Adobe Marketo Engage, often referred to as the only alternative to HubSpot, has become a leading automation tool for marketers in recent years. Is the hype justified? Why should you opt for it? Let’s learn more in this in-depth guide.
Adobe Marketo Engage Integrations
Let’s start off with the top integrations you can enjoy with Adobe Marketo Engage.
Slack
Slack is a widely known platform for business communication. This Marketo integration allows teams to easily communicate and take the burden of their corporate inboxes. You can create multiple rooms and threads within Slack and post information to everyone involved in the project all at once. In other words, you will be able to create and run chats and separate the entire team into different projects and departments.
Instead of writing myriads of emails and overloading everyone’s inbox, you can launch a new chat, invite team members that you need, and send one message to everyone. Now you can take advantage of Slack within the Marketo suite.
Google Sheets
For those who are tired of sending Word and Excel sheets back and forth and losing track of updates, Google Sheets is now available in the Marketo tool. Google Sheets allows you to create a shareable document, grant access to your teammates and clients, look up old versions and work on the file together. You can also manage the permissions and let users either read the document, add suggestions, or autonomously edit it.
As of now, there is no direct link between Google Sheets and Marketo and you will have to use Zapier or Automate.io to connect them.
Salesforce
Salesforce helps in unifying marketing, analytics, customer management, sales, and more, it helps businesses to streamline their processes and optimize the workflow. Users can monitor and collect client information, segment customers, perform email marketing activities, and analyze customer behavior. Marketo is a marketing tool and the integration with Salesforce makes its features more advanced and its capabilities wider.
Using customer analytics data from Salesforce, Marketo can personalize content to create more meaningful and data-driven marketing activities. Finally, Salesforce automatically synchronizes your data with Marketo allowing you to immediately start using it.
Zapier
Zapier is the tool that connects your existing tools and optimizes their usage. With Zapier, you can make one tool react to a certain task or outcome from another software. When something occurs in one system, it will automatically trigger an action in another tool. If you use Zapier within the Marketo suite, you can connect to Gmail, Facebook, Trello, Shopify, Stripe, etc., and trigger actions to advance your marketing strategy.
For example, every time you receive an image in your Gmail inbox, it will be automatically inserted into a certain Google document.
GoToWebinar
The integration with Marketo makes GoToWebinar much more useful. Instead of separately inviting and registering webinar participants, you can transfer the customer data from the Marketo database and swiftly create a new webinar. Once you have created and launched a successful webinar, you can clone it right in the Marketo system, use the filter feature to replace the title and date of the webinar, and create a new one in just a few seconds.
With GoToWebinar, you can link the webinar to your existing marketing campaigns to track performance – sign ups, participants, etc.
Adobe Marketo Engage: The Pros
Without further ado, let’s move on to the pros.
1. Modular Design
In this case, modularity of design accounts for customizability and scalability. Users have a choice among four application parts that they can select for their account. You can only use one part or any combination of two, three, or even all four.
Based on your industry, current needs, use cases, long-term business plans, and budget constraints, you can choose marketing automation, customer engagement, personalization, and marketing management tools from the Adobe Marketo Engage suite. But even within the separate tools, Marketo offers a high grade of customization by allowing you to pick and choose which features to keep and which to discard.
2. Functionality
Marketo provides a variety of analytics tools and features that allow you to track campaigns and generate insightful reports. Based on this data, you can adjust your strategy to achieve better marketing stats. Besides, the built-in integrations with Google Sheets, Zapier, Slack, and other business tools expand the scope of functionality even further. Some integrations like Salesforce come so effortlessly, that you do not even have to transfer data.
Marketo was created on the same platform as Salesforce. Data will automatically be in sync, allowing you to start employing the app instantly.
3. Email Marketing Genius
The report from Litmus states that four out of five marketers would rather give up social media marketing rather than forgoing email campaigns. Even with the ever-increasing popularity of social media platforms, email marketing remains the largest and most efficient marketing channel. Marketo makes email marketing simple and fun. You can create and send personalized emails in bulk with a few clicks of a mouse.
Additionally, you can filter out your user base to target a specific group based on demographics, occupation, location, and other aspects. The AI-powered system will identify the best time to send out the emails and automatically reach out to your audience.
Adobe Marketo Engage: The Cons
Like anything in life or in B2B Marketing, Adobe Marketo Engage isn’t perfect.
1. Pricing Complexity
The feature combinations make Marketo’s pricing structure quite confusing. As mentioned above, you can combine the four parts in any way, which is why it is so difficult to figure out exactly what you will be paying. Marketo’s pay-as-you-go pricing model is enticing as you will not be charged for features you do not use, but this also cause a lot of confusion. Moreover, even the cheapest tier will be way above the market average.
We highly recommend calculating the potential ROI of Adobe Marketo Engage and eliminating all blind spots before making the purchasing decision.
2. Cumbersome Setup and Management
Another disadvantage is the elevated setup and management complexity. Aimed at tech people with decent knowledge in software and analytics, Marketo becomes almost unusable for customers with no technical background. As a result, non-tech users will have to hire an IT or marketing professional who will set up their accounts and work out processes. And if you think that customer support will be there to help, we are sorry to disappoint you.
The Marketo company grew extremely fast before Adobe entered the picture, which is why their customer service is quite inconsistent and unreliable.
3. Outdated Interface and User Experience
Marketo’s user interface is not up to date and lacks the intuitiveness modern users are accustomed to. The tool generously compensates the outdated interface with in-depth and advanced features but if you cannot take advantage of them, you will probably be left disappointed. Consequently, in order to fully utilize the software solution, you will need to spend quite some time learning its features and capabilities.
The Bottom Line
Adobe Marketo Engage is here to stay. Although the acquisition has made this marketing automation solution a little long in the tooth when it comes to the user experience and downgraded the customer support standards, it’s hard to argue with its functionality. We think that this solution is best for SMBs and enterprise-size setups. Startups should probably consider HubSpot due to its user-friendliness and ease-of-use.
Anyways, you should be able to take your B2B Marketing performance to the next level either way you go, assuming your blogging operations, content assets, and email campaigns are up to par. Contact Us to learn more.