Adopting marketing automation software is one of the best ways to transform your business’s performance and productivity. Adoption had increased extensively since 2015, when this comparison was first published. Spending on marketing automation software is expected to reach $25 billion annually by 2024. The reason behind this is that marketing automation works.
Businesses that automate lead management see a 15% or higher hit in revenue in 5-7 months. Yet, marketers say the most significant advantage of automation is something more direct. To access the top advantages of automation, you need to select the best marketing automation software for your business.
Some of the leading marketing automation software companies in the world are Hubspot and Marketo. These two cloud-based market leaders have strong customer bases, high satisfaction scores, and many overlaps in features. But they are not the same. Hubspot is known for its inbound marketing philosophy, while Marketo was founded in 2006 and acquired by Adobe in 2018.
There are some clear differences between Marketo’s engagement marketing platform and Hubspot’s inbound marketing software. Marketo primarily makes marketing automation tools for B2B clients and enterprises, while Hubspot caters to growing businesses of all types.
What is HubSpot Marketing Hub?
What is Marketo?
When to select HubSpot?
1. You are on a strict budget
Hubspot is handier than Marketo for businesses on a budget. The true magic of Hubspot is that you can get started with the CRM for free and upgrade for access to more features, including marketing automation. Its marketing automation features are available under the professional plan of Hubspot marketing hub. Hubspot is not the cheapest automation tool on the market but delivers a broad range of value across all areas of your business.
2. You need to get started fast
It is a perfect tool for B2B marketers searching for easy setup and a solution that delivers results straight out of the box. Hubspot has all-in-one features to cater to their marketing need, while Marketo is a more complicated automation solution that needs specialist knowledge and support to get set up.
3. You adore the inbound methodology
Many users select Hubspot because they admire their inbound marketing methodology or the practice of getting the attention of potential clients to your product via newsletters, SEO, social media, different forms of content, etc. With Hubspot, you can carry out every aspect of inbound marketing and complement it with successful sales and customer support strategies.
When to select Marketo?
1. Your business is a bigger enterprise
Marketo’s user is a big enterprise that needs broad marketing automation. For high-powered marketing teams that have many processes to automate, Marketo offers greater flexibility and more choices. It is more scalable than Hubspot, but these advantages at a cost that can be too high for smaller businesses.
2. You need advanced automation
Marketo provides advanced automation workflows and analytics and specializes in many custom solutions for businesses, so it makes sense that their software needs more IT knowledge to operate than Hubspot. It is now a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud; it is also a gateway to Adobe’s other tools, including advanced AI and machine learning from Adobe Sensei.
3. You are using Salesforce CRM
Marketo was developed with a keen focus on Salesforce CRM users. The majority of Marketo B2B clients come from the Salesforce user base. Marketo can work out as a bit cheaper automation solution than Pardot, Salesforce’s own choice, even though both Pardot and Marketo are priced very much at an enterprise level.
Feature comparison
How do you compare Hubspot and Marketo marketing automation tools in different areas? And which one is most excellent for your business?
Marketo automation vs. HubSpot automation
Hubspot’s automation feature has never been easier to make more of your company run on auto-pilot. Workflows are at the core of Hubspot’s automation, which can be contact-based, business-based, deal-based, ticket-based, or quote-based. Hubspot workflow automation choices include sending an internal or external SMS or email, setting a business property value, or adjusting numeric properties.
With Hubspot marketing automation, you may use automation to enroll certain types of businesses in email sequences simply, assigns contacts to the correct account manager, or create personalized support workflows for tickers.
When it comes to the degree of automation you need, it mainly depends on which platforms and processes you are using. Marketo tends to be very complex if you do have a team of dedicated professionals. Trying to automate small tasks can be overkill for small tech teams, but some tasks become progressively difficult to manage at scale. On the other hand, Marketo specializes in offering big organizations and enterprises custom solutions and offers the best value for experienced marketers with detailed knowledge of the IT support team.
With Marketo, you can package your ads campaigns into unified programs and clone them for use in multiple workflows. You can also develop marketing templates and set up your marketing programs based on those. Besides, Hubspot users can tie all their marketing assets into a single campaign, such as social media accounts and paid ads programs.
Filtering
When most marketing professionals hear the word ” filtering” in a marketing automation tool, they possibly assume it means filtering a list of contacts, separating the wheat from the chaff. Filtering involves looking at your pools of leads and then assigning tags and variables to them so you can send them to relevant customer experience.
With Hubspot, filtering is easy, letting users see a list of opted-I leads with specific behavior criteria. It can help users identify mismatches and discrepancies in their data. It is a more granular and analytical approach but not sufficient to beat out Marketo in filtering. What makes it so competitive for filtering, and what merits its perfect score? It is the power of filtering combined with the fact that you can use filter data to customize a customer experience. For example, filter data can end up on your ideal landing page, meaning a lead is hitting a specially crafted page based on their filter data. These tools perform excellently, but TechNinjaPro had to provide the advantage of Marketo this time around. It is highly effective, whereas Hubspot just offers barebones features that most other marketing automation tools offer.
Reporting and analytics
Successful marketing automation needs inclusive data insights. You need to prove that your marketing automation workflows save time, boost profits, and offer a better customer experience. Hubspot has built-in analytics tools that allow you to track your client journey from start to end and key metrics for team performance. All of this is accessible from one single dashboard that you can customize with the reports and charts that matter to you.
One of the most significant benefits of Marketo is that it excels in helping you find the most successful sales channels and strategies. You can build reports of varying levels of difficulty for sharing with stakeholders and efficiently communicating the performance of your campaigns. Dashboards and reports are completely customizable, and users can view them in the mobile app offered.
Customer Retention
When running a marketing campaign, every touchpoint represents a possible drop-off point for your leads. Send the wrong email at the wrong time, and suddenly your lead count falls while sales are not getting the marketing support they require. So, customer retention is all about keeping customers engaged and interested in your messaging. After all, your best clients are your repeat clients.
Marketo simply builds efficient and long-lasting campaigns that are highly personalized. The tool helps leads stay engaged with unique content like targeted emails and blog posts, and it is all within reach for users of any technical level. On the other hand, Hubspot’s platform can develop lead nurturing campaigns that trigger automatically, taking the hassle out of filtering and manually sending clients through experiences. All of this is based on lead actions that allow for long-term customer retention, earning Hubspot the best competitor to Marketo. When you are reaching for a product with robust customer retention features, you cannot go wrong with these two marketing tools.
Assign Multiple Assets
Multiple assets usually refer to the flock of content and assets that your business promotes and is in turn enabled by your marketing automation software. These can include things like:
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Products and services
- E-books
- Whitepapers
- SEO
- Social media marketing
- All other forms of content marketing
When it comes to assigning multiple assets, Hubspot offers quite a lot of bang for your buck. The application lets you organize, schedule, and publish content all in one place. An intuitive calendar feature that is shared across the business also offers you the ability to cross-channel coordinate. So you can take your blog posts, social media posts, landing pages & emails, push them simultaneously, or schedule them for the best possible times.
On the other hand, Marketo offers robust asset assignments than Hubspot does. Marketo can do everything that Hubspot can do, like personalize segments of sites for leads.
Ease of Use
Marketo specializes in custom solutions for businesses, and their software tends to need more IT knowledge to operate. If you have dedicated specialists or employ marketing technologists with Marketo software experience, this may not be an issue for your business, and you will appreciate the depth of features Marketo provides.
On the other hand, If your marketing team needs a marketing automation solution that provides you intuitive access to a broad range of marketing functions, you may be better off with Hubspot. In the tech market, ease of use is a vital asset, as evidenced by its impact on user satisfaction and a product’s viability. For this reason, Hubspot’s average user rating across other marketing software review websites is over half a point higher than Marketo’s.
CRM Integration
In lots of ways, marketing automation and customer relationship management are mutually dependent. That is why most organizations shop for a marketing automation solution that integrates with their CRM. Hubspot provides its own built-in CRM and integrations with popular marketing systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zoho. While Marketo does not offer a built-in CRM module, their product was built using the Salesforce platform, which means they provide some of the best Salesforce integration in the market. Marketo also offers native integrations for SAP and Microsoft Dynamics and certified integrations for Oracle and Netsuite.
Analytics
Successful marketing is driven by marketing insight, and insight comes from data. A marketing automation platform without practical data analytics tools is a bit more than an email robot. Both Hubspot and Marketo provide marketers and managers access to a set of solid analytics tools for tracking campaign programs and pulling reports. And both marketing automation solutions offer reporting on marketing efforts and revenue fluctuations and can tie revenue to campaigns.
Hubspot provides a closed-loop integration with your CRM, providing you easy access to customer information for analysis, and revenue reporting usually comes with the enterprise level. Marketo allows you to perform predictive analytics and modeling based on digital behavior patterns, CRM data, content preferences, and firmographics.
Collaboration between teams: sales, support, and marketing
Hubspot is a leading marketing automation software for collaboration between marketing, sales, and support. It provides hubs for each of these functions, offering the tools your team needs to thrive. An important consideration when selecting a new marketing automation solution is how well it integrates with your CRM.
Hubspot provides native integration with all the popular marketing tools on marketing. Hubspot has the advantage of already providing a top-quality CRM for free, which works perfectly with all other addons and automation functionality you can layer on top. On the other hand, Marketo also provides in-depth integration with other tools, both in marketing and other departments. Both marketing automation tools are integrated with PieSync, meaning it is never easier to sync your contact information to the rest of your tech stack.
Pricing Comparison
Conclusion
If your business is growing and looking to bring more visitors to your website and nurture leads with marketing automation tools of enterprise abilities, you might be better served by Hubspot. If you are a big B2B organization for a custom-built solution to align prospect engagement with expansion goals, you should consider Marketo.
Then again, these are not the only two fishes in the sea. New products continue to appear in the marketing automation market, each with a different feature set than its competitors.