Elevate Your Revenue Impact with Marketo
Contact Bands, Data Hygiene, Connected Platforms
The marketing automation tool has become the center of our marketing tech stack, and for good reason. Email, contact data, campaigns, and analytics are all valuable pieces of the marketing puzzle. But is your team leveraging every aspect of this powerful tool?
A couple of weeks ago, we had a timely working session with Marketo Product Marketer, Alexandra Quick, to discuss how to derive the most value from your data sets and answer some of your most burning questions about the tool. In this session, we discussed everything from analytics and report automation to connect data across teams and platforms and appending data to stay within your contact band. The goal: to help you get the most from your platform.
The goal: to help you get the most from your marketing automation platform.
When asked, “how do I do more with less in Marketo,” Vertify had some valuable insight about expanding and optimizing your current platforms in a time when budgets are being cut and marketers are being asked to make it work with what they’ve got. Erin Kaczmarczyk, Vertify Marketing Operations Manager said, “doing the most you can with your Marketo instance is more critical than ever. I look at email campaigns and I look at things that I’m running in Marketo and I’m like, ‘why do I have people in this data set that I can’t even market to?’ They aren’t ideal buyers that would fit into our ideal customer profile. So why even worry about having them in my Marketo instance?” She explained that when using Marketo, she is able to take those data points, append them, and remove the items that don’t need to be in Marketo. Erin finished with, “I would say that the most important thing you can do for the budget is to keep people in Marketo that you can actually market to.”
Alexandra added, “it’s important that as your business grows, you cleanse your data set and have only marketable contacts in Marketo. You may need to add more and that’s something that you should plan for as you scale and grow. Then, be sure to use Marketo to market to those contacts.” She encourages users to test their contacts regularly. “Don’t simply batch and blast your recycled lists over and over again. You’re just going to drive opt-outs and people will not want to hear from you anymore. Make the most out of those contacts. Hit them with targeted messages, things that make sense for them.”
“…it’s important that as your business grows, you cleanse your data set and have only marketable contacts in Marketo.
Alexandra Quick, Marketo
Erickson Tweedy, Product Manager at Vertify, explained that using some of Vertify’s key functionalities to clean up your contacts will help support your big investment in a tool like Marketo. “We know that you want to use Marketo to its fullest. It’s important to ensure that the data you’re bringing in from a CRM or a product system is who you want to be communicating with. Whether it’s current customers, hopefully, future customers, and anybody else on the buying journey, let’s make sure that they meet those requirements. The data you’ve got in there should be clean, crisp, and as deep as possible.”
Another great discussion happened around the question, “what’s the best Marketo feature people should know about?” Alexandra responded with information about Marketo’s newest tool. “Predictive Audiences is a new feature in Marketo and it’s powered by AI. It’s really helpful to use AI in these times because you’re taking the work of what would be a lot of man hours, and letting that be automated, continuously learning and applying those learnings without having to intervene as much. This way, you can focus on some of the higher level strategic tasks instead of being in the weeds.”
She added details about how the program works by explaining, “Predictive Audiences scales important decision-making points. There are a few features such as ‘likelihood to unsubscribe, likelihood to register, likelihood to attend.’ Typically, I’m in Marketo setting up a smart campaign or a smart list by dragging filters over and defining what my audience is going to be. Predictive Audiences works just like that. It sounds super simple and that’s the great thing about it. It does all that work for you. You don’t have to pour over data sets and understand why people are unsubscribing or not attending. It’s a really incredibly easy way to accomplish those goals.”
Lastly, the audience asked “can Marketo connect with a home-grown CRM?” and Vertify’s Erickson Tweedy responded with an enthusiastic “absolutely!” He went on to explain that there are a few different ways Vertify can go about doing it. “Every organization we work with has built or bought some combination of a CRM and then comes to Vertify so they can get data from other systems into their Marketo instance.”
Alexandra added that Marketo has a lot of complex native and non-native integrations, making it ideal for connecting with more than just home-grown CRM systems. “If you use Salesforce, for example, and have a complicated way that you’re using the systems, Vertify’s solutions are a great way to solve for that.”
“If you use Salesforce, for example, and have a complicated way that you’re [integrating] systems, the Vertify solutions is a great way to solve for that.”
Alexandra Quick, Marketo
In closing, Erin said, “I’ve never seen a tool do what this tool can do.” If you are new to Marketo, marketing analytics altogether, or find yourself in a revenue operations role, take heart. Marketo offers a lot of excellent training tools and great resources for learning how to use the platform. The Vertify customer success team is also available to provide top-notch support and help you learn how to elevate your impact with Marketo.