What Is Marketo Analytics?
April 13, 2021
Adobe’s reputation for being one of the most tech-savvy companies in the world has benefited greatly from their impressive track record of acquiring other companies that share a similar reputation.
Case in point: when Adobe acquired Marketo for $4.75 billion.
This was a record-setting amount for Adobe. It said a lot about what Marketo had accomplished and what executives at Adobe believed the platform was capable of achieving in the future.
At the time, Adobe summarized this potential by saying:
“Marketo’s platform is feature-rich and cloud-native with significant opportunities for integration across Adobe Experience Cloud. Enterprises of all sizes across industries rely on Marketo’s marketing applications to drive engagement and customer loyalty. Marketo’s ecosystem includes over 500 partners and an engaged marketing community with over 65,000 members.”
So, if your company needs a powerful marketing analytics platform, it’s hard to think of one that has garnered more attention in recent years.
But don’t go adjusting your budget just yet. Let me give you a quick overview of what Marketo is and an overview of what it has to offer.
What Is Marketo Engage?
Before I dive into what Marketo does, I want to quickly clarify that you may also hear the platform referred to as “Marketo Engage.” This change in names began back at the 2019 Adobe Summit, but most of us still – and probably always will – refer to this platform by its traditional name.
Ultimately, it seems that Adobe wants to fully integrate Marketo into its Adobe Experience Cloud and then formally change its name to Adobe Engage (I’m still calling it Marketo).
In the meantime, just know you’ll probably see the old and new versions of the name if you decide to do further research.
Alright, with that minor detour out of the way, let’s dig into the topic-at-hand.
What Does Marketo Do?
In short, Marketo is a marketing and lead-generation Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. Specifically, it’s designed to find and target qualified leads, automate numerous marketing services across multiple channels, and discover potential lead-to-revenue opportunities.
However, this only scratches the service.
Marketo can do a lot.
So, while it would be nearly impossible to give you a comprehensive list of all of the ways Marketo can improve your marketing efforts and conversion rate, I’ll go over its core features right now, so you have a better idea of what it brings to the table.
1. A Full Suite of Marketing Automation Tools
Marketo didn’t skimp when it came to putting together a full-scale marketing suite for their platform. These tools support a host of important eCommerce goals like:
- Targeting
- Personalization
- Engagement
- Campaign Creation
- Lead Nurturing
- Performance Tracking
…and more.
As I mentioned, Marketo is so robust that it would probably take several hundred pages to get through all of the incredible ways it can help your marketing campaigns.
But I do want to quickly spotlight two that deserve special attention when it comes to Marketo’s marketing automation features.
Lead Management
Its lead nurturing and scoring tools are fantastic for establishing where a lead is in your company’s marketing funnel and how close that puts them to converting. The platform’s ability to effectively score leads is supported by firmographic, demographic, and behavioral data.
Service professionals at Marketo will even help you fine-tune your scoring, so you have numbers that are as accurate as possible for guiding your company’s unique marketing campaigns.
Marketo Analytics
Every company should start with a basic platform like Google Analytics.
But many companies grow to the point that simply monitoring the basics like visits and clicks is no longer enough. They need the kinds of insights that can launch entire campaigns.
Marketo’s analytics package includes tools that will help you measure your leads’ “velocity” through your funnel on a stage-by-stage basis, so you can see exactly where bottlenecks are hurting your conversions.
These tools can even follow your customers offline, so you’re never missing out on important touchpoints or dealing with erroneous attribution numbers.
If your goal is to understand as much as possible about your customers, you’re going to be in heaven once you have Marketo’s marketing suite at your disposal.
Given their impressive arsenal of features, it should come as no surprise that Marketo is able to boast some pretty impressive testimonials from customers who rely on their marketing suite.
2. Customer Retention and Growth
If all Marketo did was offer that massive marketing suite I just covered, it would still be a top lead-generation software. There’s just no understating how powerful those tools are for creating new customers.
But this is where most marketing platforms stop – even many of the really good ones.
Marketo took things a step further, though, and outfitted their platform with some really great tools for maintaining customers and finding opportunities to grow your accounts with them.
I know that’s a pretty tall claim, so let me quickly explain some of the ways this marketing platform is able to pull it off.
First, as you nurture your leads into customers, Marketo creates profiles for each. Over time, these profiles are expanded with more and more data. This automated task will give your team a comprehensive understanding of what turned these prospects into customers and how to keep them.
You can also customize this data structure in a number of different ways based on how your company prefers to segment audiences and personalize engagement.
Speaking of which, Marketo offers cross-channel engagement, so you can connect with your current customers wherever they’re most comfortable, instead of hoping they’ll adapt to your preference. This feature also makes it easier to maintain relationships with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of customers. Let Marketo establish which channel makes the most sense for each of them.
Then, use the platform’s personalization features to make each of those clients feel like an individual – not a number.
The list goes on and on, but one last feature I want to mention is that Marketosyncs with just about every major CRM. In a lot of reviews of this platform, its lack of a CRM is brought up as a major disadvantage, but I think it’s just the opposite for most companies.
If you already have a CRM you love, keep it. You may need a little help from Marketo to integrate the platform, but that’s far preferrable to the exhausting hassle of trying to migrate your existing accounts over to a new SaaS.
3. Marketing at Scale
Once again, if “all” Marketo could were the two sections I just went over, I don’t think its status would suffer all that much. Countless marketers and salespeople would still clamor to get their hands on it.
But the features don’t stop there.
The final list I want to cover are those that fall under the title, “Marketing at Scale.” This is how you build out your company’s reach without having to build out your budget at the same pace. It’s how you attract and target more customers without having to add more employees.
One great way Marketo does this is with artificial intelligence. While the term “AI” has definitely become a bit of a buzzword, the experts at Marketo started working with this technology long before it acquired this eye-rolling reputation.
As the company states on their website:
“Customers show you how they want to be engaged and expect you to deliver value at each touchpoint with speed and precision. The path to value? Listening, learning, and using the resulting insights to engage on a personal level. It’s a virtuous cycle that requires you to turn data into intelligent action at scale, which can’t be achieved by hand-tuning campaigns. The answer is your expertise, enhanced by artificial intelligence.”
Marketo’s AI isn’t supposed to be a genie’s lamp, capable of doing the impossible. It’s a powerful technology, that combined with your expertise – and what the platform can tell you about your audience – will turn your marketing campaigns into industry takeovers.
Another great tech-powered feature that falls under this category is dynamic lookalike audiences with predictive filters that will take all that information Marketo is collecting about your current customer base and use it to discover potential leads across your entire market.
Instead of prospecting vis-à-vis shots in the dark, Marketo can tell you where you’re most likely to find the kinds customers you love – and lots of them.
How Much Does Marketo Cost?
As you’d expect from an enterprise-level platform, Marketo doesn’t advertise the cost of its marketing suite.
Although, theydogive a breakdown of what their different pricing levels entail in terms of services:
You can also download a more extensive eight-page pricing and packaging list that goes into much greater detail about what each tier includes.
If you’re sold on the many ways Marketo can help your business grow, you can also contact the company’s sales team for a custom quote.
Who Uses Marketo?
Because of its robust suite of tools (and its price), Marketo is most popular among medium-sized businesses and large enterprises. These companies gravitate to all that Marketo has to offer because the alternative means creating an unwieldy marketing tech stack.
For this reason, Marketo is also extremely popular with B2B marketers who may otherwise struggle to generate leads by using alternatives.
That said, plenty of B2C marketers swear by Marketo, too. Again, this tends to be among marketers in medium-sized companies or larger because Marketo gives them a suite of powerful tools that can address their bigger audiences.
This flexibility is why Marketo is even popular among ABM companies. Its traditional lead-generation tools can just as easily work to proactively go after specific B2B accounts. This includes using AI to build account lists and apply predictive scoring to each ABM lead.
As I touched on earlier, another great thing about Marketo is that it’s geared towards the goals of both sales and marketing teams. A lot of the information Marketo is designed to gather during lead generation is data that can be easily passed to your sales team to close the deal.
Finally, if you’re interested in case studies that show what Marketo has done for some of the largest companies on the planet, here are a handful:
Is Marketo Worth Your Company’s Investment?
I’m a big fan of Marketo, so I’d probably give it my recommendation to most companies, but you should still take the time to schedule a demo and do the same for popular alternatives like:
- HubSpot
- Pardot
- Oracle Eloqua
- Act-On
You may even end up using Marketo and one of those options or another popular platform together (e.g., MarketoandSalesforce).
Whatever the case, even if you think it might be out of your price range at the moment, I encourage you to take advantage of the free demo Adobe offers of Marketo. If nothing else, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s possible by seeing one of the industry’s most powerful marketing platforms in action.
And if you’d like any personalized advice about what’s best for your company and unique goals, please feel free to contact us to speak with an expert.