How to Use Marketo to its Maximum Potential in 2020

Marketo is undoubtedly one of the best platforms to assess and automate marketing tasks in not just email but other channels including social media, website, multiple devices, in marketing processes like lead management, consumer marketing, mobile management, and so on. Even if you’re a small business or a big enterprise, you can be assured that Marketo is going to turn your straggly email marketing performance to a steady thrive.

If you are already using Marketo, you would be quite familiar with most of the concepts discussed further in the blog, but our insights for what is new in Marketo and how you can make the most of it is definitely something you should look forward to. For those who are looking to ramp up their marketing plans, you sure must have Marketo on your list. But It is also important to make sure you know what you are getting into before you make any investments in the software.

Who can use Marketo?

From healthcare, education, eCommerce, financial services to media, there is not one industry that is not catered by Marketo. Around 63% of the total Marketo users are from the United States followed by India and the United Kingdom, with 7% and 6% users respectively.

Marketers

Marketers can not only build campaigns but also scale marketing efforts and engagement with Marketo to positively impact the revenue and growth of the organization. It provides both lead-based and account-based marketing plans with advanced customer journey analytics and AI-generated personalization.

Sales Team

Marketo helps the sales team generate ROI from every marketing aspect along with exemplary control over lead management as they provide us with insights into customer behavior.

Marketing executives

They co-relate the investment with the generated ROI, analyze the metrics and determine if the investment made did benefit the organization and its consumers or not.

Things to keep in mind before investing in a Marketo email campaign

Budget

To start with any campaign, you first need to strategize and accordingly allocate resources and funds. It is thus very important to focus on your budget before you begin with Marketo. As you might already know, Marketo is not a free app, and neither is it a do-it-all app. It requires upgrading to increase send capacity and performance, depending on the limitations of your plan.

Although they do not put out the rate cards, they charge the client by the number of their leads. The marketing plan is divided into Basic, Pro, and Elite out of which, the PRO plan is assumed the best for small business or growth-oriented businesses with a good market performance.

Outsourcing Talent 

As a marketer, one is always trying to engage more customers at every stage of their journey and do that right. While it might be challenging to manage so many outlets of marketing on digital platforms, be it social media or emails, it is an overwhelming job with abundant responsibility to manage marketing automation. 

Hiring the right person, training them, and then expecting them to deliver in a short span might lead them to underperform with unrealistic expectations. Many marketers believe that outsourcing a Marketo email specialist team will not only save you the investment on resources being trained and hired but also let you concentrate on other important ROI related tasks.

Audience

In a research done by Aberdeen, 75% of customers vouched that they would prefer personalized offers. It is safe to assume that almost the same number of people are likely to give quite some data or share preferences with the right approach. Knowing your audience is the fuel that runs Marketo and its account-based and lead-based marketing strategies. This feature is what makes the platform stand out. 

How can you make the most of Marketo?

CRM integration

When as a brand you want to increase market penetration and gain greater returns on your investments, you will have to integrate different customer databases while maintaining the business run rate. This will pose a challenge as Marketo doesn’t have its own CRM solution. Such an issue can be overcome by integrating and making a solid partnership with CRM offering platforms and solutions.

When Panasonic wanted to upscale and target a larger customer base, there was a similar challenge which was overcome by integrating Marketo with the Salesforce CRM solution. As a result, it not only improved the marketing output five-fold with zero-investment in budget or resources, but the total revenue contribution went from under 10% to 26%.

Monitor metrics to improve email performance

Marketo provides enhanced web personalization by allowing flexible customization and triggered engagement throughout the customer journey. This is done by enabling small actions like customer intent signals like scrolling and exit intent to control the campaign within one single platform. 

This is of course, other than the elements like A/B testing, tokens used in email marketing to personalize and set triggers like welcome emails, following up and cart abandonment in email campaign automation, and so on. The marketing performance insights (MPI) also allow the marketers to access complex email performance metrics to optimize channel mix and deliver relevant display ads.

Cross channel marketing

Marketo has a seamless cross-channel consumer experience that is strategized to resonate through data-driven analytics and links with email campaigns. Depending on which platform is best for a particular action, for a named industry, Marketo aligns actions across channels. One of the examples is the lead gen forms integrated with LinkedIn which allows marketers to approach a lead, engage, and retarget prospects. 

Lead nurturing and Drip Nurturing

Marketo segregates leads based on their actions and accordingly sets further communication through drip campaigns. For instance, if a customer makes multiple visits to the pricing page in a time-bound period, say 5 days, that lead will be segmented in an accelerated lead nurture funnel. The Smart engagement technology not only pushes the lead quickly through the funnel but also delivers highly personalized and tailor-made communication through email drip campaigns.

This approach cannot be accomplished by a one-size-fits-all approach as lead scoring and nurturing leads is an extensive function of profiling, recognizing and targeting prospects for better ROI conversion. In our previous blog we have explained in detail how to nurture leads and make the most of Marketo lead scoring features.

Account-based marketing- AI profiling

Sirius’s decisions say, 92% of marketers feel that account-based marketing is ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important in their email marketing campaign. A successful ABM campaign will be able to engage the right audience across the right device and channel, be it email on desktop or mobile. With Marketo’s integrated engagement across channels, one can access the pattern of customer behaviors and set triggers according to each platform. Marketo has proven to deliver automation in email with a high-class customer experience.

Wrap Up 

Marketing these days relies on a personalized approach with AI-generated marketing automation. Using such platforms has not just become a privilege but it is the need of the hour to get accustomed to how marketing will be leveraged today and in the future. 

This sophisticated yet flexible application is acclaimed for many reasons, one being that sit doesn’t technically require HTML coding skills and has an unmatchable lead profiling and personalized content based on data of the prospects. 

So, this is how you make the most of Marketo to empower your sales and marketing performance, by approaching the right leads at the right team with the right message. If you use Marketo and have some campaigns that you believe have outperformed your average, do share with us!