Marketo

I was blown away at the powerful feature set Marketo offers. Such massive time saver with its unified, centralized suite of tools available in a single place. With the ability to track, coordinate and alsert multiple team members as well. This software can help you with a CRM, personalized email marketing, social media channels, inbound marketing, lead management, event coordination and team calendaring with marketing automation using customiable landing pages and contact forms plus detailed visual analytics availble across campaigns, it's a very complete set of tools for growing revenue. The sheer data available in segments and campaigns is very impressive. The optimization, personalization and customization options are cool too. The interface itself is not the most intuitive that I've seen. But the presentation of data is very visual and this makes utilizng the data enjoyable once you learn where it's found. The ability to build templates and re-use them in future campaigns is a key feature. The calendar feature is solid as it's integrated deeply into the other tools in the system and it uses drag and drop technology. It's great for planning, sharing and coordinating everything company wide. Not having to integrate a third party calendaring system make this software platform stand out from others. One of the best aspects of Marketo is the ability to track performance and engagement across multiple events and activities such as website landing pages and webinars using multi-channel or multi-channel campaign analytics. The analytic data is very visual and this is a key to efficient learning this type of data for me personally. The bread and butter of Marketo lies in it's ability to track programs from creation to execution. The tool comes with standard program templates that allow you to easily get up and running for your basic email and landing page programs, but it also allows you to track success and engagement across programs like webinars, events, web pages and multi-step or channel campaigns. I like how easy it is to create custom stages so you can easily track each stage of your marketing/sales funnel across different programs/channels. The built-in reports also give you easy visibility into the success of specific programs as well as the resulting pipe contribution and actions taken by the sales team once they have completed the programs call-to-action. Marketo also makes it easy to track and alert sales reps of lead activity and build out a number of operational programs to ensure data consistency and communication between the marketing and sales teams as well as their associated tool sets.

The software dashboard looks pretty old school in my opinion. That's not a major negative but a cleaner UI, and less file tree based directories would add to the perception of greater productivity but perhaps that's just my opinion. And I'm not talking about becoming a flashy software but referring to seamless inline editing between modules as opposed to so many drop down menus and file trees. The complexity may become an issue if you're adding a lot of users to your account. It's simply a lot of information to get your head around initially. And then to assume efficient workflows would be a challenge unless their was one on one training, or a custom tutorial made by the account owner or business operations manager for your specific tasks at hand. The pricing for Marketo is not cheap. If you have a successful business with a large contact database of current customers and can implement Marketo rapidly then it is a justifiable cost as the ROI could be very substantial. Otherwise, $1195 monthly to $3995 per month is a lot for freelancer, small businesses and start-ups.

My first impression of Marketo was a bit overwhelming. It felt serious and the UI a bit old school. It's complex to learn to use and it would take each individual using it some time. And more time to establish efficient workflows and then share them yo discover best practices working with other team members. Overall this is a very comprehensive suite of marketing and sales tools suitable for businesses who currently use multiple third party applications. This software can unify efforts within a single dashbard. And can also import a contact list of current customers in order to implement campaigns as quickly as possible and certainly incur ROI to justify the price.