ToutApp Reviews

Pros

Marketo is a great marketing tool that allows automating repetitive marketing activities. I am using Marketo since 4 years.
We use it to improve our lead generation process and we integrated Marketo with Salesforce. We are using Marketo Forms embedded on our website to get the personal information, track the activities done by leads and notify the sales reps. We are able to track campaigns (members are synced to Salesforce campaigns) and lead sources to measure effectiveness of marketing activities. We created a series of program templates that can be replicated to manage events, webinars, newsletters or email blastings. Cloning the templates all our marketers can start a new program easily customizing just the details, without errors and saving time. I want to mention a powerful feature that I use daily - smart lists - they allows to target a specific audience and continuously been fed with new members that match the criteria.

Cons

- Integration with MS Dynamics: we started with MS dynamics CRM and the integration is not seamless as the integration with Salesforce. We had unresolved issues for 3 years until we decided to move our CRM to Salesforce.
- Consulting Services: we started our project with direct Marketo consulting services but our project manager was not responsive and we had the impression that each PM had too many customers to manage and do not have the time to dedicate the right effort to each project. For this reason, we moved our project to an external consultant firm and the results are much better.
- Support: the response time of the standard support is not quick and usually it takes some days to resolve it.
- Landing pages: it is missing a validation workflow on the thank you pages (to be sure that those who will access the thank you page have successfully filled-out the form included in the landing page)
- Reporting: the reports are very basics

Pros

Marketo is consistently ranked by analysts as a top automation solution, and I can finally see why! As a marketer, it’s simple to use but also robust for program management from creation to reporting. On a day-to-day basis, I use Marketo within a B2B environment and we wouldn’t be able to function without it. It’s a key tool for my marketing strategy, one of our most used functionalities is cloning programs, tactics, and campaigns. This allows us to make fewer mistakes and maintain continuity from user-to-user, an efficiency for my nimble, growing team.

What I’d like to see is continued product improvement driven by customer voices. I’m excited for the new Mercury UI to debut in 2018!

Cons

As an admin within a small team, the uptime to full functionality can be like climbing a steep hill on a cold day. Simply put, learning this tool can feel cumbersome if it’s not your only responsibility. Luckily, the Marketing Nation Community combined with the product docs and Marketo University prove to be helpful resources for growing your knowledge. Within a year I was able to confidently learn the tool, contribute new ideas, and become a Marketo Certified Expert (MCE).

Service/support - Compared to other automation platforms, there seems to be limited support and desire for accounts to have a 1:1 communication on a regular basis with an account rep. We’ve recently been assigned a new rep and we're making progress.

Pros

Marketo is the "Porsche with a manual transmission" of marketing automation platforms. It's full of cool features and is incredibly powerful. The strengths: 1) Workflow flexibility that is unmatched by other platforms. Building complex data management, lead scoring, and organizational processes (such as lead routing) is very achievable in Marketo. They basically give you every function they can possibly code and let their customers piece them together as they like (more on this in #7). 2) The engagement programs, primarily meant for lead nurturing, are truly best-in-class. It's a little bit of an adjustment at first, but it really simplifies complex nurturing tracks and saves marketers from putting prospects into multiple tracks at once (which happens more than most admit) 3) The vision is impressive. Marketo has a clear, long-term vision that they continually deliver on. Examples being advances in personalization, ABM, ect. I'd bet on them to lead the way (or buy the way via Vista ) to whatever is next in marketing automation, such as AI or machine learning.

Cons

I love Marketo. But, there are some things I don't love. 1) The landing page builder has made improvements but still, leaves some to be desired. Unless a template available for import matches what you'd like to do, you pretty much have to hire a developer to build your templates. 2) The reporting is somewhat overhyped. They REALLY sell revenue cycle analytics, but in reality, it's tough to implement and even tougher to accurately maintain. Since data is essentially timestamped and not stored in an external record (i.e. like Salesforce has for a campaign member), if you mess it up, you're SOL. Marketo's advice to me was "don't mess up."

Pros

- UI Usability & design.
- Tracking of programs from creation to execution, including success and engagement across programs like webinars, events, web pages and multi-step or channel campaigns.
- Complex criteria for building out nurture programs based on targeted parameters and real-time interactions.
- Global partitions and platform internationalization.
- Real-time personalization

Cons

- Search functionality could be a lot easier with keywords, or created date. I know the platform just updated to search based on URL, but it could use a bit more work to make it easier for newer employees who have tons of legacy items to sift through.
- Speed of platform is sometimes frustrating - it can be great at times...other times it lags beyond belief, when pulling lists, approving emails and landing pages, and just jumping from campaign to campaign. Sometimes I have to even restart or refresh the platform just to get it moving again.
- Campaign calendar layout is not intuitive and leaves marketing teams resorting to a Google Calendar or similar feature to track campaign sequencing and deliverables. It's usable if you spend some time in it, but it definitely could be better.

Pros

The reason why I referred the application as an ultimate platform is that it gathers all information about your digital marketing campaigns emails, online forms, marketing material etc. at a single place. It is a user-friendly interface which is easily understandable by you and it has a very brilliant capability of automating almost everything. In this, one can build a variety of things like email templates, landing pages, etc. It supports multi-touch campaigns and multichannel. It is broad and very useful for CRM Integration and most importantly Analytics. It increases efficiency in a variety of ways (like the ability to create a tokenized template) as well as its Lead management process is also brilliant!! Its capabilities are very vast, Comprehensive campaigns capabilities are one of them.

Cons

Here are a few cons which shouldn’t be ignored. Reporting of Analytics of Marketo is very bad and in addiction smart list designs are not flexible and it is very difficult to design them. Most importantly it is not within the range of all types of people, as its rates are little bit higher. Its interface should be improved for new users as well as some software bugs should also be fixed regarding auto-saving. It loads the previewing list very slowly. Its Spam Identification feature also very poor as well as email and landing page analytics are also not enough. But at last, I want to say that the major issue with it, is regarding its speed of loading the application which needs a lot of improvement

Pros

- Workflow: the logic behind the workflows allows to automate manual activities
- Lead gen: we improved the engagement of the visitors on our website and we manage the entire lead generation process on Marketo integrated with our CRM.
- Programs: it is easy to create and manage emailing and nurture programs with the ability to set rules when the email should be sent.
- Forms: we are using Marketo forms and we embedded them on our website.

Cons

- Integration with Dynamics: after 3 years we still have some issues on the integration with MS Dynamics... the 2 systems are not well integrated.
- Support: sometimes we had some issues with getting quick replies from support.
- Landing pages: it is missing a validation workflow on the thank you pages (to be sure that those who will access the thank you page have successfully filled-out the form included in the landing page).

Pros

I used Marketo in my last role for about three years and was always impressed. Marketo does a great job of integrating very seamlessly with Salesforce and in a sales role, this is imperative to your success. You are able to track not only your emails, but develop sophisticated campaigns to drive engagement in a particular market or across a broad spectrum. Above all, Marketo gave you the flexibility to develop an idea and execute on it successfully.

Additionally, the system was great in providing the engagement reports key prospects had with our organization. As a sales professional, quality leads some times make or break a quota. Marketo feeds you quality leads that you're able to rank based on many algorithms. Having an understanding of what your prospect is most interested in, creates a much more effective first conversation, rather than attempting to connect cold.

Overall, Marketo was a crucial part of our sales processes and truly assisted in your achievements as an organization. I would highly recommend.

Cons

We only encountered some occasional problems when uploading smart lists. This would sometimes take quite a long time when Marketo was running updates or changes, that would slow the system.

Pros

Easy to track different engagement programs at every stage across multiple steps.
Robust criteria for building lead nurturing.
Like their lead scoring feature - great way to segment leads based on how they interact with you.
Their real-time personalization feature is impressive. Great feature once it's configured correctly.

Cons

The email builder is pretty basic.
Leveraging the full capabilities requires a full-time internal resource.
Steep learning curve. We needed to invest in a Marketo specialist to help with integration.
Marketo is super expensive & that's before taking the extra cost of hiring a Marketo Specialist to help with implementation.

Pros

Once optimized, Marketo is good for rapid-fire content creation (emails, landing pages, and campaigns) that is tailored and optimized for digital marketing experiences. It can collect a broad range of data out-of-the-box which provides significant advantages compared to competitors.

Cons

Marketo's ability to scale, technically, can be a limiting factor at times. The major dependencies are lead database size, web traffic volume, and integration with the CRM. At the point of 750k+ leads, Marketo becomes slow to work with. At the point of 10k page visits/day, queues start to pop up on logging web activity. When lots of leads are begin updated in Marketo and through the CRM, the back-and-forth usage of API calls (by which Marketo communicates with CRMs) starts to max out, and you have to really optimize the setup in order to have timely communication between Marketo and the CRM.

Pros

We have a really small marketing team, but we are able to create quality, complex nurture streams easily with Marketo. It also gives us valuable insight into who is engaging with our website and our emails. We couldn't imagine running our marketing with anything else.

Cons

While the functional aspects of Marketo are great, they are lacking in some areas like form design and ease of use for designing emails and landing pages. They have tried to improve all three but continue to fall short compared to other tools. You will have to have someone who knows how to do some basic coding if you want to go beyond their most basic templates.

Pros

Feature rich, lots of functionality, decent reporting. You don't have to know HTML to have a decent email template,

Cons

While its feature rich, its very complicated to use. Not very intuitive when doing campaign creation, segmentation, reporting, tokens, forms - basically anything! The UI is slow and clunky and also not intuitive. Setting up multi tiered campaigns (especially webinars) and nurture streams (which is apparently a core strength) were extremely time consuming. Support is horrible. This system MAY be okay if you have a team of highly sophisticated Marketo ops people on staff to get through it, otherwise, consider other alternatives. i have ripped and replaced Marketo 2x with Pardot and couldn't be happier.

Pros

- Options for Customization of Automation Campaigns and Landing Pages
- Extensive Analytical Tools
- "The Sky's the Limit" on how much your marketing team can do with this tool

Cons

- The Email Editor is difficult to use, in my opinion. But if you are comfortable with writing HTML code, you can bypass the drag-and-drop editor. Also, it may not be any more difficult than any other option (I don't have a wide exposure to email builders).
- The learning curve on the whole is steep. If you don't have a dedicated marketing staff person, you may be frustrated by how much time you need to set aside to learn how to use the various tools. But their documentation resources and training tools are very helpful.
- You have to pay extra for full-service tech support.

Pros

I have been in the MA space for over 5 years. This is the BEST tool on the market. The best thing about is its relative ease of use. Yes, mastering it and making the most of it takes time. But the bottom line is anyone can learn Marketo, and all it takes is time. Other tools require technical knowledge outside of the platform (such as coding, scripting, SQL). But to use Marketo, you don't need any outside technical skill -- just a commitment to learning Marketo. It has an incredible user-friendly interface, integrates easily with other tools, and really adds to internal marketing's tool set.

Pros

I like the wide range of reports and data that are available. Everything from email performance to program ROI to opportunity insights are available through Marketo's Analytics software. I use it most often to look at email deliverability and program membership. There are a lot of different ways you can break down email sends and being able to look at everything from subject line interaction by job category to program ROI by attendance status is very useful in determining campaign effectiveness.

Cons

There's kind of a learning curve and a lot of different views and reports to get accustomed to, but once you spend some time in each of the reports it gets pretty easy to anticipate what you'll need to answer any given question you may get. There is some overlap between Marketo Analytics and what our department pulls from Salesforce, but there is still a lot of use in Marketo Analytics data.

Pros

Marketo has robust lead scoring and lifecycle management solutions. Lead scoring can be tokenized to create efficient and scalable.models.
Triggered MQL and Sales Alert Emails enable Sales to follow up with highly qualified leads.
Engagement programs that allow you to easily nurture leads through the customer journey.
Segment your audience and send dynamic content that is personalized to each segmentation
Smart list logic and campaigns allow for many different types of triggered campaigns

Cons

Some minor UX improvements: Be able to view a subject line without opening the email.
Improve Text version editor - Even MailChimp's is superior.
Create stronger de-duplication technology native to the platform.

Pros

Great for a large database
No flags when sending emails to large lists
Priced appropriately

Cons

Terrible customer support -- I couldn't reach anyone until I told them that I was canceling my account
Clunky interface

Pros

The interface mimics other day-to-day programs such as emails or file folders. So that makes it relatively easy to organize your campaigns and find them again. And there is a lot of flexibility built in once you get started. You can move campaigns around, bring in other pieces, clone items, upload relatively easily, etc. I also really like the auto-save feature.

Cons

When a process flow is broken, there are no hints or indications as to why. On a few occasions the program has given me error messages (the good old band-aid on the screen) for reasons I'm not ever able to figure out. While they do offer some basic training for new users, anything beyond that is a charge. And my experience with the community responses hasn't been great. When you have a very specific and detailed program, it's tough for other people to be able to understand where you're stuck. So often times the answers people provide are not enough to help me get un-stuck.

Pros

The good thing about Marketo is that it does automate a lot of emails and nurtures a prospect through the whole sales cycle. Since it's also one of the bigger marketing automation platforms, it also integrates fairly well with nearly all other marketing platforms/tools we use.

Cons

Marketo is so incredibly clunky. Just trying to edit a line in one email can take you up to 5 minutes. The look and feel of it is also stuck in the 90s. They don't provide any decent templates so my team is often forced to look elsewhere and then integrate email and landing page templates with Marketo. It's a bear to use but it's simply too much of a hassle to look for another provider.

Pros

Marketo has an unbelievable amount of functionality that allows us to manage our leads and easily automate and track success of all our marketing campaigns. We have been able to add more levels of tracking and logic to our campaigns than we were able to do with our previous marketing automation tool. There is probably so much that I haven't yet discovered but am looking forward to finding out as I continue to use the tool more. The customer support and user support portal have been very helpful for us in finding solutions to our challenges, as there is so much functionality and sometimes so many ways to do 1 task that it's helpful to get advice on which is the best way to do it. I'd highly recommend Marketo!

Cons

Because there is so much functionality (atleast compared to the automation tool we used to use), there was a steep learning curve for our team but the customer support was really helpful in getting us over this curve.

Pros

This is a great tool to have to track the digital footprints of a prospect. When they go to your web site you see ever click and with analytics it gives you a great snap shot of perspective buyers and persona

Cons

I cant say I disliked anything. I wish the web and social came together in a one package maybe because the 2 tools together are powerful. The Marketo Social gives a snapshot of what perspective buyers are saying about you on social media and with advanced analytics its a powerful tool

Pros

You can throw a lot at Marketo and it is able to handle most marketing campaigns that you need it to do. It integrates well with Salesforce. Once you get the hand of it, it is easy to use for most campaigns. It also allows you to tokenize and script inside the tokens to add features that aren't built into the product. It's fairly easy to administer for things like custom fields, etc.

Cons

They have had stability issues over the past year, which have sometimes caused problems for time-sensitive campaigns. Also, the email and landing page builder is lacking and sometimes you spend more time than you need to get a template right.

Pros

Within our company, we used Marketo for campaign execution, lead collection and management, and creating reports.

While it took us some time to set it up, between planning, configuration, once all of that was done, and we finished the onboarding programme to our marketeers and stakeholders (around 3 months from day 1 to the final onboarding). Marketo had become part of the spine of our operations.

Did I mention the very active and friendly online community? They are what made us fall in love with the tool in the first place!

Cons

It took our marketing team (especially the junior staff) some time to learn it and even more time for our non-marketing stakeholders.

Some features like the overall activity of all the leads are still not implemented directly, the community helped us figure out ways around missing features and what other software we could use to compliment Marketo, which kind off made up for it.

Pros

Marketo..where do we begin? I started using Marketo two organizations ago and at this point I wouldn't even consider working for an organization that isn't using Marketo. Everything from lead entry, lead validation, lead assignment, nurturing, email communication, landing pages, forms, personalization. At this point it has gotten so big that we have a team using it and we need to enforce best practices.

Cons

You get out of it what you put in. You can run your entire business on it but you need to ensure you are using best practices - if you let inexperienced people behind the wheel, it will turn into a huge mess.

Pros

Everything can be organized the way that works for our team. There are very few limits to the way we can set up programs and we are able to customize fields, analytics, etc to tell us whatever it is we need to know. We've used other systems (like HubSpot) and they are not nearly as flexible.

I also LOVE the Marketo Community. We've learned a lot from our peers in different discussions.

Cons

Sometimes there are too many options and not enough guidance on best practices. Marketo has documentation on different products, but they don't tell me WHY I might want to use a specific feature, just how I would go about doing so.

Pros

Customer Support and Training. Never had such a professional, but also demanding introduction. But they know, why they are doing it. The Platforms possibilities are huge and will provide the success you need to afford it.
Almost everything is possible. Each step of a campaign can be adjusted. You can create your own reports at any stage in the campaign.
To copy a whole campaign, including landing pages, flows and all e-mails take just a few clicks. But what is really impressive; to adjust the copied campaign to it’s new date, location a.o. it’s another click and you are up and running.

Cons

If it is your first Marketing Automation Software, go and hire a consultant. It is hard to get into the system, if this topic is new for you. There are a few decision you have to take (structure) in an early stage that will cause more work if there are wrong or just missed.
Also because of its flexibility it is hard to understand and at it first few rather complex than logical. You definitely need do invest time to get it up and running.