CEO, Principal Consultant
30/9/2021
We love Marketo Engage, in fact, we love all parts of the Marketo platform – we chose to specialise in them after all. That said, Marketo support can sometimes leave a bit to be desired. Especially, we’ve realised, when it comes to five common problem areas.
It needs solving like NOW
When it comes to marketing, timing is everything. If it’s not a time-sensitive email, it’s a trending social media post or news story that needs actioning, or a contract that’s up for renewal. These are issues that need to be solved quickly and effectively in order for businesses to stay ahead with their marketing. So when you get a ‘Marketo will quickly resolve your problems’ response or you’re STILL waiting for a response on the ticket you submitted over a week ago, you can’t help but feel a level of frustration. With all the will in the world, a global customer support team cannot get to each and every person’s problem at the drop of a hat. Consultants on the other hand can.
At JTF Marketing we have dedicated consultants working with clients on individual projects, whether it be training the marketing team to use Marketo in ways that they didn’t even know was possible or creating best practice campaign structures that will facilitate day-to-day use and optimise results.
It’s unique to my company
Marketo (and sometimes even Google) can deliver generic, past-proven advice and recommendations, which sometimes is exactly what you need. Often, however, marketers need help with individual concerns, problems that are in context with their unique business. Consultants can analyse issues on an individual basis and suggest tailored solutions to your business and technology stack – ensuring you are not only using Marketo engage correctly but you are using it in the right way for YOUR company.
In just three months we helped a UK tech company to transform their marketing and sales alignment and provide optimum personalisation for their customers by showing them how to correctly utilise the data and insights of their Marketo platform, something they were not previously making use of.
It’s all integrated
It’s a marketers dream when all of the programs that they have spent months researching and budgeting for come together and work in unison. But it doesn’t always happen that way. One of the most common issues that companies face when working with Marketo is an integration with their CRM platform or other marketing tools. Unfortunately, Marketo support doesn’t have hands-on experience with CRM systems – they are Marketo experts after all, not Salesforce CRM or Microsoft Dynamics 365 experts. Consultants however often have significant hands-on experience in a range of MarTech solutions so can provide recommendations and solutions that optimise all of the marketing platforms to work together in unison, not solely Marketo.
Take Allianz for example. Allianz came to us when they were unable to understand if their customised Salesforce CRM would cause them problems. The Marketo professional services team at the time, simply did not have enough hands-on, practical knowledge to be able to solve this individual issue and in fact, told Allianz it wasn’t possible. That’s when we created a tailored solution that made it possible for them. Using our own Marketing Technology (MarTech) stack we were able to demonstrate to Allianz how the solution would work with a real world example. As is often the case, we had already configured solutions similar to this in the past so got straight to tailoring the solution to them.
It’s not all product related
Often Marketo support is limited to resolving product related issues such as an email that won’t delete, or relocating data that went missing. Marketers can however, have a perfectly working product that they are happy with but need it to be implemented in a certain way, advised on coding or tailored to their unique needs to really get the most out of it. That’s where consultants come in. Consultants can help to create email templates, troubleshoot code, introduce integrated tailored solutions or even help you design the campaign you were dreaming of (but didn’t think was achievable). Ultimately, consultants enable you to optimise Marketo, save your team time and get the desired results that make it worth the investment.
It’s not a one-time thing
Marketo is a platform that offers a world of possibilities to marketers. Possibilities that can sometimes bring troubleshooting or teething problems along with them.
Our fully-managed Marketo Engage service lets you use our Marketo Certified Solutions Architects & Experts as though they’re your own. This means that every time you have an issue, you don’t need to submit a separate support ticket, you can book a call directly with your expert that already knows your company and its unique needs; allowing you to effectively work together to solve issues as they arise, or better still, come up with solutions that stop future problems from ever appearing.