Marketo

Market position

Marketo is credited with helping define and lead the marketing automation category, growing into a major vendor over its first decade. It competed with established player Eloqua and later with adjacent account-based marketing vendors such as Engagio and Demandbase; analysts have debated whether ABM tooling would displace or become a feature of core automation platforms like Marketo and Eloqua.

Marketo positioned itself as an affordable, easy-to-use alternative to Eloqua, which was then considered expensive and difficult to use, emphasizing fast deployment (campaigns live in days or hours), pre-built CRM integrations, a single integrated platform spanning inbound marketing, lead management and social campaign applications, and a large practitioner community.

Technology

The platform is a hosted marketing software suite covering marketing automation (email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, lead generation), inbound marketing content for each buying stage, social marketing apps embedded in landing pages, event and webinar integrations with popular providers, bi-directional CRM synchronization with Salesforce.com and Microsoft, sales-facing lead visibility, and campaign/channel performance reporting. As Adobe Marketo Engage it supports the LaunchPoint partner integration ecosystem.

Go-to-market

Early growth was driven by inbound content marketing and SEO, with co-founder Jon Miller blogging actively and building an audience that knew of Marketo before the product shipped. The company sells through demos, free trial accounts and tiered editions, and cultivates the Marketing Nation practitioner community as a channel for advocacy and best-practice sharing.

Business marketing organizations, particularly B2B marketing and demand generation teams and their sales counterparts, spanning fast-growth companies through enterprise and consumer-segment businesses; the platform is used by chief marketing officers globally.

Geography

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, with marketing directed at EMEA markets in addition to the United States and a global base of chief marketing officers.

History

Founded in 2006 as a lead management startup, Marketo released its first product in 2008 after early fundraising difficulties. It grew into a marketing automation company, ranked 28th on the Forbes Most Promising Companies list in 2011 with about $33 million in annual recurring revenue, and raised close to $110 million across multiple rounds before going public in 2013. In May 2016 it agreed to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.79 billion; shareholders approved the deal in August 2016 and it closed on 16 August 2016, taking the company private and ending its Nasdaq listing. In 2018 Vista sold Marketo to Adobe for $4.7 billion. Marketo also acquired sales engagement provider ToutApp.

Risks & controversies

Two shareholder class action lawsuits were filed in July 2016 over the Vista transaction. In a California federal court suit, Robert Rosati alleged the proxy statement omitted material information about management conflicts of interest, including discussions with Vista on continued employment and rollover equity, the process leading to the merger agreement, the analysis by financial adviser Morgan Stanley & Co., and financial projections, and that CEO Phil Fernandez and named board members breached fiduciary duties; the deal was reported to generate more than $58 million for Fernandez. A separate Santa Clara County Superior Court suit by Sonila Porwal alleged directors sold the company too cheaply through a defective process and sought to block or rescind the sale. Reporting has also noted customer complaints and confusion around the rollout of Marketo's Project Orion.