technology

Marketo vs. HubSpot Explore Their Respective Strengths & Weaknesses

Digital is at the heart of everything we are doing in marketing. Moreover, cloud marketing technology delivery is going through a thrilling revolution Marketo vs. HubSpot. As perhttps://www.huffpost.com, what was once referred to as ‘marketing automation, seems to have come up with brand new and strong muscles, and has gradually evolved into somewhat a wide analytically-fueled and ultra-high-scale enterprise customer platform. Moreover, technology has become integral to extensive transformation projects and has become a strategic weapon for your business.

One of the greatest matchups in the marketing automation software landscape seems to be HubSpot versus Marketo. Many people are scared of the thought of comparing the two top marketing automation platforms. It is quite difficult to do a comparison of the inbound marketing giant HubSpot with Adobe’s hot favorite Marketo. Let us explore Marketo vs. HubSpot.

Product Overview

Marketing automation offers a lot of help to humble marketers. It is effective in taking away the tediousness and boredom out of the daily processes of generating campaigns, keeping track of them, firing off emails, and even automating them or even make them reasonably easier. Thanks to cutting-edge automation tools, you could easily build complicated email sequences, design landing pages, organize contacts, and more with these advanced marketing automation tools. This could be the reason why a majority of the people, more than 51% of all organizations, are utilizing automation tools. Both Marketo and HubSpot could provide automation tools such as: 

  • SEO tools
  • Blogging tools
  • CRM integrations
  • Analytics and reporting tools
  • Third-party integrations.
  • Social listening features.

Marketo and HubSpot are two of the key players and initially, HubSpot provided robust inbound marketing or automated email campaigns. An organization seems to have experienced lots of success while selling its key Marketing Hub product in the SMB market especially companies having 20 to as many as 200 employees. HubSpot has forever utilized its free CRM product as an effective way of generating new leads for fundamental Marketing Hub offering. HubSpot during the last 2.5 years has upgraded itself from being a vendor selling just one point solution to a multi-product organization for lead generation. Moreover, the latest Sales Hub solution for client prospecting and sales automation has been gaining phenomenal popularity throughout 2017. We understand that more and more clients are buying Marketing Hub and Sales Hub together as they could obtain a single dashboard view for effectively tracking all marketing and sales prospects present in the funnel. 

Marketo

Marketo was introduced in 2006 and was later purchased by Computer software giant Adobe recently in 2018. Officially referred to as Adobe Systems, the organization is famous for its creativity and multimedia software products. Popular products would be including Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Marketo is a well-recognized and most-lauded marketing automation tool. It is known for delivering robust performance for all businesses whether big or small, using effective tools such as email sequences, Search Engine Optimization, and powerful integrations with some third-party CRMs such as Salesforce.

Greatest Strength of HubSpot

The strongest point about HubSpot is that it is a robust all-in-one inbound marketing device. HubSpot has been instrumental in introducing the ground-breaking inbound methodology utilized by the current digital marketers hence, it boasts of a platform meant solely for that purpose.

From developing your site to closing leads, HubSpot would be doing everything, you require for a complete inbound marketing campaign. Additionally, during the last few years, HubSpot has gradually become not just a marketing platform but also a robust customer service & sales platform. If you are thinking in terms of a software platform that would be managing the entire lifecycle of all your contacts HubSpot could be giving you that along with its unique three integrated hubs. If you are thinking in terms of a comprehensive solution, nothing could be better as compared to HubSpot. However, many features are endearing about Marketo too. Let us explore those features highlighting Marketo justifying its popularity in the market today.

Greatest Strength of Marketo

Marketo is known for its cutting-edge advanced analytics, as well as, for email workflows. You could enjoy using the software provided you have a robust IT background. Only then you could explore and make the most of Marketo’s advanced features. Big organizations that need complicated email campaigns covering a broad spectrum of customer bases should use Marketo for meticulously customizing their email marketing. 

Marketo is meant for big organizations as it can incorporate thousands of leads into the system. This implies that several tools and features are developed for dealing with complicated marketing processes and enormous quantities of leads. 

Another striking feature of Marketo that is loving and gets appreciation from its users is its amazing mobile optimization tools. It boasts of a mobile app for using Marketo on the move. Moreover, it flaunts a set of tools that ensure that assets developing in Marketo would be fully optimizing for mobile devices.

Major Weakness of HubSpot

For quite some time the major weakness of HubSpot was the fact that it catered more to the requirements of medium to small-sized organizations. Its easy-to-learn and simple-to-use software helped everyone even IT. Novice or a layman can learn it and start working on it without any hassles. This was something that truly attracted its SMB audience. However, this often failed to work for a business that was far more enterprise-level as more often than not. There was a need for something more versatile and more robust.

However, with the introduction of HubSpot’s Enterprise-level tools last year, this weakness is almost a non-issue now. Even though HubSpot has admitted that its focus is still very much on medium, small, and mid-market organizations, its toolset seems to be powerful enough to meet the requirements of enterprise-level firms today.

Greatest Weakness of Marketo

One major weakness of Marketo is its initial steep learning curve that is necessary for getting utilizing the software. Marketo is best-suited to bigger organizations that have a dedicated IT team or department.

Conclusion

The user experience associated with both Marketo and HubSpot seems to come down to individual choice and preference. Both these software platforms boast an amazing user experience with truly intuitive navigation and dashboards. However, the tools of HubSpot offer a more detailed and step-by-step guide as you go on using them hence. Everybody right from an IT expert to a layman could use the software right from the word go without any hitches. Marketo or HubSpot, the choice is entirely yours to make but make sure that you are investing in a robust marketing automation platform for sure. This would dramatically transform not only how you do marketing but also would help you at succeeding. And go on analyzing and reporting on whatever work you seem to be doing.