If you want to realize the full potential of any investment you make in your B2B MarTech stack, it really boils down to how skilled your team is at using it.
“This is never more true than it is for Adobe software, which can be a cheetah or a house cat depending on how well you put it together and operate its machinery,” wrote Ted Schadler, VP & Principal Analyst Forrester Research, going so far as to add that “firms should never buy software without a service provider at the table.”
All too often, improving cost efficiency and maximizing marketing impact for a complex and mission-critical marketing automation platform like Adobe’s Marketo Engage can take a backseat to simply trying to keep the campaign engine running.
The fix may be easier than you think. To start, we’ve identified five common issues that B2B marketing organizations should pay attention to if they want to get the most out of Marketo.
Issue 1: Campaign dashboards aren’t capturing all the information you want.
Being able to share as much relevant information as possible with your sales team ensures outreach efforts are more effective. If your organization uses Marketo, it means a lot of campaigns are happening at once—and mistakes do happen. Maybe there are missing steps in a campaign flow, or a source is missing or not being scored as intended. Perhaps you’re not able to see the first and last touch, or what converted a contact to a qualified lead. If this isn’t information that can be viewed easily and accurately, it’s worth investing in a layer of quality control.
Issue 2: You need access to historical data.
If you’re looking at long-term trends or developing the next step of your strategic roadmap, you’ll want to consider as much data as possible. Unfortunately, Marketo enforces a time limit on how long data is stored for easy retrieval. It can be a few months or a few years, depending on your settings, but if you’ve passed the deadline, you’ll need support from someone familiar with the API and who possesses some coding knowledge.
Issue 3: It’s time to create a new Smart campaign.
Smart campaigns are core to what makes Marketo unique, allowing marketers to automate even the most intricate campaign streams with minimal effort. If you’ve done it before, it may be tempting to repeat the same formula, but tailoring campaigns and workflows is crucial at a time when the B2B buying process has become increasingly non-linear and unpredictable. It’s also time-consuming and easy to make a mistake, which makes it extra important to have access to talent that understands how to do this well.
Issue 4: You need to standardize platform usage across a larger marketing organization.
Attention to detail matters, especially when it comes to Marketo. It may not seem like the best use of your limited resources, but it’s important to make sure UTMs are accurate for reporting and attribution. It’s also worthwhile to standardize naming conventions for folders and files across different marketing teams and divisions. Even if the admin work feels like a headache, you’ll be saving yourself far greater pain later.
(And if you happen to be reading this because your organization has outgrown another marketing automation platform and thinking of migrating, even something as simple as collecting a list of documents and files you need—and ensuring nothing gets lost—is a big value-add.)
Issue 5: You need to do—or fix—a Salesforce integration.
Some platforms can integrate with a click of a button, but that isn’t the case with Marketo. While it may not be necessary to have a Marketo certification to perform every integration, when working with Salesforce, you’ll likely benefit from a higher level of expertise. Sync errors are incredibly common, and you should have someone around who can help figure out why leads didn’t get pushed over so you don’t waste time on something that should be an easy fix.
Marketing as a Service (MaaS) Provides an Immediate and Long-Term Solution to Marketo Management
In life and Marketo, there’s always room for improvement, and even when there isn’t anything obviously wrong, the goal should be to continually think of ways to increase marketing impact.
Reserving the capacity to question and optimize the setup may seem daunting or even impossible, given the difficulty of finding, training, and retaining B2B new-age talent.
However, B2B marketing leaders can turn to marketing as a service (MaaS) as a solution for stabilizing and scaling Marketo impact.
Hiring a MaaS firm means outsourcing execution to a dedicated Marketo-certified team that can address all the issues above. On top of that, the economic advantages of employing an offshore model enables a significant increase in the overall cost efficiency of MarTech management.
2X’s Marketo Service Desk offering supports:
- Resourcing stability and capacity with Marketo-certified and trained resources
- Labor cost savings averaging 50-70%
- The ability to adapt to and service your ever-evolving MarTech stack
- Best-practice structure and standardization around Marketo execution
- More time for your in-house team to think strategically about what to prioritize and improve
- Speed-to-launch with a dedicated team of full-time employees
For more information on how 2X can help you get the most out of Marketo, view a breakdown of our MOps capabilities.
Zi Yan Tung
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