim to have packages that suit any size of company.

If you’re willing to contact the sales team, you might discover options that we don’t know about.

Marketo Integrations

Like many of the best marketing tools on the market today – Marketo plays well with others.

Most companies know that they need to be able to offer integrations with other leading tools if they want to attract customers these days.

After all, we all rely on a vast range of CRM systems, website builders and more.

Just a handful of the tools you can integrate with Marketo include:

  • Salesforce
  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • WordPress
  • NetSuite
  • Oracle
  • Hootsuite
  • Eventbrite

There are dozens of options, so take a look before you sign up.

Customer Support and Assistance

marketo customer support

When it comes to customer support, Marketo offers a range of options.

You can leave the company a message by sending them an email, or you can connect to the instant chat option – although it appears to be primarily manned by chatbots.

Additionally, there’s the option to get in touch over the phone. Marketo provides local phone numbers for a range of locations, so you shouldn’t have to worry about over-spending on toll charges.

You can also try reaching out to the team on their Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter pages.

For DIY self-service, Marketo has a comprehensive guide to their software available. There are also plenty of resources available on the Marketo website to help with things like understanding your marketing metrics or upgrading your content marketing.

The resources page includes:

  • Articles
  • Free training
  • Cheat sheets
  • Guides
  • Success kits
  • Webinars
  • Videos
  • Live demos

Everything you can think of for getting more information.

Conclusion

Marketo is a pricey way to upgrade your marketing efforts.

However, if you’re looking for a comprehensive marketing automation solution, complete with things like predictive strategies, artificial intelligence, and in-depth analytics, it might be worth your investment.

Marketo offers one of the most comprehensive analytics strategies available for people in search of omnichannel advertising opportunities.

Unfortunately, it won’t be affordable for everyone.

Have you tried this software yet?

Let us know in the comments below!

Rebekah Carter

Rebekah Carter is an experienced content creator, news reporter, and blogger specializing in marketing, business development, and technology. Her expertise covers everything from artificial intelligence to email marketing software and extended reality devices. When sheโ€™s not writing, Rebekah spends most of her time reading, exploring the great outdoors, and gaming.

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