May 24, 2012

Marketo Introduces Integrated Solution for Social Marketing Automation

Marketo yesterday launched Marketo Social Marketing, a suite of products to make every marketing campaign inherently social.

The suite's first offerings, Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions, include a new collection of social campaign applications, such as video sharing, voting, sweepstakes and referrals. The products are tightly integrated with the company's marketing automation platform, so marketers can add a word-of-mouth marketing lift to every campaign, track the impact of individuals' sharing through social channels, and nurture relationships with the most influential customers.

Marketo Social Boost's features include a Facebook Page builder, voting and polling applications, video and event-triggered sharing, social comments, and ratings.

Marketo Social Promotions allows users to deploy customer referrals, sweepstakes, contests, and "flash deals" that enable them to not only reach their prospective customers in social channels but also reach all of their prospects' friends. Because it's completely integrated with Marketo Lead Management, marketers can include social promotion in multichannel campaigns, and then capture and manage resulting sales leads.

"As more companies evolve their marketing campaigns to leverage the potential and reach of the social Web, they require more powerful collaboration and revenue management tools to understand the true value of social engagement," said Denise Terry, director of social media at RingCentral, in a statement. "Marketo's Revenue Performance Management platform has helped us optimize our marketing program investments for several years, so we're thrilled to see the capabilities extend to our social campaigns through integration with Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotion."

With Marketo Social Marketing, marketers can now collect detailed information about which prospects are sharing their content and campaigns, and use lead scoring techniques to determine who has the largest social reach and who generated the most referrals. This rich social data enables companies to identify these influencers' impact on their business. Then, businesses can use lead nurturing to engage these important influencers on a large scale.

Both Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions are fully integrated with Marketo's Lead Management and Revenue Cycle Analytics products. As a result, every social campaign can take advantage of Marketo's strengths in email marketing, landing pages, lead nurturing, and lead scoring campaigns. New prospects and influencers identified in social channels become part of the customers' strategic lead database, fully unified with prospects found using traditional channels.