Marketing automation has become a necessity over the last few years. You may resist this trend, but the concept is simple: professionals using automation software have better results than those who do not. According to the Aberdeen Group, an international market intelligence company, 87% of the best agencies use automation technology for marketing.
Automated marketing is to use softwares which allow users to be more efficient and increase their company’s revenue by simplifying marketing workflows. It will not replace the marketing professional, but it will help the team be more assertive in defining leads and provide better insights onto the entire sales funnel.
Marketing automation will help you with email marketing, landing page creation, website customization, ROI metering, multi-channel campaigns, as well as segmentation, generation, growth, and lead retention.
With more than 10 years in the market, Marketo is one of the most used marketing automation platforms in the world. It is used by more than 100 thousand professionals across 19 thousand websites. Its software was designed around email marketing — a feature it does exceptionally well –, but Marketo isn’t limited to this.
Marketo offers customized solutions that help medium and large companies integrate marketing automation into their business systems. Among its highlights are some of the most advanced analytics, when compared to other marketing softwares, as well as seamless integrations with other SaaS providers through its ecosystem of partnerships.
Consulting and implementation
Marketo has marketing consultants who can assist you both in platform implementation and in aligning your digital marketing strategies. In addition, Marketo’s creative team can create custom email templates, landing pages, and mobile device layouts.
Training and certifications
Although Marketo does not have a training and certifications program as complete as other platforms such as Hubspot, Marketo offers the Certified Expert Credential, which validates users with competency, expertise, and operational knowledge in the broad use of the platform. After acquiring the credential, one can pursue other specializations such as ‘data analytics & reporting’ as well as ‘leads nurturing & engagement’.
Email Marketing
The platform allows you to acquire detailed profiles of each contact, create personalized follow-ups, deliver email messages, perform A/B tests and track the ROI of your campaigns.
One of Marketo’s most functional features is the accuracy of its A/B tests. You can try different subjects, email addresses, dates and times of sending, testing full versions of different emails. These tests will help you discover the most successful email variants for your audience, which increases the potential to increase sale conversions.
A highlight of the Marketo A/B testing is the segmentation of an email’s time of sending. If there are leads in other time zones, you don’t have to send a mass email to everyone. This ensures that each lead receives it at the appropriate time. Despite this feature not being exclusive to Marketo, it allows users to send emails to a different time zone without the need of creating a separate campaign.
Leads Management
By enabling efficient marketing analyses, Marketo helps to improve the quality of leads and supports the sales teams by identifying opportunities and gathering data. Users will be able to prioritize their best customers to work on upsells and cross-sells with.
The platform uses header and footer codes to create cookies to track user actions while simultaneously collecting information constantly. For example, you can make a redirection campaign for users who have already visited a particular page on your website. With Marketo’s engaging mechanism, if they are not involved enough in a campaign, you have the option to adjust the frequency or move leads along the channels to provide a more qualified content.
Another one of Marketo’s features for managing leads is the creation of smart lists, which allows you to find groups of people using simple filters. You can use it on campaigns, reports, targeting, business models, engagement programs, etc. Additionally, you can also export a smart list and send it to other people who do not use Marketo.
Multichannel
This platform enables you to monitor key metrics, helping you, to consequently increase customer lifespan by engaging your audience with personalized multi-channel experiences, including the use of good mobile app implementations. With its integrations, it works with email, SEO and SEM.
Marketo “Ad Bridge” integrates Marketo’s behavioral data with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other advertisement platforms, which allows marketers to acquire even more efficient and responsive targeting ads.
Currently, Marketo has integrated with the Gimbal platform which adds the possibility of marketing based on location and proximity.
The Marketo Community
Many of the new features that come up at Marketo are from user ideas and this happens thanks to its great community. Through it, you can submit ideas, create discussion topics, create private groups, access product documents, receive tips and get help to solve problems. The Marketo Community is one of the platform’s greatest features.
Pros
• Compared to some of its competitors, Marketo is easy to implement, has an excellent customer support, an active community of users who help each other, receive praise for the platform’s usability and integrates spectacularly with Salesforce.
Cons
• Marketo did not start out as a marketing automation platform but it started out as a lead management tool. Although most of the product has already been upgraded, some features still receive complaints from users, such as the landing page builder due to the difficulty of using it.
• While Marketo provides an advanced analytics feature among marketing software, a common complaint of users is related to the time it takes to acquire both analytics and reports without using any additional extensions.
• Another factor that usually makes users have doubts about using Marketo is the price. The lowest priced standard package is $ 895 per month, which can be much higher as you add more features to your package.
The InEvent platform, which focuses on optimizing the management of corporate events, offers integrations with leading companies, and Marketo is one of them.
Therefore, your Marketo lists, including emails, names, and labels, can be fully synchronized with the InEvent platform, making it easy to import and export data from one platform to another. The synchronization happens automatically every hour, or it can happen instantly at the click of the sync button, in addition to allowing the use of custom fields.
For a better understanding of this integration, watch our tutorial vídeo below:
