Marketo, Inc., the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, will increase the sync speed of their industry-leading native Salesforce CRM integration by up to 50% to empower marketing and sales teams to convert more leads to revenue. These enhancements will become generally available later this quarter.  

The enhanced integration between the Marketo Engagement Platform and Salesforce CRM enables marketing to better partner with sales teams so sales reps can:

Focus on higher-quality leads that result in better pipeline and faster revenue growth
Improve lead response times to engage customers before competitors do
Tailor conversations based on real-time customer behavior

Marketo, Inc., the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today announced it has partnered with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to empower sales teams to discover the right prospects within target accounts and engage with them in a more personalized way to drive revenue growth.  

Marketo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator have partnered to deliver an innovative integration that supports sales teams' efforts to identify and engage the best contacts with personalized messages at every stage. With this integration, sales reps can access potential customers' LinkedIn profiles and gain visibility into their professional network, all within Marketo ToutApp to:

Leverage shared connections to secure "warm introductions" to prospects
Uncover new contacts within a given account to increase reach and coverage
Discover contacts' professional experiences and interests to tailor outbound messages and build rapport

"Marketo, Inc., the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today unveiled a suite of new and enhanced solutions that give marketers and sellers cross-channel personalization, enhanced email analytics, and account-based insights to engage more effectively with their customers. This latest product release reinforces the company's commitment to delivering the best solutions for marketers and sellers to win in the Engagement Economy.

Marketo's new analytics and insights offerings include the following:

• Account Insight is designed to strengthen the partnership between sales and marketing teams around account-based marketing (ABM) strategies by focusing sellers on the best accounts to target and giving them real-time insights into how and when a prospect is engaging with their brand in order to tailor follow-up interactions.
• Email Insights Enhancements allow marketers to drive greater value from Marketo's Email Insights solution through new ways to prepare, analyze, and share email campaign performance with marketing leaders.
• Integration with Facebook Offline Conversions Enhancements allows marketers to map additional Marketo customer journey stages to Facebook offline conversion stages, so marketers can further optimize their ad spend based on more meaningful actions and insights into the customer journey."

Earlier today (July 25) it emerged that Marketo users were experiencing trouble with logging on to its website, which helps them use the marketing automation software to engage with their own customer bases, with #marketo soon trending online.

The vast majority of the sentiment was of a mocking nature, with many highlighting the irony of Marketo’s self-professed excellence in customer support, as well as the irony of the situation.

This soon prompted an acknowledgement and apology from Marketo’s social media team, which has since issued a statement and claimed that a fix is imminent, with the company’s chief executive Steve Lucas confirming that it was “resolving DNS issues” along with a ‘profuse apology’.

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• LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms Integration allows marketers to collect high-quality leads on mobile via LinkedIn's pre-filled forms and sync that data to Marketo. This enables marketers to engage and retarget prospects instantly or alert sales reps to follow up.
• Web Personalization Campaign Enhancements provide marketers with flexible customization and triggering functionality to create more tailored website experiences. The new enhancements enable marketers to listen and respond to new customer intent signals, such as scrolling and exit intent. This provides marketers with more control over web campaigns without having to tap IT resources.
• Custom Fields for Named Accounts that enable marketers to append and sync account data in Marketo for more precise targeting and personalization.
• Percentile Scoring for Named Accounts makes it easy for marketing and sales teams to prioritize accounts based on scores from multiple inputs, such as behavioral, firmographic, and demographic data. For example, teams know at a glance whether an account is in the top 10 percent of active accounts or the bottom 10 percent.
• Account List APIs enable marketers to access and share named account lists with other applications to effectively execute a cross-channel ABM strategy. For example, marketers can now more effectively target accounts through ad networks, and marketing and sales can better harmonize their efforts for the same set of accounts across the buyer's journey."

Marketo, Inc., the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today announced the creation of the Alliance for ABM Success (Alliance), a consortium of experienced account-based marketing (ABM) leaders who have come together to help companies adopt, implement, and succeed with ABM. In addition to Marketo, other founding members include DigitalPi, Elixiter, LeadMD, Fathom, and Perkuto. 

The Alliance was established to study, formulate, and share ABM best practices to advance the market's understanding of ABM technologies, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and collaboration about ABM success and its influences on revenue teams (sales, marketing, and customer success) globally. The Alliance will draw upon the combined experiences of its members and the projects they have led.

Infor and Marketo have agreed to tie together their core products and jointly sell them to businesses looking for sales and marketing software. The goal is to compete better with software giants like Oracle and Salesforce that have spent billions over the past few years to build their own sales and marketing software lineups. Executives from both companies confirmed the news, which will be announced later Monday.
Initially the two companies will focus on integrating or tying together Infor's customer relationship management (CRM) software with Marketo's marketing automation product but integration of other products will follow, Infor CEO Charles Phillips told Fortune.

Marketers can take full advantage of the platform's distinguishing capabilities, including:

• Capture the right customer data – Bring together the customer behavioral and profile data to engage customers at scale and manage their identities.
• Personalize & automate experiences across channels – Use data, customer insights and artificial intelligence to automate and personalize every experience across the customer lifecycle and across marketing channels, including email, web, ads, events, social, mobile, and more.
• Optimize business impact – Tie marketing efforts to business outcomes, like pipeline and revenue, and optimize marketing performance with analytics at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

The Marketo Engagement Platform is comprised of three functional areas that give marketers the flexibility they need to evolve their digital marketing capabilities over time. These include:

• An Engagement Marketing Hub that contains customer identities and data and the APIs to bring this data into and out of the platform. This also includes the automation, analytics, and adaptive engines that power customer insights and automated execution across the platform's applications.
• Marketo's Marketing Applications that are natively built into the platform. These 12 best-in-class apps include Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Web Personalization, and Predictive Content, among others.
• Partner Applications that leverage Marketo's open and extensible architecture and are available through LaunchPoint®, Marketo's ecosystem of best-of-breed partner technologies that helps organizations optimize, complement, and expand their use of the platform.

How is the technology doing?

We are expanding Marketo from a marketing automation tool to an engagement platform for enterprise organizations. And there’s a huge fundamental difference between the two. We’ve been at work on the technology for about two years, but are really making that pivot now.

Our goal is not to build every application a marketer needs, but to facilitate a platform that can integrate any application the marketer needs through a robust API to 600 partners. All of our own marketing applications, whether it’s lead management, campaign management, account-based marketing or web personalization, they’re all completely integrated within a single platform.

Marketing Organization & Technology

• 68 percent of marketers have a strategic plan for their MarTech stack to ensure that they have a robust, open platform to share data and integrate with other technologies.
• 96 percent of marketers surveyed believe that it is critical for a new vendor to be able to integrate with their existing technology.

Lifecycle Marketing

• 39 percent of marketers devote less than a quarter of their budget to customer engagement programs, and more than two-thirds of marketers do not have customer referral programs. While the emphasis is on customer acquisition, marketers are beginning to understand the significance of engagement marketing and how this approach will become critical to all marketing strategies.

Usage and Effectiveness

• 44 percent of marketers find that having relevant content for each audience is the biggest challenge to scaling their program effectiveness.
• More than a third (34 percent) of marketers are practicing account-based marketing (ABM). As this figure rises, marketers will need clear strategies to overcome the challenges of implementing ABM, such as sales and marketing alignment (24 percent of respondents cited team alignment as the top challenge).

Multi-Channel Strategy

• Marketers must embrace a multi-channel approach to engage with today's empowered buyers and ultimately drive revenue for their organizations. Only 42 percent have a mobile-optimized website, and 26 percent are incorporating mobile advertising into their mobile marketing strategy, even though many marketers do not identify as mobile marketers.

When comparing Pardot vs. Marketo, you’ll need to know the pricing and features breakdown for each tool. You could pay less for Marketo per month, but add-ons may nickel-and-dime you pretty quickly. You’ll also need to know how much manpower you have, as both of these options require a significant time investment for learning and configuring the product. Steep learning curves ahead.