New Tools for Fearless Marketers

It's finally coming. This month too. The news from Marketing Nation Summit is that Marketo Sky, the new UX for Marketo announced last year, is going in to open beta in May. It looks great, and I'm really looking forward to actually using it. The demos that had at their summit last year were excellent, and it seems like they've developed it significantly since.

There are a ton of new features coming in Marketo Sky. There's an infamous thread on Marketo's community about Marketo's so-called minor missing features, and many of them are going to be added into the release.

Bizible

That's not even the biggest news from Marketo's customer conference. That particular accolade goes to the announcement of Marketo's newest record acquisition - Bizible. Bizible are an analytics vendor specialising in attribution. It's an interesting acquisition, but one which enhances an area of relative strength rather than addressing their weaknesses when it comes to reporting. Marketo already have multiple add-on modules dedicated to BI and business reporting, but they're used inconsistently. Many Marketo customers prefer to do ROI reporting out of other tools, frequently BI tools or Salesforce. This is often because Marketo's out of the box reporting is limited, and their add-on modules do not have the feature set of a dedicated tool, of which Bizible is one such example.

Audience AI

This is the other announcement which got significant press attention. It's a lookalike service to identify potential hot prospects you may be missing out in your Marketo database. It's based off Google's machine learning algorithms, which implies there's more to that partnership than initially presumed by many last year. Whilst it looks cool, other data platform vendors already claim to have similar functionality. Ultimately, this is going to succeed based upon the accuracy of the AI, and they're working with the right partner on that side of it.

Sales Engage

This appears to be ToutApp rebranded with parts of Marketo Sales Insight thrown into the mix. This allows them to sell ToutApp to their customer base, which is positive. Their ToutApp acquisition was a good one, and I've had conversations with customers about it since. Integrating the Sales playbook tools more into Marketo works best for both Sales & Marketing.

The most notable thing about Marketo Summit this year is the branding. The fearless marketer tagline has got attention. Are Marketers terrified at the moment? Absolutely, GDPR is causing sleepless nights for everybody in the industry. These tools have potential to help Marketers in the post GDPR world, but the proof is in the end product.