Marketers today are held accountable for much more than they used to be.
From customer engagement to acquisition and retention, it’s a bumpy road filled with challenges.
To put it in the words of Steve Lucas, the CEO of Marketo:
“Today, we are making more complicated decisions than ever before, and as marketers, we are required to do it in seconds.”
Talk about pressure, right?
The only reasonable solution for brands to compete in this high-pressure environment is to embrace technology.
However, we often miss the point of technology.
The aim shouldn’t be just buying technology solutions so you can eventually add it to your marketing stack and call it ‘completed’.
The real goal is recognising what you want to accomplish. Customer journey mapping is a great way to start. After you complete the map you are fit to go after the automation technology.
So to help you leverage Marketo in your quest for customer journey optimisation, we share our thoughts and best practices below.
Marketo came to life in 2006, as a tool that helped CEOs and their teams to demonstrate the return on investment for their marketing programs.
Over time, with new product launches and acquisitions – Marketo expanded into a complete engagement hub.
The last significant thing that impacted Marketo was when Adobe Systems bought the platform in 2018.
After the new partnership transpired in the media, Marketo announced to its users – they should expect nothing less.
Marketo became a part of Adobe Experience Cloud and stayed a solution that can be used as a standalone tool in any marketing capacity.
In 2020, Marketo announced:
“…The new Marketo Engage experience that brings together the look and feel of Adobe Experience Cloud with productivity innovations to help marketing practitioners work faster and smarter. The end result is a next-generation experience that’s designed for easy adoption – marketers can seamlessly switch back and forth between the current and the new experience on every screen, individually, at their own pace. Plus, the context is maintained while switching, so there’s no disruption.”
Today, Marketo is considered a comprehensive engagement platform, providing marketing automation solutions to sectors such as healthcare, technology, financial services, manufacturing, media, and higher education.
The use of the platform is broad, as Marketo users may be sitting in different departments and levels of responsibilities. The platform is used in demand generation, marketing operations, sales, product management and more.
On top of that, according to the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management report, Marketo Engage was not only named a Leader but positioned highest for Ability to Execute and furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision.
Core capabilities of Marketo Engage include:
All of the listed capabilities can be further dissected into features that allow B2B companies to nurture your leads, follow them throughout their buyer’s journey, communicate across numerous channels and engage with them at scale.
Let’s see how to optimise the features for the best possible results.
As with any marketing automation platform, the first step to consider is the awareness stage of the customer journey.
So, how can Marketo help us improve the customer experience during this stage?
Well, by using the Web Personalisation feature, we can present personalised web content to our audience.
Additionally, it’s possible to personalise the content even if the prospect visited your website for the first time.
Marketo can identify browsers attributes such as location or behaviour.
For example, we can customise the imagery, offers or content towards the visitor in real-time based on the data we collected.
With Marketo Predictive Content, you can dig out assets you have scattered over your website and recommend that piece of content to the customer right then and there.
Similarly, Landing Pages functionality also allows marketers to customise content display – by applying dynamic content.
As far as building awareness in your outbound marketing goes, Marketo is a handy ally. It’s simple as creating an Event Marketing Program on the platform once, and then clone it for any future use.
By using this functionality, you can update event details using tokens and rerun the updated program for the next event.
You can utilise Reporting functionality that allows you to keep track of critical metrics such as clicks, lead generation or conversion rates.
The good news is – to provide more convenience for its users, Marketo integrates with several leading events and webinar providers (Zoom integration available) for a completely automated solution.
The platform expands its functionalities with features such as Ads, Social Media and Search Engine Optimisation. These will ensure that your marketing efforts are giving the best possible results.
Additionally, with the Mobile Marketing Software, marketers are empowered to engage customers within a mobile app (assuming your business has one).
You can use Mobile Marketing Software features to deliver personalised content that matches the customer’s behaviour in the app itself.
Once you collect the necessary insight, you can intelligently connect and expand their mobile experience across other channels.
In the engagement stage, there is one channel that consistently proves its unquestionable value – email.
No matter the business type or model, email is often the most important channel to engage customers throughout every stage of their journey.
Marketo offers extensive Email Marketing Software to automate personalisation across channels and at scale. Marketers can leverage A/B testing to compare various versions of an email template and its effect on the same audience segment.
Marketo offers a variety of functionalities when it comes to Personalised Emails as well.
Once you narrow down your audience, you can start building your perfect email using Marketo’s drag and drop interface.
Then, you can employ tokens as placeholders for names or locations and even dynamically change content for each customer.
Based on the behaviour your customers exhibit, you can set Triggered Emails that will record that behaviour and prompt a response email at the right time.
Alternatively, if you have sales teams aligned with Marketo – you can set notifications for your sales reps to call if the lead behaves in a certain way.
Lastly, you can measure your email performance using Email Insights that will allow you to drill down to individual email metrics.
Marketo’s capabilities are even more put to use if you have a CRM extending on the platform. Then you can easily link the performance of the emails directly to revenue with its powerful Marketing Analytics tool.
In the spirit of bringing more clarity, we will define Lead Nurturing as the process of deepening relationships with customers through every step of their journey.
It’s important to note – it is not only before the purchase stage of the journey you need to charm your buyers.
By this stage, you should already be their new best friend. Or at least, aim for that.
Building the Nurture Program in Marketo is possible with the use of its engagement program type and nurture channels that contain predefined program statuses.
You are free to create the streams in the nurture program to ensure your communication is consistent and relevant to their stage in the journey.
Furthermore, Marketo’s Lead Management has everything you might expect in a marketing automation solution.
It will enable you to connect, interact and analyse the insight throughout the customer’s journey.
On top of collecting leads and nurturing them with suitable and personalised campaigns, Marketo offers a Lead Scoring feature to track any behavioural and demographic attributes for future use.
By utilising lead scoring functionality in Marketo, you will be able to stay on top of your lead qualification from marketing to sales.
Additionally, by connecting Marketo with your CRM, you can integrate the entire lead management workflow of both marketing and sales users of the platform.
This will help you provide a more seamless journey to your customers.
On top of that, utilise Marketo Sales Insight to ensure your sales reps have a prioritised list of quality prospects who are ready to be converted.
Marketo places much emphasis on aligning the two departments. Therefore, the platform ensures your sales reps can view customers’ ‘moments of truth’ and even send marketing emails.
Marketo is a marketing automation platform designed to satisfy the needs of both B2B and B2C businesses. However, it shines brightest when used in the B2B environment.
With that in mind, we must consider the post-purchase stage of the customer journey where we must ensure customers are leveraging your service or product in the best possible way.
Thinking beyond acquisition is all about making and keeping the customers happy.
Also, there are a lot of missed opportunities when it comes to cross- and up-selling your product or service.
Just because your customer has bought the product doesn’t mean their journey with your company is over.
So, to support this stage of the journey, Marketo has brought us Account-Based Marketing as well as Customer Base Marketing.
Account-based Marketing (ABM) features ensure you don’t forget your customers after they have made the purchase or signed the contract.
The ABM method is especially prevalent in the B2B environment.
The aim is to identify high-value accounts, nurture them and eventually cross- and up-sell further.
Customer Base Marketing, on the other hand, is designed to bridge the gap from customer to advocate. It covers everything from increasing adoption of the sold service or a product to marketing additional solutions to the same customers.
With its marketing automation engine, Marketo puts the emphasis on increasing customer’s retention and adoption for the benefit of your business.
Marketo is well known to aid different markets and businesses of diverse sizes. Some of their customers include companies such as GE Healthcare, Fujitsu, Panasonic and Roche.
The real value of this solution is measured through the impact that companies experience after the adoption.
To demonstrate what Marketo can do for your marketing operations, we bring you the story of Panasonic.
Panasonic is one of the world’s biggest ‘makers of things’ and has one of the largest B2B websites in Europe, counting over 63,000 pages across 22 languages.
The main concern for Panasonic was to find a solution that will support their marketing team in their campaigns, while also staying a complication-free tool.
It was imperative that the system provides visibility into customers’ online behaviour, increases the productivity of the marketing team and supports the running of campaigns while giving greater cross-sell opportunities.
On top of all, Panasonic was interested in better alignment of marketing and sales departments.
The outcome?
By utilising Marketo and integrating it with their CRM – Panasonic’s marketing team was able to expand the marketing campaigns output by five times. Subsequently, they improved marketing’s contribution to the company’s total revenue from under 10% to 26%.
According to Stephen Yeo, Panasonic’s European Marketing Director, almost one-third of their pipeline now is coming from marketing campaigns.
“It has completely changed marketing within Panasonic, and it’s spreading throughout the global organisation.” – Stephen Yeo
Marketo was built to honour marketing processes and evolve with them.
Only last year the platform was acquired by Adobe, and as demonstrated, we can expect great things from it in the future.
Take Marketo Sales Engage, for example. The application serves both marketing and sales teams.
By merging the CRM data and Marketo insights – it helps you create a more consistent journey for customers and provides a more natural way of nurturing them.
It was released in the fall of 2018, right after Marketo became a part of the Adobe family.
In other notable news, Marketo recently acquired Bizible – a platform that gives B2B marketers visibility into the complete customer journey and deep insight into the ROI.
With Adobe’s dedicated investment in advancing the Marketo platform, you can rest assured you are in good hands.
Marketo Engage has got your back in your quest of providing a great customer experience.
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