Marketo Engage has a full roadmap for 2022, with new features and innovations coming down the line fast. Venu Tavisala, senior director of product management for Adobe Marketo Engage, described this 2022 roadmap in a presentation at the Adobe Summit 2022 (here’s the full, on-demand presentation – registration required).
Tavisala began by detailing research from Forrester around the impressive impact Marketo Engage has had on its customers and their marketing efforts. Those impacts include:
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an average ROI of 267% across Marketo Engage customers;
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29% improvement in customer engagement;
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59% improvement in lead conversion rates on top of the funnel and 25% conversion improvement from marketing qualified leads to sales.
As Tavisala says, “we know that getting results isn’t easy these days, and that the challenges are many, including the pandemic, the pace of change, business disruption, and rapidly-evolving customer expectations.”
Marketo’s vision and strategy for 2022
Before he began getting into the specifics of Marketo’s 2022 roadmap, Tavisala briefly explained Marketo’s vision and strategy. “Our vision is to empower marketing teams, to orchestrate personalized experiences at scale in concert with sales to drive highly efficient demand with agility and measurable business impact,” he says.
The Marketo strategy Tavisala detailed is multi-pronged, and includes:
1. Delivering industry-leading marketing automation for B2B that is optimized for both scale and time-to-value.
2. Providing the orchestration that powers marketing and sales engagement and effectiveness across all channels and stages of the customer journey.
3. Delivering best-in-class marketing automation in the context of Adobe’s full customer experience management suite, connecting with content workflows, customer data and profiles, artificial intelligence, analytics, commerce, and marketing workflows.
4. Supporting a wide range of marketing strategies, including lead based and account based, inbound and outbound, online and offline, so as to help customers adapt to changing conditions and advance their digital maturity.
5. Continuing to improve our ecosystem with strong partners and have an open architecture with pre-built integrations, allowing companies to create marketing stacks that will deliver value now and in the future.
Marketo Engage 2022 roadmap highlights
“Strengthening the core of the Marketo Engage platform is important to help our customers grow and adapt their winning strategies,” says Tavisala. As such, Marketo is launching a number of features and innovations on its 2022 roadmap, including these:
Predictive Lead and Account Scoring
“We're really excited about predictive lead and account scoring because data is exploding, and it’s becoming imperative for our customers to identify and engage with the right contacts and right customers at the right time,” says Tavisala. The tool offers an intelligent and configurable propensity-to-buy scoring solution for both Lead and Account profiles, and includes:
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AI-powered scores that offer higher accuracy to increase Marketing ROI;
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Ability to configure scoring without data science expertise, enabling faster time-to-value; and
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Actual vs. predicted analytics to drive user confidence and boost adoption.
“Customers will also get scoring insights that will clearly identify the reasons for the score,” says Tavisala, “which will drive transparency as well as better adoption.” Predictive lead and accounts scoring will be available for Real-time CDP customers in the second half of 2022, and then will be rolled out to the rest of Marketo Engage customers after.
Dynamic Chat
“This tool maximizes every opportunity on websites with integrated, 1:1 personalized conversations without additional investment, moving buyers through the marketing and sales funnel faster through real-time conversations,” says Tavisala. B2B businesses can thus engage with prospects on the web in a personalized and contextual way, generating more qualified leads and booking meetings with sellers. Marketo went live with dynamic chat in March, and will be doing a phased rollout to all customers over the next six months.
Sales Insight – Actions (Salesforce CRM)
This feature improves the accessibility of campaign-context data for sales, so they can make informed decisions about their prospects based on a unified view of the customer/prospect. Marketo and Salesforce are platforms “our customers depend on to keep their marketing and sales teams in lockstep to close deals,” says Tavisala, so getting those platforms connected and sharing with each other is a big focus. “We have plans to expand Marketo’s sales insight capabilities to now include integrated sales actions, empowering sales reps to initiate personalized, one to-one conversations with their prospects, right from their CRM system,” he says.
Reps do not have to leave the sales insight panel within their CRM to access marketing, curated sales emails, and send one-to-one personalized emails to their customers. Insight and action can happen in one place and sales reps won’t need to toggle back and forth between different screens or systems anymore to go from insight to action. The feature has been available to Marketo customers as a limited rollout since February, with a broader rollout slated for later in the year.
Adobe User Credentials
Constantly inputting your user credentials to access systems can be time-consuming and frustrating. This feature streamlines user administration and enables single sign-on across Adobe Experience Cloud. Product admins can manage users and user entitlements through a common Admin Console. In addition, IT/Security admins can manage Marketo Engage product instances along with other AEC products through a common console. The feature “also simplifies admin tasks, such as license management, user management, and entitlement,” says Tavisala.
Marketo will start onboarding the new capability to new enterprise customers in the first half of 2022 and start migrating existing customers in the second half of 2022.
Conclusion
Marketo has a lot of innovations and integrations coming down the road to help improve what its customers do, especially around connecting Salesforce and Marketo. Other improvements include enhancements to usability/UI and improved data sharing capabilities. As Tavisala says, “Marketo continually responds to our customer feedback” through our roadmap.
To learn even more about Adobe Marketo Engage and how it can improve your marketing efforts, reach out to us. We partner with Marketo to implement marketing automation solutions that drive marketing ROI.
