It is easy to set up an online store, and then add beautiful images of your products. The difficult thing to do in any online business is to make sales, which is also called a conversion.
You need to be able to market your goods. Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, no one will know that your business exists unless you put your ad in front of people. In a physical store, people will pass by your location, and word of mouth will spread who you are and what you sell.
Marketo is a tool that you can use to help you solve this problem. It is a marketing system that allows you to create mobile marketing campaigns, automate these campaigns, send emails to your potential clients, and so much more.
Here, we will be taking a look at the power and features of this online marketing system, the pricing, and help you decide if this is a tool that you should add in your business.
A Little History
Marketo has been around for more than a decade. It was founded in 2006, and it started out as a simple marketing automation tool. Now, it has also evolved into marketing management and analytics. It is used in several industries like healthcare, media, manufacturing, and financial services.
Marketo’s headquarter is in California. It has more than a thousand employees, and it now operates globally with offices in Japan, Australia, and France.
In 2018, Adobe bought Marketo.
Why use Marketo?
Marketo is a leader in marketing. It offers not just email marketing, but dozens of other services that help companies be in the presence of people. It is a recognized brand that is used by big companies like Sirius, the digital radio company.
It is also known for its Launchpoint system where you can start your marketing campaign and access everything that it has to offer.
Today, it has even become a standard; Marketo offers a certification program for marketers. Getting a certification from Marketo means that you know your marketing stuff and that you can offer your services at a higher price than most freelancers.
To become a certified Marketo expert, you have to take an exam.
And once you pass the certification, you will enjoy these benefits:
- A digital credential that you can post on your social media channels as a digital marketer
- Globally recognized certification
- You have the chance to become an employee of Marketo
- Exclusive membership to the Marketo group in LinkedIn.
So, apart from benefitting from the product itself, you are adding a valuable skill that you can sell once you are certified.
Marketo Features
If you use Marketo, you may be overwhelmed by the number of services and marketing tools available in the system.
Below is a list of the things that you can do with Marketo.
Marketing Automation
This tool allows you to create campaigns that target specific customers. For example, you can show your advertising material to females only, and only to a specific age group.
With this tool, you can create landing pages, social media ads, create forms, and behavior tracking. You will be spending your money on marketing where there is value since you are only focusing on the hot prospect, not random people.
Here, you will also learn how to use marketing techniques like scoring CRM integration, sales intelligence, sales calls, and nurturing prospect clients.
This part of the system also has analytics that can show you how each of your campaigns is affecting your sales. The tool to access the analytics is called the Marketo Moments.
Email Campaign
Here, you can build an email campaign that looks professional, which you can send to your email list. It has an editor that works like a word processor, and all you need to do is to drag and drop your photos or videos.
There are also templates in this tool that you can use to make things easier for you. Just add the text for your campaign, edit the colors and fonts, and send the email.
The great thing about this software is that the email will change its appearance depending on the recipient’s device. What it means is that your campaign will not look like a broken series of links and images if it is viewed from a mobile phone.
Optimized for Mobile
In this feature, you can show your ads to customers while they are in your app. You can market your goods while they are playing games, or while they are watching something on YouTube for as long as your app is installed in their devices.
The benefit of this is that you can push notifications to your customers according to your preferences. You can push notifications based on what they are doing, or when they are inside your own business app.
You can also keep your business connected with consumers in real-time. The Marketo system will know where your customers are. And you can use this information to push notifications.
For example, you may have an ongoing tradeshow in 123 Main Street. If the Marketo system detects that a customer is within that area, you can push a notification telling this customer that you have a tradeshow ad that he may want to attend.
Digital Ads
This is the feature where you can create ads and launch them in many ways. You can change the ad setting so they will only be shown to a particular type of people or specific interests.
Here, you can choose if you want to show your ads only on mobile, desktop, or on other channels like email or social media pages. You have the option to launch your ad in Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other platforms.
It is also in this feature that you can trigger retargeting for customers who went to your website but never made a purchase. It has a system called Audience Hub, which provides insights about customer behavior. With this, you can create a much more personalized campaign.
Web
In this feature, you will be focusing on potential clients who have never bought an item from you yet. It will help you convert up to 98% of your anonymous visitors. What you can do with this tool is to add content and messaging materials to make these site visitors engage with your business.
You can also create real-time call-to-action campaigns as this feature automatically analyzes customer behavior, location, and other things such as the website where they came from before going to your website.
Marketing Analytics
In this feature, you do not only get basic numbers and reports. The marketing analytics feature of Marketo dives deep into these numbers to provide you with better insights.
For example, you can see statistics on every customer touchpoint, and you can identify which areas of your campaign are actually bringing in sales. If you know that your Facebook ad is performing better, you can boost that ad and make more money from that social media channel.
Here, you can also track how your customers move through your business space. You can see how people go through your sales funnels, where they stop exploring, and you can use this to improve your sales funnels or make better offers.
You can create a customized report for yourself, in case you do not want to see the default report settings. You can also integrate all your data here, so you do not get bogged down with using spreadsheets.
Predictive content
Predictive content refers to computer software or program that guess the right ad or content to be shown to a person.
This prediction is based on analytics and algorithm. For example, you may have several videos, infographics, articles, and eBooks on your website. What Marketo does is it indexes these contents and analyzes how they work, and how they are best presented to.
If a video you have is a tutorial about how to build a website, Marketo will show this video ad to somebody who, historically, have been searching for information on the internet on how to build a website.
This potential client will then be directed to your website, and if your video presentation is convincing enough, then this potential client may be converted into a paying customer.
Account insights and profiling
This is a tool that categorizes your known and unknown customers into groups. With this tool, you can create profiles.
For example, you want to create profiles for customers who are female, 18 to 25 years old, and loves pets. If you have a marketing campaign for a pet item, you can use this specific profile to sell your products to people are more likely to buy.
Sales Connect
This feature is a tool that is best used if you have sales reps. You need employees in a contact center, or you may also employ freelancers to call sales leads and offer your product.
In this feature, your sales reps will have a list of sales leads that are very likely to buy. The account insights and profiling feature are going to give your employees a good background about a particular customer.
Your sales reps are not limited to connecting to your leads by phone. They can perform sales through email, social media or even direct mail. And because they get customer insights from Marketo, they will know the right approach to sell, when the right time is to sell, and what products to sell to these leads.
Marketo Solutions
The features of the Marketo marketing system are the tools that you can use to boost your sales and improve your marketing campaigns. The solutions, however, are for specific problems that any business has about marketing.
Below are the Marketo solutions that you can take advantage of:
- Lead management – a strategy to nurture your potential clients before you take them to your sales page; create effective sales funnels to ensure that a sale is closed
- Email marketing – a marketing guide that will help you create an email ad that your customers will read
- Consumer marketing – a guide to how you can attract customers and make them buy; it also teaches you how to retain customers and make them loyal to your brand
- Customer-based marketing – this is an approach to making sure your existing customers are connected to you, and that you can do repeat business with them
- Mobile marketing – this is a solution to keep customers attracted to your app; you can also use it to create personalized conversations with your customers
Marketo Pricing
So, how much does Marketo cost?
This software is not for business people who are on a tight budget. Marketo is for middle-sized and huge businesses that can spare at least $1,000 for a marketing budget.
If you want all these features, you will have to negotiate an enterprise account with Marketo. But if not, you have the option to choose from several bundles.
Lead Management Bundle
This comes in four pricing—Basic, Pro, Elite, and Enterprise.
With the Basic package, you will get:
- Customer Engagement Engine
- Lead Scoring, Segmenting and Nurturing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Email, Landing Pages, and Forms
- Social Marketing, Events, and Webinars
- A/B Testing
- Sales Intelligence
- CRM Integration
- Campaign Dashboards and Reports
- Marketing Calendar
If you take the PRO, you will get all the features the Basic plus these:
- Digital Ads
- ContentAI
- Program and Campaign Analysis
- API and Integrations
- Additional Marketing and Sales Users
In Elite, you get all from the first two and:
- Anonymous Retargeting
- Opportunity Influence Modeler
- Revenue Modeler
- Success Path Analyzer
- Advanced Report Builder
Email Marketing Bundle
There is only one package available for this bundle, and you will get the following services:
- Email and Landing Page Creator
- Drag-and-Drop Audience Segmentation
- Mobile Responsive Template Library
- Real-Time Campaign Triggers
- Intelligent Nurturing
- Email and Landing Page A/B Testing
- Dynamic Content
- Campaign Dashboards and Reports
- Marketing Calendar
- Forms and Progressive Profiling
- Automated Workflows
- Social Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
Consumer Marketing
Like the Email Bundle, this one only has one package. The services you will get are:
- Marketing Database
- Audience Segmentation
- Real-Time Behavioral Triggers
- Intelligent Nurturing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Marketing
- Event Marketing
- Digital Ads
- Email Marketing
- Web Personalization
- Landing Pages and Forms
- A/B Testing
- Campaign Dashboards and Reports
- Marketing Calendar
- Mobile Marketing
- Cross-Channel Marketing
Customer Base Marketing Bundle
This is geared towards building relationships with customers. It has only one package with the following services:
- Customer Database
- Customer Segmentation
- Customer Nurturing
- Customer Scoring
- Web Personalization
- Account Based Web Marketing
- Intelligent Nurturing
- Email Marketing
- Landing Pages and Forms
- Events and Webinars
- Social Marketing
- CRM Integration
- Sales Intelligence
- Customer Journey Modeler
- Campaign Dashboard and Reports
- Revenue Analytics
- Marketing Calendar
Mobile Marketing Bundle
For those who want to target app and mobile users, mobile bundle is the best choice. It has only one package with the following features:
- Push Notifications
- In-App Messaging
- User Segmentation
- User Behavior Tracking
- Real-Time Behavioral Triggers
- Email Marketing
- Landing Pages
- Intelligent Nurturing
- Mobile Performance Dashboards
All packages, including the Basic from the Lead Management Bundle, would cost you $895 per month.
The PRO will cost $1,795 per month, and the Elite package will cost $3,195 per month.
Summary
Marketo is not for beginners in online business. These features are for huge businesses that are already earning, and for those who are ready to take on the world as its market place.
Is it worth the money? The answer is yes. But only if you are a large business and you need customized marketing solutions to drive more sales and retain customers.
At a budget of $3,000 for marketing, you should be making at least $50,000 in your gross revenue per month to be able to afford this.
You need Marketo if what you want is a one-stop shop for everything that has something to do with marketing and increasing conversions.
If you just want to focus on a single campaign, like email marketing, then you may need to consider another system that will not cost as much as Marketo.