Exploring Marketo: A Guide to the Marketing Automation Platform

Marketo is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that helps businesses improve their marketing efforts. It lets you or say allows you to run campaigns across various channels like email, social media, web, and mobile. With Marketo, you can generate leads, nurture them through the sales pipeline, and analyze campaign performance to optimize future strategies.

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The platform offers features such as lead scoring, email marketing, customer segmentation, analytics, and integration with other marketing tools. Whether you're a small or large business, Marketo can streamline your marketing operations with its fully-featured automation platform. You can plan, execute, and track marketing campaigns across multiple platforms, including social media, email, web, and mobile. Marketo makes it easy to engage your audience and achieve results, regardless of the size of your business. Now, let's dispel a few myths about marketing automation before we dive into how it can benefit you. Marketing automation is not just a fancy term for email promotion. It encompasses much more than that. It manages campaigns across all platforms, including social media, internet, and direct mail. It combines powerful features from your CRM, lead management system , web analytics platform, and other systems to create a comprehensive solution. By utilizing marketing automation, you can gain a deeper understanding of your marketing efforts and potentially increase your ROI. And no, marketing automation is not an email address for spam. It can produce results depending on how you use it.?

Lead lifecycle management, lead scoring, and lead nurturing are some of these procedures for B2B businesses . They consist of retention, upselling, and cross-selling for B2C businesses. And marketing ROI analytics are crucial procedures for all businesses. Marketing automation fosters connections with leads who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase. Only 20% of leads are typically ready for sales when they initially come in. This means that in order to nurture qualified leads into sales-ready prospects, you need to follow a structured process called lead nurturing. Nurturing can result in lower cost per lead and higher revenue when done correctly. To get knowledge about this crucial procedure one must take a deep dive into the situation and immerse themselves into the statistics of Marketo and it's world -?

? Improved lead generation by 28 percent year over?

year and increased sales by 18 percent

? Lowered cost of distribution and marketing

? Enabled precise measurements to determine?

which campaigns were most valuable for closing?

new business

? Provided an understanding of what was required?

to move prospective students from consideration

to buying

? Allowed marketing to measure ROI and take a leadership role in driving higher revenues challenges with campuses in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, and across?

the Ottawa Valley, Algonquin College has over 19,000 full-time students and more than 36,000 continuing education students. To generate student leads, the organization used batch emails, leaving the college unable to track the effectiveness of its marketing content. In addition, due to the diverse student base, the sales cycle could range from just a few days to several years. The college needed a marketing solution flexible enough to provide detailed insight into prospect behavior and the sales pipeline solution. Algonquin College considered several marketing automation products before ultimately selecting ‘Marketo Engage’ based on its ease of use and Salesforce integration, which were at the top of their requirement list.?

However, the marketing staff were also pleased that Marketo Engage could provide first-hand insight into how customers progressed through a website, interacted with landing pages, and responded to marketing campaigns in real time. Their marketing organization is now in a position to move from basic nurturing to “advanced nurturing”—using a set?

of elaborate campaigns and triggers to launch relevant, targeted content at the instant the prospect expresses?

interest. This capability allows Algonquin to further refine how they segment leads and ensure they always deliver the?

right message at the right time.

Benefits with marketing automation, Algonquin College has gained deep, actionable insight to determine the content that has the most immediate positive impact on lead generation, open rates, conversion rates, and closed sales.

As a result, the marketing department improved workflows and moved prospects through the buying cycle faster.?

They have improved lead generation by 28 percent year over year and increased sales by 18 percent, all while lowering their?

cost of distribution and marketing. In addition, the ability to measure ROI has dramatically improved with Marketo?

Engage, letting the marketing team take a leadership role in driving higher revenue.

Comparing marketing automation to other solutions. A stand-alone solution that plays well with others.You probably want to know what sets marketing automation apart from solutions. You’ve already purchased or used—and whether you need more technology to make it work. In this section, we’ll walk you through exactly what marketing automation adds to your toolbox and how you can integrate it into your technology stack. Marketing automation and its relationship to CRM .?

Many customer relationship management (CRM) systems already have a module for?

Marketing. If this is your case, you might wonder whether you really need marketing?

Automation. But if you dig into the design and capabilities, you’ll find that although?

CRM systems provide value to sales organizations, they fall short for most marketing departments. CRM systems serve a very different purpose, which is what creates an opening for marketing automation solutions.

From a functional perspective, CRM systems typically don’t let you send emails, Track prospect behavior, or manage marketing programs. Many CRM systems can be customized to handle tasks like automated campaign flows, lead scoring, and De-duplication. But even that can be a challenge. Marketing automation helps marketing departments in ways that CRM systems simply Can’t—and CRM systems help sales and other departments in ways marketing automation Can’t. Both systems are necessary to businesses. Today, CRM systems and marketing automation can work together seamlessly. Marketing automation and its relationship to email marketing As a marketing tactic, email still has a tremendous impact. But the world is changing.?

With the deluge of messages customers receive every day, emails have to be more?

relevant and engaging than ever for a customer to take the time to read them.

Despite the prevalence of email marketing, not all companies are succeeding with it.?

Marketers struggle with targeting, formatting, and delivery timing. It’s no surprise that engagement—the primary metric for email response rates—is falling along with open and clickthrough rates.

Other common marketing tools—such as CRM, landing pages, social media, and?

web analytics—only compound the problem. When tools like these don’t integrate with email marketing solutions, it puts email in a silo. Plus, email creates endless administrative work for marketing teams that try to connect processes and consolidate reporting manually. Costs quickly escalate for one-off email solutions that deliver poor ROI. And revenue flounders because companies fail to segment their audiences, which?

leads to inconsistent, impersonal customer experiences.

The answer is to use email solutions that coordinate with other tools, start dialogues?

that build relationships, and engage customers—not an entire company—on their schedules. That’s where marketing automation comes in.

Who uses Marketo?

Lori Wizdo, Forrester analyst who covers marketing automation, broke down Marketo users into three buckets:

• Marketing practitioners who need to get campaigns built and nurturing strategies operationalized.
• Sales reps who now have insight into all the digital behavior of prospects and can now have better, more contextual engagement.
• Marketing execs who can now correlate marketing investment to sales pipeline and revenue.

(Source : https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/what-is-marketo-a-marketers-guide/ )

Seven signs you need to graduate from email Marketing to marketing automation

How to tell if your company is ready to move up to a more mature solution-:

1.You ’re sending email blasts rather than engaging in customer dialogue.

2.You ’re losing valuable time with manual email campaigns.

3.Your email marketing exists in a silo.

4.You can’t segment or target key audiences.?

5.You ’ve got “trigger insensitivity” issues.

6.You can’t tell if your email is driving pipeline or revenue.

7.Your sales team is frustrated.

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Your relationship with the marketing team and inbound marketing is very important.

Inbound marketing is such that it enables potential customers to find your company—often so that even before they even contemplate making a purchase—and converts early exposure into brand preference. This can truly lead to generating much anticipated leads and, ultimately, the revenue one deserves in actuality. The job of an inbound marketer is not only fortunately or unfortunately to find leads, but to assist leads in finding them. So it's almost a give and take situation. To accomplish this, companies develop intriguing content that captures attention and grows their audiences. Marketing and it's automation that forms the actual 'Marketing Automation' improves the effectiveness of such inbound marketing. Due to the limits of inbound marketing, such as the difficulty of targeting a certain or a specific audience and compelling customers to take action, a comprehensive marketing strategy must involve a variety and different types of approaches, including events, webinars, emails, and advertising, in addition to inbound tactics and more so that is. To get the most out of inbound marketing, businesses should integrate it with relationship marketing, lead scoring, and other components of marketing automation.?

We call this the “inbound marketing multiplier .” Without it, inbound marketing simply generates the names of raw prospects for your business but doesn’t turn them into Leads and customers.?

Inbound marketing is a strategy, not a technology. Many technology solutions can help with inbound marketing, including blogging software, content management systems, Search engine optimization (SEO ), and social media monitoring. These can also work With a marketing automation solution. Inbound marketing solutions work better when combined with marketing automation technology, so consider implementing both. The challenge Marketing executives can find it dizzying to juggle the complex array of programs and activities needed to reach target customers across a broad range of online and offline channels. Their campaigns need constant adjustment based on new insights, competitor?

moves, and technologies.

The solution to succeed and win in this highly complex and lightning-fast business environment, marketers need to be agile. According to McKinsey, agile companies “achieve greater customer centricity, faster time to market, higher revenue growth, lower costs, and a more engaged workforce.” They are more likely than other organizations to rate high in organizational health, which is a strong indicator of long-term performance. Putting agility into practice Marketers lay the foundation for marketing agility in two ways:

1. Gathering in-depth information on customer preferences and behavior.

2. Quickly creating new campaigns and adapting existing ones.?

Therefore, automated marketing platforms are crucial for agile marketers, as they provide a comprehensive customer view through their marketing databases. When confronted with these intricate needs, a flowchart alone is insufficient to fully understand everything. Instead of that, seek out modular interfaces for users that rely on triggers, then pay attention to customer feedback and react with suitable responses. Marketing automation platforms are revolutionary for agile marketers as they offer a consolidated customer view through their marketing databases. Marketing automation platforms provide user-friendly interfaces and are simpler to manage and update as time goes on. Convincing your executive team of the value of investing in marketing automation may take some time. In order to persuade them, you must comprehend their priorities and the reasons for their objections. Highlight marketing automation by addressing the obstacles that your company encounters in every department. If not, your business case may not be perceived as a priority by your executives.

at this moment. Your success in presenting a solid argument for marketing automation depends on effectively demonstrating how the investment will resolve the top issues and meet the main concerns of C-suite executives. Ensure that you effectively communicate the anticipated timeframe and level of effort to any executive you are trying to persuade. You can't simply activate marketing automation and expect immediate outcomes. Avoid making commitments you can't fulfill. As you increase your investment, you will begin to understand how to utilize marketing automation in order to enhance the impact on revenue growth. Your peers will value and admire your practical, rational attitude.

Marketing departments frequently encounter a credibility deficit within their organizations. Marketing Week states that there is a link between the size of a company and how important they perceive marketing to be, where smaller businesses prioritize it the most while larger corporations also see its value. Per Ben Alexander, former CMO at Digital Risks and current marketing director at Usay Compare, “Over time, marketing can be perceived as less important as the business starts investing in new markets, sales processes, partnerships, technology and so on.”

Many executives think of marketing as a cost center, not a revenue-driving department. Not surprisingly, most executives don’t want to invest more resources in a cost center. They see no reason to automate marketing processes?

if it will just produce mediocre results faster. You’ll need to address some of these perceptions head-on when making?

the case for marketing automation.

Conclusion

Marketing automation enables firms to save time and money, track and optimize marketing spending, and accelerate revenue growth. According to our benchmark analysis, marketing automation may help firms improve their pipeline by 45%, generate 25% more revenue, and empower sales people to spend 22% more time selling. Marketing automation is essential for modern marketing organizations. It simplifies, and thus automates and even measures marketing operations and workflows to save you time and money, track investments, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate revenue development.?

Article Credit: Shahataj Sarkar