Marketo

Marketo is a Marketing Automation Software will help you effectively manage your Marketing channels like Landing Pages, Emails and Social Media and nurture your leads before they are sent to CRM. You do not need to invest in multiple marketing software if you are using Marketo. Even a user with limited HTML skills can use the drag and drop visual editor of Marketo to design elegant emails and landing pages. Marketo has enough templates to suit any business need. For the email campaign customers can be segregated into multiple segments based on users preferences, demographics etc. and with automation you can choose which email will target which segment and when will those emails be sent for effective lead nurturing. On Landing page forms you can also add an option of filling up the by using social media profiles for your customers. This will allow you to capture rich data about your customers which can be used for enhanced customer segmentation. If your Marketing Automation software cannot talk to your CRM then there is no point in using it. You will have to do extra efforts to get the data to your CRM and back. Luckily Marketo offers native integration (bi-directional) with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics Online, and certified integration with Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics on Premises, NetSuite, SAP Cloud and SugarCRM. With these integrations, it's possible for your sales team to view which marketing campaign has touched the customer and device their sales pitch accordingly and marketing team can analyze which campaign and channels are performing best. Most Marketing Automation Softwares offer lead scoring, Marketo does one better and offers multiple lead scores for the same lead. Lead scoring is dynamic and goes up and down based on customer activities. . Marketo offers a library of showing email and landing page performance, web activity, and lead performance. They also offer campaign performance results with customizable metrics, influence reports showing the impact of marketing campaigns and a revenue modeling capability that reviews the sales and marketing process at a high level. Marketo standard and fully customizable reporting will help you track and analyze marketing and sales metrics to calculate the ROI of various Marketing campaigns.

Marketo is one of the most expensive Marketing Automation Software and is priced very high compared to Hubspot and Pardot. This makes it tough for most entrepreneurs, small businesses and start-ups to implement Marketo. There is a steep learning curve and you will need to hire a lot of expert professionals in order get best out of software capabilities. You can customize most reports but for analyzing you will need to download the data and push it to a BI tool or use Excel. Marketo offers seamless integration with Salesforce, however, this integration is not without its issues. If I do not want to sync few leads with Salesforce, Marketo won't allow that. Also, if a lead is deleted from Marketo and not Salesforce, the lead will be synced back to Marketo once it is updated in Salesforce. If you want to use Marketo Calender you will have to shell out additional money. Marketo is too much Salesforce-centric and ignores other CRM solutions like Zoho CRM which are quite popular in SME segment. You need to use third party tools for native integration between Marketo and Zoho CRM. It also offers very limited support. If you are not implementing it through a channel partner, you will be hard pressed to find support when you need it.

Marketo is one of the leading Marketing Automation Software in the industry today. It may be expensive for a small and to some extent medium business, the company's is growing at an exponential rate. If you are already using Salesforce then you need to be on Marketo as it is known for tight integration with Salesforce CRM. It works perfectly if you stay within the constructs of the tool. Lack of customization limit what you can achieve with Marketo. It is quick to deploy and once you get used to it, you will be able to effectively manage your Marketing activities.