Marketo’s Stephanie Roodhouse, director of customer marketing, and Katie Pope, senior customer marketing specialist, share why the marketing automation platform chose to focus on review sites in 2015. They also discuss how Marketo is currently leveraging and benefiting from the TrustRadius Review Acceleration Program, plus their plans for expanding the initiative in 2016.

Why did Marketo choose to focus on review sites in 2015?

One of our core values is customer passion and review sites are a great avenue for that. They help us to amplify the voice of our customers.

Reviews not only help build brand presence and drive demand, but they also give you valuable feedback on your product, support, services, and overall customer experience. We are able to surface positives and negatives from the reviews and share that feedback with our key internal teams.

This is a very strategic initiative for Marketo and that’s why we decided to focus our efforts on building a strong review presence.

Why did Marketo invest in the TrustRadius Review Acceleration Program?

Before starting the Review Acceleration Program, we drove reviews through our advocacy program or personal asks. By working with TrustRadius, we’ve been able to accumulate reviews at a much faster pace – a 4x velocity increase.

What helped were the one-click rating tiles that we used as secondary CTAs within reminder and confirmation emails. That’s also when we began opening it up to our broader customer base.

Between the one-click rating titles, custom landing pages and drip campaign that TrustRadius handles in the background we’ve been able to obtain a higher rate of completion than we had experienced in the past.

What were some of the concerns as you opened up the program to a broader customer?

What we found is that there was not a large delta between the reviews we received from our advocates and those from a broader customer base. That told us that generally we have high customer satisfaction across customer base. This was a great test.

We review every single customer review that comes in and ensure key internal stakeholders see them and respond if a review requires a comment. To that end, the Customer Marketing team has been instrumental in establishing the site as a key listening tool for engineering, products and our customer teams. TrustRadius asked reviewers for deeper information than other review sites and therefore we can extract more information from the reviews. We’ve used the data to have many really constructive conversations with our teams around potential roadmap changes or enhancements and also from a service design perspective where we could potentially improve in areas where historically we have not quite been getting top marks.

What is the importance of the TrustRadius Review Acceleration Program at Marketo?

Customer marketing has really proven its strategic value with this program having placed very well in the 2016 TrustMaps with visibility at the highest level of the organization.

Not only have we performed extremely well on a review acquisition perspective, clearly hand-in-hand with your Review Acceleration Program, but we’ve really been able to establish ourselves at a whole different level – and it’s not just at VOC, product and engineering levels. We are also working with the online marketing team to syndicate reviews even if we still have some work to do on that. We are revising our website so nothing will happen until early 2016 but the initial tests were positive.

TrustRadius is also playing a big role on our demand generation programs. Having the content and reviews allow us to create assets for our demand generation and field marketing teams. I know our SMB team created a SMB product profile report which would have not been possible had we not had new and fresh reviews.

How are reviews being leveraged by sales?

Marketo’s marketing department works very closely with sales trying to accelerate deal cycles and help them close business. We have done a lot of sales enablement to educate salespeople on the reviews. We also physically add reviews to our customer advocate database so that when salespeople are searching they can find the most relevant reviews. In fact, some of our top content that’s downloaded are some of these reviews on TrustRadius.

We’ve found that it’s all about repeat, repeat, repeat so you have to continuously enable the sales team.

What are your priorities with the Review Acceleration Program in 2016?

We want to continue to target beyond our advocates. We also want to continue to arm our demand generation team with more assets. We have plans around driving certain type of reviews, so that our demand generation team can start to benefit from more assets and use them for their programs.

We also want to start using custom questions, more than we have done today. It’s a big potential. We also have the opportunity to re-engage with customers that have given us a rating.

Lastly we want to further explore the widget to get lift beyond time on page especially around conversion. And last but not least, we plan to continue to educate and enable our sales team.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you recommend TrustRadius to your peers?

10. The program has really helped us to be successful with our reviews this year. We look forward to further partnering with TrustRadius in 2016.