It’s been a busy few weeks recently for Marketo.

Earlier this week, Marketo made headlines when it forgot to renew its domain. According to multiple reports, this oversight caused several hours of downtime for both the corporate website and its marketing automation platform. It’s been estimated that this outage impacted thousands of landing pages, forms, campaigns, etc. Ouch.

Lesson learned: take five minutes out of your day to make sure you’re aware of important domain expiry dates for your organization. Consider setting a few dozen reminders in all of your personal and professional calendars too.

In other Marketo news, earlier this month the company announced new enhancements to it’s flagship Marketing Engagement Platform. That’s really where the focus of this blog is going to be today.

Essentially this release is all about creating more personalized experiences for contacts across a variety of touch points (or channels). Marketo refers to these moments as “cross-channel experiences”, which especially makes sense when you consider today’s buyers journey happens across web, email, mobile, social and dozens of other channels. It’s interesting to note that a good chunk of these new capabilities impact their Account Based Marketing (ABM) module. Like every other marketing automation leader, Marketo has been busy bolstering ABM functionality since initially launching the module at their annual Marketing Nation Summit in April.

Announcement Highlights

  • Social Media: LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Integration
  • ABM: Percentile Scoring for Named Accounts
  • ABM: Account List APIs
  • Reporting & Analytics: Marketing Performance Insights (MPI)

At a high level, Marketo continues to be serious about driving more informed decision making while empowering marketing teams to understand engagement levels of key Accounts. The Marketing Performance Insights module (MPI – currently in Beta) seems to address campaign impact and attribution entirely within their Marketing Engagement Platform. Marketo hopes this dashboard will deliver quality insights and reporting to reduce the need for third party BI tools.

On the Social Media side, Marketo has further integrated into LinkedIn by connecting directly into their Lead Gen Forms. This integration screams immediate value when considering it will improve the quality of leads and the ease of obtaining them. Potential prospects don’t have to fill out forms (particularly on mobile) and the integration means improved prospect data. Of course, the other obvious (potential) benefit from this: improved conversion rates. This is a great little addition with huge value for marketers.

The other thing I like about this release is Marketo recognizing the need to synch data to and from other platforms (Custom Fields, API’s). Whether your organization is running a highly focused Account Based Marketing program, or operating a wide lead-to-sale funnel, data, tools and reporting isn’t even close to being in one centralized dashboard (unless you count manually inputting all kinds of numbers into Excel). These functionalities appear to move the needle a bit closer in that regard (but there’s still a long way to go there). A marketer can only dream…

Looking forward to seeing the rest of the year’s product announcements from Marketo.