One of the biggest names in marketing automation software, especially B2B marketing, Marketo offers a wide selection of marketing solutions for businesses ranging from marketing automation, email marketing, mobile marketing, lead management, analytics, and more. According to https://www.forbes.com, among the biggest benefits of marketing automation is that it allows businesses to connect with their ideal customers instead of marketing to everyone. Marketo will definitely feature on the list of alternatives; however, since it is not very cheap, you will need to make sure that you can benefit from its capabilities before you invest. Some of Marketo’s pros and cons that can help you to make a more informed choice:

Advantages of Using Marketo

Marketo offers what is possibly one of the most extensive ranges of tools for an effective marketing solution that can fulfill the need of all modern marketers to establish their brands and buy twitch followers. Marketo is also extremely flexible as it is structured to offer distinct modules so that you select exactly what you need and ignore the rest to keep both the complexity and cost down to a more affordable level. Marketo also emerges a more usable product compared to its competitors because of its modular structure. It comes as a pleasant surprise that Marketo setup is extremely easy and fast, especially when you consider the fact that it is a complex product.

Good Reasons Not to Include Marketo in Your Shopping List

Perhaps the biggest complaint that customers are likely to have about Marketo is its pricing that makes it unaffordable by smaller businesses and overkill for beginners. As is inescapable with a very sophisticated product, Even though the interface is fairly intuitive, it is still not something that can be used without some amount of training. Even though Marketo is not strictly sales-oriented software; it can be of immense use to the sales force. However, Marketo is not a CRM solution so you will be disillusioned if that is what you have been expecting. While Marketo itself does not have a CRM solution built-in, it does offer integrations with many other CRM packages. While the integration with Salesforce is one of its finest features, its integrations with other CRM solutions are not as impressive.

One area where Marketo needs to improve is in the quality of its landing pages and form builder that is far behind industry leaders like Leadformly and Unbounce. Another crib of Marketo users is that the usability and details of its analytics and reporting functions are below par and the competition outscores it quite easily. Marketo users are generally happy with the user experience, however, they report that it can be frustrating to use some of its tools and that the performance can be quite sluggish.

Despite a large number of negatives, there is no denying that Marketo occupies a position of leadership in marketing automation software. While there are some small issues, the real deal-breaker for any potential customer is undoubtedly it’s pricing.

What Is Marketo Pricing?

There are no pricing details available on Marketo’s website and prospective customers need to contact its sales team to obtain a quote. Since it’s pricing is based on the number of leads the customer has, its decision to have three separate pricing categories seem to be inexplicable. The final pricing, therefore, depends on both the number of leads and the plan selected. The cheapest plan for leads less than 10,000 is $1,195 per month while across plans and the number of leads it grows to as high as $11,995 per month for 750,000 to 1 million leads. Even though these are monthly prices and you can save with annual contracts, it is quite clear that while the prices are comparable with the competition, the lack of an entry-level plan makes it unaffordable for small businesses. According to experts, even at the enterprise level, Marketo is one of the most expensive marketing automation solutions in the Influencer Marketing Platform.

Marketo Functions

The Marketo platform is divided into several separate apps, which means that you can just use the apps you want without needed to deal with the complexities of the others. This modular structure can be more important than you think because typically enterprise platforms tend to give users such a large number of features and dashboards that they can mess up the job of getting to the point with simple objectives. In this respect, Marketo does a very good job of offering a suite of apps that enable users to use what they need whenever they need a particular function. The various apps include marketing automation, account-based marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, social media, digital ads, web personalization, marketing analytics, content AI, and Marketo Sales Engage. Between all the apps and the tools provided, marketers are positioned well to obtain good coverage of all the automation functions across their marketing strategies. The only thing that is missing is a CRM, which you will have to buy additionally.

Comparison with the Competition

The most obvious difference with HubSpot is that HubSpot builds in a CRM and also provides options with entry-level pricing for smaller businesses. While the enterprise-level pricing is not that different between the two, HubSpot’s entry-level plans allow customers to scale their businesses with the number of leads. HubSpot scores very high on the quality of its reporting as well as customer support – the extensive documentation and content created by it helps customers to extract the best out of it. Smaller brands looking to automate their marketing can also consider ActiveCampaign, which is designed specifically for small businesses looking to grow. It gives very affordable entry points that are ideal for startups and small businesses. Even though it is less feature-rich than Marketo, the features and functionalities are more than adequate and the built-in CRM means that no extra investment is needed.

Conclusion

Marketo may be the perfect choice of marketing automation software solution for enterprise-level businesses even though the absence of a CRM may be frustrating. For smaller businesses, the cost, however, may not make it affordable.