Marketo offers top-grade marketing automation solutions for SMBs (small to mid-size businesses), focusing directly on B2B companies through its products, which you can buy separately or as a bundle. These products are:
Lead management software: The marketing automation system includes the traditional tools for creating marketing and lead generation campaigns such as (Email marketing, Landing pages, A/B testing, and Lead scoring/nurturing.)
Sales insight software: The sales team is an aiding tool for leading sales pursuit.
Social marketing: Tools needed for expanding marketing campaigns through social media network publishing.
Revenue cycle analytics: In-depth analysis tools that priories points of power and revenue leverage on marketing campaigns.
All these tools combined, besides the newly added service for a small-scale business called “Spark,” put Merkato in the front line as probably the best and most complete Marketing automation solution available (probably the most expensive too.) so, if Marketo is so perfect, why search for the alternatives then?
The answer is simple; it’s a matter of taste, Request, and offer. That’s how the market is. And when a business asks for such detail, a vendor can’t provide some other will. So let’s see where Marketo lacked that its competitors could cover up for.
Table of Contents
Merkato Points of Weakness:
- Merkato depends tightly on salesforce as a significant CRM integrated solution. While this option has many bright sides, it left the system with no further development or tools offered for other popular CRM solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics as an example. (Act-On is the lead competitor focused on Microsoft dynamics.)
- It does not support dynamic website content integrations (such as the calls-to-action feature, which HubSpot as another leading competitor, covers pretty well.)
- Its primary aim for the B2B market left it lacking proper support for other markets such as B2C or B2B2C Markets. (The points covered by other major competitors such as Teradata Aprimo.)
- The software lacks tools and customizations for more ambitious marketers than the ones already included inside. (Salesforce Pardot better covers such a point.)
- It does not accommodate other marketing automation needs such as Marketing Resource Management (MRM), Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM), and Marketing Asset Management (MAM). (Oracle Eloqua does a better job on that part.)
- Merkato came so short on local or regional support outside the United States. It lacks proper means for global support. (IBM Unica takes the stick for this one.)
- It enforces mandatory subscription contracts over customers, which develops an element of customer lock-in. (HubSpot offered the most transparent & lock-in free experience among competitors)
- Merkato is one of the leading high-end pricing point solutions for small companies. It’s costly. (Act-On software offered the least pricing plans among competitors.)
Most Prominent Marketo Alternatives:
- HubSpot.
- Salesforce Pardot.
- Oracle Eloqua.
1- HubSpot
Have you ever heard of the concept of “inbound marketing?” That’s the heart and soul of what HubSpot is. As well known, HubSpot is one of the purest & user-friendly marketing automation systems available, with a wide range of marketing tools that entirely support small business starters & mid-sized types of business.
Hubspot points of strength:
- Dynamic website integrations are best supported. Such as CTA or call-to-action feature allows for more tailored offers according to anonymous leads’ behavior.
- Robust and varied third-party integrations for an enhanced Online Ecosystem and more valued customers.
- Clean, simple, & user-friendly UI makes Hubspot one of the most intuitive and complex-free experiences through automated marketing platforms.
- Outstanding customer support and team management. The executives on HubSpot are so talented that they maintained the company`s rapid growth without any negative impacts on customers.
- Reasonable pricing for Hubspot plans and services has led to Hubspot being one of the preferable vendors offering complete marketing automation solutions, especially for small start-up businesses.
- Hubspot offers an all-in-one platform that includes SEO, CMS, & social media tools for a reasonable overall pricing value.
2- Salesforce Pardot:
The company’s flagship product, Prospect Insight, performs lead acquisition, lead scoring, lead nurturing, lead segmentation, and performance reporting. Pardot is growing steadily with a reliable firm as a salesforce holding its back.
Salesforce Pardot points of strength:
- As a certified Salesforce CRM partner, such an option allows for an ultimate stability level through the customer marketing life cycle. Besides the renowned level of honesty and seriousness, the Salesforce network provides customers’ current services and expectations.
- The company offers a robust total cost of ownership (TCO) in return for its feature sets, process automation, and reporting.
- Pardot sports a perfect integration level with Google Analytics & Google AdWords for efficient Lead synchronization, traffic criteria, and accurate ROI calculation through a click, keywords, & click thoughts measuring.
- As part of the more prominent Salesforce infrastructure, Pardot enjoys a strong customer support base, which systemically influences the product roadmap and new capabilities through its active forum and crowdsourcing tool.
3- Oracle Eloqua:
With a clear lead over software enterprise, Oracle first introduced its Eloqua, which created the marketing automation software category. And with an apparent persistence in making Its SaaS the best marketing automation solution in the market, Eloqua became one of the most mature & sophisticated marketing automation software platforms in the industry.
Oracle Eloqua points of strength:
- Eloqua has introduced some of the most advanced and flexible marketing software tools through its flagship product Eloqua 10, which offers Primary marketing automation capabilities, including campaign management, lead management & analytics.
- Eloqua harnessed the best email deliverability tools, making him a category leader in that field.
- The best at automating targeted communications over a wide range of both online/offline channels.
- Eloqua acquires the best lead management (flexible lead definition and distribution through any point on a successful campaign) through its Program Builder and elaborative workflow rules that permit marketers to conduct casual audience splitting on common forms for A/B testing.
- Eloqua provides Marketing Resource Management (MRM) functionality, which, while short compared to best-of-breed MRM software vendors, offers far more MRM execution than most marketing automation software vendors.
- Eloqua includes many optional rule-driven parameters throughout its system, which are often utilized as Marketers progress in order and seek out higher functionality.
Conclusion:
Besides the three products mentioned, which are considered significant competition to our renowned Marketo, there were many other excellent products capable of covering many shortages each in its way and area of expertise.
Vendors such as Teradata Aprimo with its couple brilliant marketing automation products Aprimo marketing studio (which is a B2C Marketing Operations, Multi-Channel Campaign Management and Digital Marketing aiming for Mid-market to enterprise-level,) & Aprimo marketing studio (which built for B2B industry and support Demand Generation, Marketing Operations and Performance Analysis.)
Also, IBM Unica, with its products Unica Enterprise & Unica On-Demand, both fulfill the company’s successful approach towards providing competitive across multiple marketing software segments & loosely defined marketing software mainstream categories. In addition, its marketing resource management (MRM) & enterprise marketing management (EMM) have helped the company stand out most through the crowds.
We could also monitor severe competition from other Vendors such as Act-On with its Webinar and WebEx specialty, Silverpop, Salesfusion, or Genius. All are offering excellent Marketing automation services and tools as well.
The market is swarming with great projects that we couldn’t sum up here, so we had to go with the most reliable options available with a hint on each one of them with its most substantial assets and points covered for Marketo.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you might have found our comparison helpful.
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