Marketo 3.0 Reinvents Marketing Automation (Again) in Support of Conversations

It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since Marketo first came on the marketing automation scene. In that short amount of time they’ve gained 150 customers in 9 countries. Feedback from their customers and the company’s own experiences using their software have driven this robust, upgraded 3.0 release that includes 200+ new features.

Marketo software is designed by marketers, for marketers. I’ve had several lengthy conversations with Jon Miller, VP of Marketing, about how the company uses Marketo Lead Management to prove that marketing automation produces results by educating leads and building engaged relationships prior to sales activities.

And, what happens when salespeople call?

Leads recognize them and want to talk.

Conversation is the key to marketing and selling complex sales in a digital buying environment.

Marketo recognizes that not all online interactions with a prospect can be treated the same way. They use a cocktail party analogy to get their point across.

For example, when you go to a cocktail party, you can’t script what you’ll say because you don’t know who’ll be there or what they’ll talk about. If you try to approach this type of interaction with the same script for everyone, you’ll end up looking like an idiot to most.

To alleviate this pain, Marketo has upgraded segmentation to get really granular. They know that some prospect activity (or lack thereof) means a score should be decreased. They help marketers make sure that the message developed for a particular niche doesn’t get sent to people who won’t care.

Perhaps most importantly, they understand that the goal of sales is to be out selling. So they’ve freed salespeople to work hot leads from wherever they are by using real-time alerts to notify them instantly, via email or mobile device, when a lead takes action that indicates they could be an avid buyer.

Even though I’d love to cover all 200+ new features, I’m going to restrain myself to talk about some other key improvements that address issues I think provide a compelling advantage for their customers:

Progressive profiling: This means relieving your prospects from the pain of repeatedly filling out the same information time and again when they repeatedly download valuable content from your website.  It’s been proven that each additional field on a form increases the probability that leads won’t bother. Each field introduces friction and redirects their focus from getting your information to deciding how much of their own it may be worth.

With progressive profiling, the form fields the system knows are pre-filled, leaving only the new fields to be completed before they can get what they want. This approach enables marketers to gather insights beyond contact information and get more meaty clues about the buying stage, priority needs, related issues, etc. Marketers need to evaluate every field required on a form to make sure the pay off in insight is worth asking the lead to expend that additional effort.

Landing Pages: I’ve always been impressed with Marketo’s drag and drop interface, but the ability to alter you landing pages on the fly when you see an opportunity to improve them, including switching out your forms, means your campaigns can be more holistic and responsive to your leads. In fact, Marketo has specifically made landing pages simple to create to ensure that marketers make as many as they need for each niche market they target.

Anonymous Lead Tracking: The problem with website analytics is they track your website visitors in aggregate, regardless of who they are. It used to be that marketers would have to compare lead generation and management statistics against website analytics to determine how much of their traffic was actively engaged in the buying process.

With leads waiting longer to self-identify, this left marketers with a handicap.

Now, that’s not an issue. Marketo tracks everyone who visits. The software creates an ID for unidentified leads and then merges that record with new information once the lead proactively raises their hand.

This is HUGE. Now marketers don’t start from that identifying event, but can look back and know exactly how long the lead has been interacting with you, as well as what they’ve done to date. And so will your sales force. That’s where the human conversation comes in. Marketo has also tightly integrated with Salesforce.com to enable salespeople to see scores, what they call “interesting things,” activity and events.

They’ve not only removed the hassle for salespeople to know which leads need their devoted attention immediately, but they’ve given them the background to construct relevant conversations on par with the lead’s interests and experience with the company to date.

Reports: Marketo offers a slew of reports right out of the box. You can pretty much slice and dice your leads any way you need to, getting instant access to metrics and graphs that quantify marketing’s impact on downstream revenues. In an age where marketers have an executive mandate to prove ROMI and business value, Marketo has gone a long way to make sure you can.

I could go on, but it’d really be better if you go check it out for yourself. Here’s a link to the 3.0 demo.

Just one more thing. Marketo is on-demand. You can get a free trial, but you’ll also be up and running in hours. This means you’ll likely be able to prove value before your trial expires. Unlike other trials that take most of that period just to figure out how to set them up.

You can also go read John Gaffney's review over on the Demand Gen Report.

Comments

[robin]

its a good article

[Lead Management Software]

Third release is impressive. Marketo is doing a great job in lead management software industry.