Is the Acquisition of Bizible by Marketo a Big Deal?
At the recent Marketing Nation Summit, Marketo announced that it has acquired Bizible a B2B 
performance measurement company, for an undisclosed sum. This is, to date, the largest acquisition they have made. The acquisition follows last year's purchase of sales enablement provider ToutApp and 2013's acquisition of personalization platform Insightera for $19.5 million.
With CMOs being under constant pressure to deliver results and ROI to justify their marketing spend, they need to align their own planning and spending with the company strategy, get one view of budgets to stay on track, and optimize marketing to improve the customer experience. Even with the number and complexity of all their marketing tools, CMOs still lack the visibility they really need into performance. Instead of automated processes and integrated systems, there are disparate and inaccurate dashboards, manual spreadsheets and multiple teams working in silos. CMO's need a way to quantitatively prove their effectiveness and gain control of critical functions. It seems as though this acquisiton may be the best thing to happen, CMOs can now measure marketing's total impact to the business, making better data-driven decisions, and providing a platform to influence the entire organization.
So What Does This Mean for Marketo?
"This acquisition doubles down on Marketo and Bizible's shared commitment to providing the most powerful, innovative, and robust marketing software that gives marketers the edge to win in the Engagement Economy. Together, our solutions create an industry-first platform for marketers to plan, engage, and measure by understanding what directly fuels ROI," said Steve Lucas, Chief Executive Officer, Marketo. "The combined product strength of Marketo and Bizible provides all marketers everywhere enhanced visibility into every touchpoint across any channel. Our investment will accelerate Bizible's impressive growth and provide instant and achievable benefits to our current and future customers in the enterprise and beyond."
Marketo added some context to the acquisition, saying that Bizible will be part of an overall initiative that helps users plan, engage and measure. With Bizible, “marketers will now be able to have greater visibility into full-funnel marketing, from campaign planning through to execution and revenue. This will enable teams to make smarter investments and only on the things that offer them the greatest impact.”
The release also stated that its measurement capabilities will be further enhanced by the launch of Marketo Performance Insights analytics, "which provide marketers with a 360-degree view of campaign performance from top-of-funnel engagement to revenue impact.” Bizible allows for in-depth attribution to easily report the ROI on all campaign efforts.
Who is Bizible?
Seattle-based Bizible was founded in 2011 by Aaron Bird, Peter Thompson and Andy Turman. The three Microsoft alums were building ad platforms when they became aware of the breakdown connecting marketing to revenue and decided to rectify it. Bizible offers solutions to enable marketers to align planning, execution and measurement to core business objectives. Its revenue attribution tool unifies behavioral and ad data with sales outcomes, using machine learning to help users measure multi-touch attribution and provide full funnel insights linking campaign planning to end results.
Today, the company’s products help their customers determine which marketing avenues are working, which aren’t and ultimately, where to best invest their marketing dollars.
Bizible’s attribution model is a fundamental shift in the way marketers think about attribution. Instead of assigning revenue to programs or campaigns, Bizible assigns revenue to touchpoints, which roll up to marketing channels. Touchpoints refer to the engagement that a prospect or lead has with your online or offline marketing efforts. In many B2B sales processes, a lead has several touchpoints with your brand before contacting sales. Bizible captures all of these touchpoints seamlessly rather than relying on a program or campaign every time someone comes from Twitter to your website.
"Under the umbrella of Marketo, we will continue to aggressively innovate while also leveraging the breadth of the Marketing Nation to reach even more customers with our game-changing technology," said Aaron Bird, co-founder and chief executive officer, Bizible. "We remain committed to delivering marketers effective solutions that provide the analytics and insights needed to make smart decisions and grow their companies.”
Bizible's three co-founders – along with the rest of the Bizible team will continue to work out of the company's office in Seattle, which will become a satellite for Marketo. Earlier this year, Marketo expanded in Denver with a 50,000 square-foot office with lots of room for growth.
Moving forward, Bizible and Marketo will look to roll out new products that better help marketers.
Ending Notes
So yes it's a big deal! With this latest acquisition. Bizible and Marketo can now deliver with confidence the needs of all CMO’s everywhere. Marketo’s marketing automation applications are widely used to help manage campaigns to demand generation and nurture leads, Bizible’s enables companies to manage their marketing for revenue with accurate and comprehensive measurement and reporting of campaigns and channels. Full attribution is the future of marketing reporting and with Marketo diving deep into that market, it validates this.
In addition to the acquisition, Marketo also announced a multi-year alliance with Google Cloud to build new products for marketers that utilizes artificial intelligence in new ways, boosting the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and better segmenting audiences. Steve Lucas said in a press release, "Together we are envisioning solutions that will quickly put greater insights in the hands of the marketer, saving them time and energy."
Even though there are still some unanswered questions, it will be interesting to see how this acquisition will pan out for both parties and how the future of marketing automation will be affected.
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Natalie Evans
Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.