You’ve probably heard of HubSpot, the marketing platform that lets you track customer behavior and engage with them via email marketing, landing pages, and more.

On the opposite end of the marketing spectrum, you have Marketo, the enterprise software company that helps businesses across industries grow, manage, and analyze their marketing data.

Here’s where the comparison ends. While both HubSpot and Marketo provide useful, effective tools for digital marketers, the reality is that they serve completely different markets.

If you’re looking to manage digital marketing on a large scale, HubSpot is probably the right choice for you. However, if you’re looking for a more specialized solution, Marketo deserves your consideration.

Why Should You Look At Specialized Solutions Instead Of General Purpose Applications?

It’s quite common for entrepreneurs to build their products from the ground up, launching a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and iterating based on user feedback. This is a perfectly acceptable practice, and one that can be extremely effective.

As your business grows, however, the need for specialized software will become apparent. After all, you’ll want to track the performance of your marketing campaigns and analyze the data pertaining to each campaign. This requires more than just a generic marketing application.

When it comes to specialized software, the choices are endless. You’ll have access to all sorts of tools, such as conversion optimization, automated email marketing, and SEO analysis. You can even build complex workflows, involving two-way communication with customers and other stakeholders.

These applications are quite useful, and they can be customized to fit your specific needs. However, building a marketing platform from the ground up isn’t something that’s easy to do. You’ll have to consider all the functionalities that you need, and the challenges that you’ll face along the way. That’s why, it’s so important to consider the specialized solutions offered by top-rated vendors.

What Sets Marketo Apart From Other Solutions?

Forbes has dubbed Marketo the #2 “unicorn” company in the marketing software industry, with a valuation reaching nearly $12 billion dollars. Marketo’s tools help businesses across the globe analyze their marketing data and plan campaigns accordingly.

The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco. Marketo provides SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to enterprises, including marketing automation, website creation, and performance marketing. In addition, the company has offices in the UK, Germany, and France.

Let’s have a look at what sets Marketo apart from other solutions.

Customer-First Approach

Many companies claim to focus on the customer, but in reality, they’re just throwing marketing words at you. You’ll see the same story over and over again: The company has built a better mousetrap, and they want you to buy it. But in order to grow their business, they have to also grow their marketing department, and in order to do that, they’ll have to acquire new customers. So even though the marketing department may work hard to ensure that new customers are accrued as quickly as possible, the reality is that they have to also work hard to keep existing customers. What sets Marketo apart from other solutions is their customer-first approach.

The customer is at the center of everything that the company does, and they make sure that their product is used for the purpose that it’s intended. In order to do that, they gather data from all the customers that they have, using that data to develop a deeper understanding of the customer’s needs. This way, they can ensure that each new feature that they build will have a direct impact on the customer’s experience.

Product Development

Another key differentiator between Marketo and other solutions is the way in which new features are added to their product.

Unlike many companies, who will add a shiny new feature every month and expect you to pay for it, Marketo focuses on adding features that are useful and relevant to everyday marketers, rather than focusing on the whiz-bang factor. In fact, many of their existing features are actually quite useful, and they’ve just added more features to the product, knowing that you, as a marketer, will find them valuable.

This month, they launched a feature called “Lookalike Audiences”, which gives you the ability to identify customer segments that are most likely to respond well to a given marketing message. In the past, you would have had to rely on your gut to tell you that segment A liked something about campaign X, while segment B disliked that same campaign. Now, with “Lookalike Audiences”, you can discover key marketing characteristics that segment A and segment B share, as well as the likelihood that they will respond to a given marketing effort.

Data And Analytics

A feature-packed marketing product wouldn’t be complete without some sort of data analytics aspect, right? Well, Marketo is no different. In addition to giving you customer insights, they also provide you with the ability to track the performance of each individual campaign, segment, or campaign. This means that you can see exactly how each marketing message is progressing, including the performance of individual landing pages, and whether or not that message had any impact at all.

This level of detail gives you the flexibility to discover exactly what is and isn’t working, and to adjust your strategy, if necessary. The fact that Marketo offers this level of analysis as a core part of their product is a testament to their level of commitment to their customers.

Specialized Solutions For Specialized Needs

The reality is that not all businesses are created equal. Not every business has the same needs, and not every marketing plan is created equal. That’s why it’s important to look for applications that are specifically built for the unique needs of your business. With that said, here are a few reasons why you might want to consider Marketo.

Saving You Time

You work hard to grow your business, and you don’t have the time to learn a new software package, just to do your job. That’s why it’s important to consider applications that are either completely free or have a low, one-time-use cost. Marketo is one of the few vendors that provide a free version of their product, and even then, you only have access to the most basic features. It’s also one of the few vendors that offer a low, one-time cost for their product. So, instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a single annual subscription, build out a free trial version of their product, and see how it works for you.

Extensive Documentation

One of the main draws of Marketo is their extensive documentation.

If you’re looking for a product that has all of the necessary documentation that you could want or need, then Marketo is the choice for you. The documentation isn’t just available online, either; it’s also available in multiple formats, including an e-book, which makes it suitable for reading on any device.

Scalable

One of the best things about Marketo is that they make it easy to scale their product, as your business evolves.

If you’re looking for a product that can grow with you, and that you won’t have to worry about scaling later, then Marketo is the right choice. Their in-house developed “serverless” architecture allows them to scale their platform effortlessly, as your business grows. Serverless computing allows them to leverage a hybrid cloud model, combining the computational power of Google Cloud Platform with their proprietary in-house software.

Consider The Options

If you’re looking for a marketing platform, then consider the options that you have.

You’ve got HubSpot, which provides you with all the basic features that you need to get started. Then, you have Marketo, the option with all of the bells and whistles. Both of these platforms provide you with everything that you need to grow your business. It’s just a matter of which one you choose, depending on your needs.