Marketo Reviews

As a consultant, I help clients create marketing campaigns, send webinars, and do data massaging when leads come in through the website or other sources like LinkedIn campaigns or Google Ads. I've also helped them set up clean life cycle management, lead scoring, and all of those things. 

Basically, doing all this to get them better revenue and deliver good quality leads to the sales team.

There are some default integrations available, like GoToWebinar and Zoom for webinar hosting platforms. You can integrate LinkedIn and Facebook, so you can create LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms in LinkedIn, and the data will flow directly into Marketo. Apart from that, you can also create custom integrations using webhooks. 

Organizations that provide support with Marketo can help with custom integrations using webhooks. If not, there are a few integration tools, like Zapier, that help integrate Marketo with tools that don't have direct integration.

Marketo is user-friendly. It gives you smart campaigns, and it also has an engagement map now. It's easy to see which campaign is calling which campaign. It was kind of difficult before, but now it's easy, just like HubSpot or Pardot, where you can have a chain-like structure connecting one to another. The engagement map provides that now.

In terms of email, it's pretty good at handling customization and templates. We can put in different variables, so even someone without coding knowledge can create and develop emails that look good on different browsers. They are fully responsive emails. So if they are not touching anything on the template, it's pretty good and handy. In terms of that, Pardot or HubSpot don't provide that functionality.

The engagement map was an area that needed improvement. Earlier, if you were creating multiple programs, it was difficult to see how they connected to different campaigns. The engagement map helps visualize that, so that's a good improvement.

They have also introduced dynamic chat. Earlier, we had to use third-party tools. They have been creating and introducing new sub-apps that are easy to integrate with Marketo. So they are doing that. For example, using Bizible, we can also track the source. It's pretty handy in Marketo.

There is a learning curve. If you know strategy but don't know Marketo, that will be a problem. If you know Marketo but are not good with strategy, that will also be a problem. You should be good at both to get more out of it.

It's been five and a half years as of now.

It's rare that it breaks down. But when it does, they have a status URL where you can check the issue and which regions it's happening in. They are pretty updated with that. 

And if anything breaks down, they are pretty quick to fix it, usually within 24 hours. The occurrence of these types of things is pretty rare, like maybe once or twice in six months.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

It is a scalable solution. No issues with scalability.

The technical support team is good at providing details. But sometimes, if a knowledgeable person is facing an issue, the support team relies too much on documentation. 

They are not always that knowledgeable. But if you escalate the issue to a senior person on the support team, they are pretty good. 

The first person you get in touch with may not be able to resolve your issue, but if it's complex, you need to escalate it.

So, there is bit room for improvement in level one support team.

Neutral

I have been supporting mostly all the major marketing automation tools.

The initial setup depends upon the task and requirements, and it also depends upon the person working on it. It depends on their knowledge and how handy they are with the tool. 

If you know strategy but don't know Marketo, that will be a problem. If you know Marketo but are not good with strategy, that will also be a problem. You should be good at both to get more out of it.

Each organization gets its own credentials and interface, and you can access it on Google or any browser.

There is ROI. It is worth the money. 

The pricing is not cheap, but it's not that expensive either. If we look for cheaper solutions, there's HubSpot and Pardot. 

Marketo was a little more expensive than HubSpot and Pardot, but it's pretty good for mid-scale companies and small-scale companies. So, it's a good fit for mid-scale businesses.

You need to go in and dig around the system to understand how you can leverage the features and functionality.

Marketo is one of my favorite marketing automation tools, so ten out of ten.

• Can segment the database in a number of ways. We can target leads based on where they came from, what they did in the emails, and what they did on the website.
• Automation ability: Allows us to build marketing flows that send automated emails based on user actions.
• Lead scoring: Helps us find the most relevant leads based on source and behavior.

We have a large database that targets many different types of users for many different types of events. Marketo helps us easily segment and target the appropriate users for the relevant events. Automation also helps us to instantly send relevant offers to registered participants.

• Marketo is still very slow. Despite promises over the years to improve this, we are still waiting for a reality when it takes a few seconds to load large lists of data.
• The landing page building is still a very non-intuitive and a non-user friendly process. Marketo would be wise to adopt an easier approach, similar to what unbounce offers.
• More proactive support from account managers would be nice, especially in problem-solving.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

I would give customer service a rating of three out of 10.

Technical Support:

I would give technical support a rating eight out of 10.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We have found it very challenging to measure our ROI through Marketo.

With Marketo as the core strength, I have led numerous Marketing Automation projects from end to end. I have analyzed business requirements for MAP implementation, configured database setup, worked on SSL implementation, handled system integration, coded Email and Landing Page Templates, configured analytics setup, and led more than five hundred campaign projects.

Marketo is the backbone for our company's Digital Marketing operations.

The most valuable feature of this solution is Smart Campaigns. It is very easy to use and very powerful too.

Marketo should give more power to the users for data manipulation. Marketo sees data in terms of Leads and Campaigns, which is fine, but there are other perspectives of data too that can and should actually be utilized. I compare this to Adobe Campaign which allows the manipulation of data from different angles.

My organization uses Marketo since around 2013 - 2019, 6 years in total. I myself contributed since 2016, so that's around 3.5 years.

Very stable and solid.

Very scalable and easy to use.

They are very helpful and supportive, but at times I found some communication troubles.

We use it in our company, which is a market research company. In terms of the version, I don't think there are multiple versions, so it's the latest one that I have.

The main feature of Marketo is sending out emails, so that would be the most valuable feature.

It could be more scalable.

I have been using this solution for six years.

So far, it looks stable.

It could be more scalable. Currently, 20 people are using it in my company. We are definitely going to expand its usage in the future.

Their technical support is all right.

I was not a part of it, but from what I've heard, it was complex.

It is expensive. We have a yearly license.

I would advise others to ask for expert services from an agency. I would rate Marketo an eight out of 10.

Marketo makes it easy to stay in contact with our base of customers, prospective customers, and partners. The ability to quickly build and automate complex scenarios, create dynamic lists, and analyze campaign results is invaluable.

With the increasing sophistication of anti-phishing and filtering software, we have seen a number of messages that return link clicks – even though links were not actually clicked.  A simple indicator of this, is when Marketo analytics show that every individual at a particular company has clicked on a link (usually the same one) in an email.  These “phantom clicks” can make it difficult to estimate the effectiveness of a particular email or piece of content.

This issue has been discussed extensively in the Marketo community, and the larger ESP community as well.  While there are several temporary works arounds, I would like to see a more proactive attempt at a long-term solution.  I do recognize that this problem is not limited to Marketo, and it certainly has not been a deal-breaker for our continued use of the platform.

Three years

I joined the organization after deployment, but am told it was a relatively smooth process. As with any automation solution, the real hurdle isn't in the deployment, it's in optimizing processes to take advantage of the product's unique capabilities.

Marketo is a solid automation platform with fantastic stability.

The scalability of the solution is virtually unmatched. We've expanded our operations (and database) greatly over the past few years without a hitch.

Customer service is prompt, friendly, and generally helpful.

Pricing depends on the size of your database and feature set.  Our experience with the renewal process has been frustrating.  Marketo bakes a substantial price increase into each contract which has required renegotiation every year.

Great ease of use creation for campaigns. Marketo enables the use of templated landing pages and emails to make it easy to create messages and landing pages.

The available analytics are sub-par.

No.

No.

Customer Service:

This is where Marketo falls short. Their customer service is awful.

Technical Support:

OK>

Yes. Switched with a new company.

Straightforward.

In-house and vendor.

Yes.

Email drip campaigns

Automated customer outreach from sign up to upgrade

Easier to create/modify graphic driven templates

Need automatic 404 reporting for links included in content

5 years

Takes time to setup and manage

None

None

Customer Service:

8 out of 10

Technical Support:

8 out of 10

Manual solution with Constant Contact - easier to manage multiple campaigns in Marketo

Architecture for the brand and organizing landing page domains/URLs took time

In-house

Saves .5 man/year

Varies

Hubspot

Pardot

Hire a Marketo certified consultant prior to install and launch.

- Relative ease of use - Advanced capabilities for closed-loop lead management - SFDC sync

- Can be more than what you really need - Wish it had a better user interface - Needs integration with marketing resource management