Marketo's New Platform Enables Personalized Engagement
Marketers don’t need more data, they need to determine what to do next with the explosion of customer behavioral data available to them. Therefore, Marketo Inc, a cloud marketing solutions platform provider, announced the public availability of Marketo's next generation Engagement Platform. The platform, which is powered by a new big data architecture previously codenamed "Project Orion," was unveiled last year and marked the largest tech investment by the vendor in its 10-year history. With the new architecture of its Engagement Platform, Marketo is expecting to extend its marketing automation through personalized customer engagement management hub.
"We are delighted to formally announce the public availability of the Marketo Engagement 
Platform, the industry's most scalable platform for CMOs to build their brand, grow revenue, and thrive in the new digital world we call the Engagement Economy," said Steve Lucas, Chief Executive Officer, Marketo. "The Marketo Engagement Platform underscores our continued leadership and innovation in marketing, as well as Marketo's commitment to delivering breakthrough solutions that enable organizations to connect with their customers and prospects like never before."
Here are the most striking capabilities of the platform:
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Capture the right customer data: Bring together the customer behavioral and profile data to engage customers at scale and manage their identities.
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Personalize & automate experiences across channels: Use data, customer insights and artificial intelligence to automate and personalize every experience across the customer lifecycle and across marketing channels, including email, web, ads, events, social, mobile, and more.
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Optimize business impact: Tie marketing efforts to business outcomes, like pipeline and revenue, and optimize marketing performance with analytics at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
The Marketo Engagement Platform is made up of three functional areas that include:
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Engagement Marketing Hub contains customer identities and data and the APIs to bring 
this data into and out of the platform. This also includes the automation, analytics, and adaptive engines that power customer insights and automated execution across the platform's applications.
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Marketo's Marketing Applications are natively built into the platform. These 12 best-in-class apps include Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Web Personalization, and Predictive Content, among others.
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Partner Applications that leverage Marketo's open and extensible architecture and are available through LaunchPoint, Marketo's ecosystem of best-of-breed partner technologies that help organizations optimize, complement, and expand their use of the platform.
When Marketo’s Project Orion was first announced, Phil Fernandez, Marketo's Chief Executive 
Officer, claimed that the platform will be able to:
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Capture up to 1 billion customer events a day.
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Capture over 40 million customer events per hour per subscription.
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Perform triggers 1,000 times faster.
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Improve customer experience by allowing marketers to listen, learn, and respond to their customers quickly.
The platform is mainly designed to help organizations "lay a digital fabric across the whole enterprise" while also delivering an enhanced analytics architecture. Marketo believes that the platform will enable users to put customer interactions in the context of what came before and what comes next so that companies can listen, learn and respond to each customer in a personalized, relevant and contextual way across the enterprise. In other words, the platform is capable of decoding any signal that can help Marketo users meet their customers in just the right way, at the right time, in the right place, with the right messages and offers.
Despite the huge investment in its product line to leverage digital experience, Marketo’s platform can still be slow at times when merging duplicate records, pulling smart lists, exporting lists, and creating reports in RCE. The industry insiders have been stressing that if Marketo wants to gain a share in the large enterprise market, these low latency issues should be fixed. Customers expect that Project Orion will tackle this issue but there is no official announcement from the vendor saying that this performance issue has been addressed with the new release.
Some believe the re-architecture will improve Marketo’s capabilities significantly, with dynamic performance and speed whereas some have stated that they haven’t experienced a big change since Orion was rolled out. Either might be premature statements as Marketo rolled out Orion in phases so it will be possible to fully understand the success of the re-architecture project when it is rolled out for each organization.
The company says the platform, the company’s biggest technology advancement to date, is designed to run across the whole enterprise with a view to enable the scale, performances, and analytics needed to interact with customers along every step of the buying journey.
Marketing Automation Statistics
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The value of the marketing automation industry worldwide will soar to $5.5 billion by 2019, according to MarketsandMarkets.
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A study by VB Insight found out that 80% of businesses which have actively utilized marketing automation have also enjoyed increased leads.
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There is an increased interest in the technology in the market. In fact, in June 2016, Google Trends unveiled that Google searches for ‘marketing automation’ reached an all-time high.
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Marketing automation is working when it is executed with the right strategy. A study conducted by Nucleus Research revealed that sales productivity grew by 14.5% due to automation software.
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According to Pardot, more than 75% of email revenue is made from campaigns that are not generic. 21% of this result is generated from triggered email campaigns managed through automation.
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42% of CRM users plan to increase spending in marketing automation.
Due to its obvious advantages, the adoption of Marketing Automation technology is growing at an astonishing rate, and Marketo is still the best-in-class marketing automation platform. I believe its new Engagement Platform will reduce the issues related to speed and data processing power. Marketo built its fast-growing business on selling to small and mid-market accounts which kept it largely off the radar of its biggest rivals for years, and now the cloud-based engagement marketing software platform provider has been trying to expand its audience to the enterprise-level customers. In the upcoming months, here at CMS-Connected, we will report on how much the new platform has helped the vendor reach out to upmarket which puts Marketo on a possible collision course with big players such as Oracle, Salesforce, and Adobe.
Venus Tamturk
Venus is the Media Reporter for CMS-Connected, with one of her tasks to write thorough articles by creating the most up-to-date and engaging content using B2B digital marketing. She enjoys increasing brand equity and conversion through the strategic use of social media channels and integrated media marketing plans.