The Best Marketo Add-Ons for SMB

For newbies, Marketo proves its value right off the bat as an excellent email automation tool. But its potential goes far beyond email and event management. Marketo allows you to manage truly multi-channel marketing experiences across social, web, and digital ads-and sales empowerment tools help your reps build consistent email journeys throughout the customer lifecycle.

Once your team is trained, your quick wins are in the bag, and you’ve had a chance to take a breath, it’s time to start building your road map. Especially for smaller teams, potential wins need to be carefully measured against your team’s capacity, budget, and business goals. New martech initiatives can transform your business, but they are only as good as your strategy and preparation.

Here are five popular Marketo add-ons for mid-sized businesses, along with a few considerations for each.

Sales Insights

Sales Insights helps your sales team see Marketo data without leaving your CRM. Sales reps see their leads ranked by recency of engagement and overall lead score. Sales Insights is a great way to surface Marketo data-if you have the groundwork in place. To get the most value, first plan to:

• Implement Marketo lead scoring. You can start lead scoring out of the box, but it’s worth using Marketo consulting hours to get started. In order for lead scores to be helpful, you should have a decent idea of which firmographic and behavioral factors help people convert. If you haven’t already, start with that analysis. Involve both sales and marketing in the conversation.
• De-duplicate your leads. Lead scoring is only as good as your data cleanliness. If the same person is recorded in your CRM multiple times, Marketo will score those records separately. Talk with your CRM administrator to understand the current state of your data, as well as the road map for ongoing data quality.

Sales Connect

Marketo Sales Connect offers sales automation to complement Marketo’s marketing automation strengths. Reps can easily send and track template emails. They can also build out automated email sequences and link to assets. At most organizations, the Sales Connect decision will sit with your sales team.

For marketers less familiar with the sales automation ecosystem, here’s a list of Sales Connect competitors. Formerly ToutApp, Sales Connect became a Marketo offering in 2018. The Marketo community is still building Sales Connect expertise. That said, Sales Connect’s integration with Marketo will likely continue to improve over time, allowing you to more closely link your sales and marketing automation efforts.

Account-Based Marketing

Once you’ve set up lead scores, the Account-Based Marketing add-on should be on your radar. ABM draws on lead scores to create account scores that surface the accounts most interested in your product.

As Marketo Champion Corey Bayless put it, “ABM is about targeting within marketing automation. It immediately tells you who your best customers are and where to focus your attention based on the campaign you are trying to run.”

ABM pulls account information from your CRM into Marketo. It allows you to filter campaigns based on named accounts and even gives you the option to pull in child accounts. Using ABM to structure your data opens up new opportunities not only for email campaigns, but also for social ads and web personalization.

Ad Network Integrations & Remarketing

If your initial wins in Marketo are all about email, it can be easy to forget Marketo’s out-of-the-box integrations for social advertising. Ad network integrations are not really add-ons, but they’re on this list because they may feel like add-ons.

As soon as you start using Marketo, you can easily connect your Marketo lists with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google to create custom audiences that reach people who exist in your Marketo database. This saves you the work of exporting and re-uploading from one system into the other.

Note that each platform has its own minimum custom audience size requirement and can only identify a small percentage of your list. For example, LinkedIn recommends uploading 10,000 contacts or 1,000 accounts to meet their minimum threshold of 300 targets.

The Retargeting add-on (included right out of the box in higher pricing tiers) can help you remarket to your website visitors using Google and Facebook based on factors like industry, size, and interactions with your web campaigns.

Website Personalization

The website personalization add-on (also standard in higher pricing tiers) allows you to build website campaigns in Marketo using the same tools you’re already using for email. You can then target different web audience segments with different web campaigns. For example, if you segment your Marketo audiences by region, you could show different events to each region. You can also show special offers to members of priority accounts.

As one reviewer notes, web campaigns make the most sense when you have clearly defined audience segments that need to see very different calls to action. A few limitations to keep in mind as you build your strategy:

• There are a number of options for defining web segments, but built-in firmographic attributes will be more useful for some industries than for others. Firmographic attributes include enterprise versus SMB, as well as predefined industry categories.
• Also note that, like all Marketo features, this feature needs to comply with GDPR for European audiences and will not surface personalized content for people who have opted out.

Predictive Content

If content marketing is an important part of your strategy, Predictive Content is a good add-on to investigate. It allows you to surface the relevant related content based on a desired outcome, whether clicks or conversions.

Predictive Content does this by first cataloging your existing content and showing you what is already doing well, much like Google Analytics. Then, it lets you curate high-performing content pieces for the algorithm to test and recommend. Higher pricing tiers come with up to 50 assets; at the Select pricing tier, you can choose to pay for fewer.

For the best results, you should already have a clear strategy for using content pieces to drive form fills or purchases. Otherwise, your ability to optimize based on conversions will be meaningless. You should also have a clean content taxonomy so that the add-on can discover and compare content within categories (blogs, white papers, and so on) based on consistent URL naming conventions.

If you already have a strong inbound marketing strategy, predictive content can take it to the next level. If not, tightening up your approach is a good first step.

Other Marketo Add-Ons

Have a more specific need? Other add-ons include a variety of advanced analytics and reporting tools, Mobile Push Messaging and SMS Messaging, and more. You can also check out third-party Launchpoint partner solutions as you build out the best martech stack for your strategic goals.

Originally published at www.smartbugmedia.com.