3 innovations in Marketo Engage: Personalization, alignment & marketing attribution

August 14, 2020 Kristin Connell

By Chuck Leddy

To deliver on the digital experiences that satisfy buyers’ complex needs and drive revenue growth, B2B marketers need forward-thinking solutions that integrate the latest technologies. At this year’s Adobe Experience Makers 2020 virtual event, Adobe Senior Product Marketing Manager Louay Bachir described a number of “key innovations [to Marketo Engage] that users can take advantage of” to improve marketing performance and ROI. Mr. Bachir’s presentation was entitled Marketo Engage Innovations (click for free on-demand video), and he described 3 major new tools that we’ll explore more fully in this blog post.

#1. Personalization: Connecting people with relevant content

Marketo Engage has been deploying more artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to help marketers personalize customer engagement and content. AI can analyze historical patterns and individual customer journeys to make better predictions about what content customers want next, no matter where that customer is in their journey. These predictive capabilities (driven by AI) allow marketers to stay on the front foot, anticipating customer needs in advance rather than taking a reactive, flat-footed approach to engagement.

Bachir presented some surprising stats about the use of AI by marketers. He noted that while 66% of B2B marketers want AI tools to help them with customer targeting, only 18% of B2B marketers actually have adopted any AI-driven personalization tools, a massive “want vs. have” gap of about 50%. To make the case for AI adoption even stronger, Bachir explained that marketers who have leveraged AI for targeting have seen a 20% increase in revenues within two years post-adoption. So such AI tools boost ROI.

Marketo Engage has stepped into this “want vs. have” gap by offering “Predictive Audiences,” which leverages AI to enable B2B marketers to enhance targeting. For example, Predictive Audiences can evaluate and segment audiences by “likelihood to register for an event” and/or “likelihood to attend an event,” empowering marketers to better craft and target content to the right people. As the tool sifts through more data, it’s predictive capabilities become more accurate.

#2. Powering sales experiences. A new Marketo Engage offering called “Sales Insight” boosts sales impact and marketing-sales alignment “by providing sales reps with the [business] intelligence needed to maximize productivity and drive results,” said Bachir. This BI tool helps sales reps “gain deeper insight into buyer behavior and interests,” prioritize their leads and sales activities, and better “personalize engagement,” explained Bachir.

The Sales Insight tool enables marketing and sales to share customer information and engage customers across the cycle/funnel. The Insight dashboard is easy to read and the tool makes it simple for sellers to send personalized emails to take advantage of opportunities and customer needs as they arise in real-time. 

It’s not enough to have easy access to relevant customer data, explained Bachir, but sales must also be provided with accessible, easy-to-use tools for engaging with customers in truly targeted ways. Sales Insight allows exactly that, with an intuitive user interface that also supports convenient mobile use.

#3. Measuring performance and marketing attribution. Spending your limited marketing budget on hunches or wasteful “spray and pray” approaches is the definition of inefficiency. Only 15% of marketers say they can effectively measure their marketing performance, which means connecting marketing’s impact on revenues. Attributing marketing actions to revenues has long been a major challenge for marketers everywhere: as American retail pioneer John Wanamaker used to say, “I know that half of my advertising spend is wasted, but I don’t know which half.” Marketo Engage is helping users meet the challenge by enabling them “to understand how every marketing dollar is contributing to growth and ROI,” said Bachir.

Marketo has made enhancements to Bizible, which Bachir described as “the leading attribution app for B2B marketers.” Bizible connects every marketing activity to revenue and “reveals the ROI of every channel, campaign and content asset across sales and marketing,” said Bachir. Bizible not only drives reporting, better campaign tactics and credibility for marketers, but also drives lead generation. “Users of Bizible have driven a 45% increase in MQL volume and a 36% decrease in MQL cost,” explained Bachir.

Bizible innovations include optimizing ad spend with new Linkedin Ads integration, deeper integration between Bizible and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and a native integration with Adobe Analytics to “easily enrich user profiles,” according to Bachir. John Wanamaker could only dream of such attribution capabilities.

Key Takeaways: What’s clearest from these 3 changes to Marketo Engage described by Louay Bachir is that Marketo continues to deploy new technologies and look for new ways to make marketing more productive, attributable and fully integrated with the overall business. Data and AI are increasingly at the heart of how that happens, empowering enhanced personalization and content relevance for Marketo users.

Want to learn more about how Marketo Engage can help your B2B marketing efforts? Sojourn Solutions’ certified Marketo Engage consultants have the deep marketing automation knowledge and experience your organization needs to reach new peaks in terms of measurable marketing impact. We help you by developing proven, data-driven solutions to help you connect with your customers. Reach out here for more information.

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