The Essential Beginner’s Guide to Adobe Marketo: What is Marketo?

Traditionally, the life of a marketer involved being rushed off your feet trying to get everything for your next marketing campaign. This would drain your time and energy, and dull your creative spark.  

This is where marketing automation comes in. Its aim is simple: to streamline the marketing process by doing the repetitive tasks for you, reaching out to potential customers and holding on to the existing ones. 

In this article, we’ll be delving into the world of marketing automation, focusing on one of the most popular platforms of its kind, Adobe Marketo. 

What is Marketo? 

Marketo is an AI-powered marketing automation platform that helps to streamline marketing campaigns, improve workplace efficiency, and increase revenue. It does so by offering a host of features, including: 

• Landing page creation 
• Personalized emails 
• Interactive webinars 
• Social media content 
• Cross-channel personalization 

These are just a handful of features that Marketo has to offer, we’ll discuss them in more detail later on. 

What is Marketing Automation? 

Popular among a broad spectrum of businesses, marketing automation is the process of using software to complete repetitive and mundane marketing tasks. These can include sending marketing messages, nurturing sales leads, and personalizing marketing content.  

Marketing automation software is designed to streamline the entire marketing process, saving businesses time and resources. 

As more companies look to revolutionize themselves digitally, marketing automation platforms are becoming a must-have piece of software for marketing and sales teams.  

Who is Marketo For? 

Marketo is aimed at all sorts of businesses, from smaller-scale operations to the giants that are Amazon and Charles Schwab. While the main users of Marketo are companies in the software and tech industry, it can benefit other industries, including:   

Ecommerce  

With most of the world now shopping online, ecommerce companies are relying on marketing automation to broaden their customer pools. With platforms like Marketo, you can guide buyers through the entirety of the buying process, encourage them to sign up, or offer discounts on products. 

Financial services 

Unlike ecommerce sites, financial services don’t experience the same levels of success with regular marketing campaigns. They don’t offer instant satisfaction, nor are they the subject of impulse purchases. However, with Marketo they can offer thoroughly personalized customer experiences which allow them to develop loyalty among their customers.  

SaaS (software as a service) 

SaaS companies are among the biggest adopters of marketing automation platforms, as they can distribute their marketing efforts to specific target audiences.  

There’s no point spending a lot of money casting a wide net for a niche software service. That’s why the likes of Marketo are so effective, allowing them to reach the exact demographic they were hoping for. 

Now we’ve covered a handful of industries that benefit from marketing automation, let’s take a look at the departments that benefit. 

1. Marketing executives

With the help of Marketo, marketing executives can access the analytics that shows which aspects of the campaign are most successful. They can use these statistics to divert the direction of the campaign and increase revenue further. 

2. Sales representatives 

With the help of Marketo, sales reps can gather information about the type of people who are interested in the product. This will help them to engage with their audience more effectively. 

3. Marketers

On a more general level, the marketers in charge of building a campaign will have more of a basis to work from with Marketo. They’ll have a much clearer direction in mind, streamlining and speeding up the process. 

How Does Marketo Work? 

The Marketo setup process isn’t as straightforward as many would like, with Adobe themselves recommending that you enroll an IT expert to help you. They’d be right too, as setting up Marketo will feel like a slog if you’re inexperienced with IT. 

Cross-channel marketing 

One of the first major features you’ll notice after setting up Marketo is cross-channel marketing. This allows you to coordinate engagement online and in-person, helping you to interact with your customers according to where they are in the buying process.  

Social/digital marketing 

Marketo understands the importance of social media marketing as much as it does digital marketing in general. By utilizing the power of interactive online content, Marketo will gather data from social media campaigns to help you understand your audience better. 

Dynamic Chat 

Adobe’s Dynamic Chat feature uses AI to help generate leads and boost conversions, using a chat bot-style system. It will track customer activity and provide unprompted extra information to them as they browse your site. To do this, it will work alongside your integrated CRM tool. 

Email marketing 

A key form of marketing is, of course, emails. Marketo sends out personalized emails based on your customers’ interactions with your business. This will go a long way toward boosting engagement and nurturing a relationship with your customers, much like how a CRM tool would operate. 

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How Much Does Marketo Cost? 

While it’s clear that Marketo is a highly useful tool for marketing automation, its biggest flaw may be in its pricing. Adobe isn't willing to share the individual prices for the four plans: 

• Growth 
• Select 
• Prime 
• Ultimate 

This is largely because of their personalized package system, where you only pay for the features you want. While it’s nice to not have to pay for every single feature on the platform, transparency of pricing would be welcomed.  

One thing that is certain is that Marketo isn’t cheap, even in its most cost-effective form. Here is a rough price and features guide for each plan: 

Features breakdown 

Users

With only 50 users available, even with the extremely expensive Ultimate plan, Marketo may feel restrictive for large businesses. Considering the price of the Ultimate plan, you’d expect an unlimited number of users.  

Even the 25-user cap on the cheapest plan feels slightly unfair, given that the price isn’t exactly a drop in the ocean for small businesses.  

API calls

APIs (application programming interfaces) are software-to-software interfaces that allow different applications to gather information from each other. API calls are essentially messages sent to servers, which can be used for making online purchases, building solutions, and accessing online services. 

Again, Ultimate plan users may feel short-changed here, being afforded the same number of API calls as the two cheaper plans underneath.  

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Marketing calendar

Calendars are vital in marketing, as they allow you to keep track of different campaigns. The growth plan is the only plan not to be offered a marketing calendar within Marketo.  

This may not be an issue, as most CRM tools will have a marketing calendar feature. Even some email platforms such as Mailchimp offer their own marketing calendar feature. 

Marketo Measure

Only the Ultimate plan gives its users access to Marketo Measure, Adobe’s own B2B attribution tool. This allows marketers access to a broad range of analytics which help them to shape the direction they take their campaigns in.  

There’s no doubting that it will be a useful tool for marketing departments at major companies. However, it’s one of very few features that the Prime plan, which is around $25,000 cheaper than the Ultimate plan, doesn’t have access to. 

Is Marketo worth the money? 

It’s difficult to put a blanket statement over whether Marketo is worth the money, due to the incredible range of prices across its four plans. For a start, the two most expensive plans are aimed toward large businesses that operate in the multi, multi-millions when it comes to revenue. If you’re a smaller business, or even a medium-sized business, you’d likely find it hard to justify the cost. 

One of the platform’s main issues is that the Ultimate plan doesn’t actually have many features that differentiate it from the Prime plan below it. Yes, Ultimate users get access to the Marketo Measure tool, but other than that, there’s little else.  

It’s also a shame that the number of users and daily API calls is capped from the Select plan onwards. This could be the catalyst for many companies to take their investment elsewhere. 

Let’s dive into some of the pros and cons of Marketo.  

Pros and Cons of Marketo 

Pros  

• Good integrations: While it may be easy to confuse Marketo as being a CRM, it isn’t. However, it does integrate with two major CRM tools, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. This helps you to include Marketo into your system seamlessly.  
• Easy to use: As with a lot of Adobe products, Marketo is very easy to use once you’re all set up. Everything is simply labeled, with features in relevant places. In a workplace environment, with data being passed around to multiple departments, ease of use is very important. 
• Great customer support: Marketo has a very active customer support system, so you’re unlikely to be struggling for long if something goes wrong. 
• Contains all the essentials: As far as marketing automation tools go, Marketo is comprehensive. It contains all the essentials that a business needs, with a flexible pricing system that cuts out what you don’t need. 
• Flexibility: Marketo’s flexible pricing system is very useful, allowing you to only pay for the features you need. Not only does this reduce the price of the software, but it also declutters the user interface, ensuring it doesn’t become too complicated. 

Cons 

• Expensive: Marketo isn’t the cheapest marketing automation tool available, far from it. This isn’t the main issue, however. The prices for Marketo are only available upon request, with this lack of transparency a turn off for many potential users. 
• Complicated to set up: While Marketo is easy to use once you have everything in place, the setup process can be complicated. If you’ve never had any experience in setting up this type of software, you may require a specialist to run you through the process. 
• Speed: A common complaint with Marketo is that it doesn’t run with the speed you’d expect from modern software. Even with high-speed internet, you may find the software to feel sluggish. 
• Limited users: Unfortunately, Marketo only allows for a certain number of users per account. This will limit the number of staff that have access, potentially slowing down the process of a marketing campaign.  

Alternatives to Marketo 

Whop

If you're selling digital products or services, then you can sell and market these with Whop. With Whop, you create your own whop, where you sell and amange your digital products (like SaaS, ebooks, webinars, coaching calls, online courses, paid communities, and more).

When you have your first product on Whop you can start using Whop's marketing features. This includes creating marketing content in the form of blog posts and forum content, hosting webinars to showcase your products, having social proof in the form of reviews and comments on your Whop storefront, offering multiple pricing options, and having your digital products on the Whop Marketplace, which is visited by millions of new customers each month.

Whop also has an integration with MailModo for your email marketing campaigns, a CRM where you can manage customer payments and subscriptions, a Resolution Center for customer service, and a dashboard where you can view your analytics and reports.

While not a marketing automation tool like Marketo, you can not only market your products with Whop, but also sell them through Whop.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 

If you’re a smaller business looking to save a bit of money on marketing automation, Microsoft Dynamics 365 may be the better option for you. It’s a more user-friendly, cost-effective platform, which still has the tools in place to help you grow as a business.  

It lacks a lot of the complexity of Marketo, but it still has many of the essential features you need to run successful campaigns. It also has the power to work as a CRM tool, giving you even more for your money. 

Salesforce 

Although it is primarily a CRM (customer relationship management) tool, Salesforce does offer marketing automation features. Much like Marketo, it’s not cheap, but its wealth of features goes a long way to making it feel like a good investment. 

It allows for unlimited users with four of its five plans, so you won’t have to make any decisions over who can use the platform. The main drawback is of course that Salesforce is more of an all-rounder and not specifically an automated marketing service. 

Simplify Your Marketing With Whop  

If you want the right people to find your digital product or service, but don’t fancy paying over the odds, Whop is here to help.  

Whop provides all of its sellers with the tools they need to market their product, whether it’s an online course or a digital coloring book. You’ll have all the analytics and statistics you need, as well as an eager audience waiting to engage with you. 

So, what’s stopping you? Join Whop and show the world what you have to offer today.