The 4 Biggest Hurdles to Marketo Success

Marketo is a large investment which puts a lot of pressure on teams to get an early ROI. Even when you fully understand the benefits of marketing automation, you may still face some challenges to get the biggest bang for your buck. Here are the four biggest challenges to getting off to a great start with Marketo, or any marketing automation platform.

You don’t have the right training

There are a few different options for training when you purchase Marketo, all of which come with their own pros and cons.

• Marketo Community (FREE) - The Marketo Community (community.marketo.com) wonderful resource of Marketo users and experts who answer questions and provide insight via articles in an interactive forum. The challenge is for a new user - How do you get started when you don’t know what you don’t know? The Community is most valuable when you are using Marketo and get stumped an issue that is easy to explain in a written question. The experts on the community are responsive and intelligent. However, when you are getting started it can be hard to articulate your questions in a way that can be easily answered online.
• Marketo Foundation Training ($) - The Foundation Training is a series of on-demand video instruction from Marketo covering the fundamentals of Marketo. Although you can access these videos at your convenience, they also require you to carve out at 30-60 minutes at a time. Some topics might be learned quicker and others might require a deeper dive. Considering the lack of interaction between you and the trainer, this can be an expensive and less effective way to learn Marketo. What if you have questions?
• A Consulting Firm ($$$) - Digital Marketing Agencies and firms are exceptionally valuable in guiding your company through Marketo and digital marketing best practices, however, these often come at a much larger expense than small teams can afford. Requesting additional money from upper management after they have already invested in Marketo can be a daunting.

You have competing priorities

Odds are, your team had projects on your plate when you implemented Marketo and it's likely those are projects (or more!) are still on your plate now. The harsh truth for today’s marketing teams is that the digital marketing technologies aren’t a replacement for traditional efforts, they are an additional part of the marketing mix.In addition to learning Marketo and getting it up and running, you still have to manage trade shows, events, traditional advertising, content development, social media, public relations and countless other marketing and communications tasks.

Your data doesn’t work anymore

Nearly all mature or growing companies have years of data that may even spread across multiple systems and databases. Based on the systems they were using, sales teams had their own processes for tracking prospects and customers. The accounting department was able to keep track of customer billing. The data and the systems worked as expected and it worked.The key difference is that once you add marketing automation to the mix, the data becomes actionable in a much different way. The quality of your data can be the differentiator between being successful or not. Good data may not be good enough for marketing automation and bad data can be downright dangerous.

You jumped right in, but you need a better long term plan

By our very nature, marketers are inquisitive. This means that as soon you set Marketo up, you started playing around in the system - adding contacts, building campaigns and maybe even sending out emails right away. After all, Marketo is a really cool and powerful tool.Even with the best of intentions, it's easy to add clutter and bulk into Marketo. Some of that is harmless and part of the learning process; however, when you are getting started it's easy to create inefficient campaigns that will be hard to replicate and scale.

Marketo’s biggest strength is its ability to respond and communicate with your prospects and customers in a personalized way at a large scale. In order to maximize your Marketo investment, it's important to build campaigns with a long-range view.

I have been in your shoes and I can help. I’m a different type of Marketo consultant. I can come in and work WITH you to help you eliminate all four reasons that you aren’t seeing ROI as quickly as you like.I can coach you through hands-on, real world Marketo training.

Think of me as a personal trainer. You’ll be doing the work, building the strength and endurance, and learning what you need to do to succeed on you own. I’ll be there to guide you on techniques, offer a method for improvement and to cheer your successes.