Marg Adobe Marketo Engage

If you're able to set your smart campaigns up correctly & keep things relatively simple in terms of your campaign paths then it basically works. If your needs are relatively simple then it should do most/all of what you want it to do. If you're an enterprise of a reasonable size with a decent team who are at least familiar with anything like this kind of platform then it's a reasonable option to at least compare to alternatives.

Although their range of core features are okay, most of them are overly complicated, confusing and at times outright baffling. It actually seem to be a considered commercial strategy of Marketo to over complicate their product so they can take your money in support and training charges. Marketing automation is (and should be a relatively simple thing which is often confused by idiots! If you had never used another platform (and I've used virtually all of the premier platforms then you could be forgiven for thinking it's a good product as you would have no point of reference and, with enough perseverance, work-arounds and comprises made to mitigate it's many shortcomings then it can be made to work well. Should you really be buying a platform where you have to do that though?

There are far too many useless gadgets (which are essentially just red herrings to mask shortcomings in the basic areas and there's just not enough true functionality and scope once you get under the bonnet. For many companies, Marketo proves to be a very difficult system to implement if they are not already broadly up to speed on the basics of marketing automation and already have the hard fought for best practice under their belt. Marketo just love to charge you through the nose for support and charging you thousands to become Marketo qualified is the equivalent of buying a Mercedes and having to then pay them thousands to get the title "Mercedes driver", Many other platforms provide free support and actually assign you dedicated customer success teams.

Marketo are more than five times the price of better and more flexible alternatives like Act-On, their social media functionality is woeful compared to the likes of Hubspot, they aim at Enterprise (and miss and in doing so they completely ignore SME/SMB's, Don't just take my word for it - go read the independent and highly respected 2014 Forrester Wave Report which investigated all the main providers. Forrester said Marketo's "enterprise-class viability remains to be proven” and placed them well behind Act-On, Salesfusion, Silverpop and Salesforce Pardot in their rankings (Act-On was the only company considered a leader for both enterprise marketing requirements and small marketing team requirements. Having been involved in over a dozen implementations of Marketo and having seen other agencies reduced to using it as a glorified email broadcast tool I'd already seen the writing on the wall. I've went out and found far better alternatives for our clients. I spend tens of thousands every month on marketing automation licenses and implement and manage multiple projects across social, digital and automation every week so if I want a really expensive all-signing, all dancing platform then I'll use something like Eloqua over Marketo every day of the week. If I want value for money, excellent functionality, great support and a suite of tools that actually work in harmony with SEO, SEM, social media, mobile devices etc. then I'd recommend Act-On, among several others.

Marketo are great at their own content marketing and self-publicity and their product does look aesthetically good which are the only reasons I can fathom for them ever being seriously considered but once you get underneath their product then it is, I'm afraid, a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.

As the industry joke goes, what's the difference between Sameul Eto and Marketo? Samuel Eto is much, much cheaper...

Shop around and decide whether Marketo is best value or overkill for your needs.

Instead of solving existing business problems, Marketo tends to create new ones!

nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing

Expensive, hard to use, expensive training, hard to understand, customer service doesn't answer the question, appalling payment system, significantly less functionality than competitors, takes no responsibility for problems

None frankly, went back to old marketing automation systems and will be moving to another provider

Honestly I only ever had to use the landing page tool and I was not impressed.

I had many difficulties with the landing page tool. It lacks any form of ui/ux. Very difficult to navigate, integrate responsive css, upload files, and more. The "What You See IS What You Get" fails miserably . Nothing looks the same from preview to publish.

If you are considering using marketo for landing pages please make sure to test other alternatives first. This tool failed for our agency and our clients.

Digital marketing via landing page campaigns. However, marketo did not solve this for me. Moved to another platform. Our clients were very unhappy with the ease of use and overall environment and results.

I have been forced to use Marketo and have tried to get into this tool compared to Pardot or other CRM systems. I will say that the only thing Marketo is good at is sending emails. But, it becomes expensive using this tool just for emails and they do not provide any best practice to trigger messaging.

The scoring model and reporting tools are poor. WHY? They do not use machine learning for scoring and do not collect data over 90 days. So, if your B2B sales circle is over 3 months you are in trouble. In addition, they will tell you that they track channel acquisition attribution, but they are wrong: They do not track REAL 1st touch. They capture lead creation but it is useless in our ecosystem. They cannot help measuring the impact of channels. So, if you are a smart marketer and want to know where to fish, what is your best channel of acquisition, you do not want use Marketo tool. And finally, not the less but customer service is null. However more you spend and more they care so you may get service not for who you are but more for what you spend...

I do not recommend this email tool if you are a sophisticated and smart marketer.

We are leveraging marketing tools to implement lead gen. creation in the software industry (B2B market.

The idea of what Marketo promises to solve vs the reality of what it does. It's somewhat good at closed-loop attribution for e-mail but fails to deliver on channel and traffic sources. In fact, your average Marketo "expert" doesn't understand traffic sources - only e-mail campaigns. I'ts a terrible fail for a company that promises so much.

Everything:

- Clunky, slow UI

- Clunky, slow reports

- Terminology - Marketo re-invent the wheel everytime

- No real database = slow, difficult to manage

- Ages to learn

- Very bad support

- Any worthwhile reports and tools costs $000's extra

Avoid at all costs. Look at Google Analytics, Adobe or Oracle.

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