Success Story: Marketo + TrustRadius

Bertrand Hazard
January 22, 2016

Success Story: Marketo + TrustRadius

TrustRadius has allowed us to accumulate reviews at a faster pace by going beyond our traditional customer advocates, leverage the rich user insights to drive continuous improvement and accelerate deal cycles.

Stephanie Roodhouse, Director of Customer Marketing, Marketo

Customer

Marketo is a marketing platform that serves a diverse range of SMB and enterprise clients. When there was a strategic push to get more user content and insights, Marketo’s customer marketing team turned to TrustRadius to quickly scale and strategically leverage authentic third-party reviews.

Challenge

  • Customer marketing needed to get more users on the record as part of a company-wide initiative to embrace transparency
  • Demand generation and field marketing teams did not have enough persuasive content assets
  • Product, engineering and VOC teams needed real-time customer feedback so they could proactively improve the platform

Solution

  • Adopted the TrustRadius Review Acceleration Program to acquire more reviews
  • Embedded one-click rating tiles in event invitations to collect ratings
  • Ran training sessions to educate sales reps on how to leverage reviews in deal cycles

Results

  • Increased review acquisition velocity by 4x
  • Doubled review volume within five months
  • Drove demand and accelerated deal cycles with persuasive user-generated content assets
  • Mined critical customer insights for engineering, products and VOC teams
  • Established the customer marketing team as a strategic contributor to Marketo’s success

Story

Marketo provides engagement marketing software and solutions designed to help marketers develop long-term relationships with their customers. Their solutions for SMBs and large enterprises include email marketing, lead management, consumer marketing, customer base marketing and mobile marketing.

Initially, Marketo was only focused on driving its customer advocates to write reviews on third-party user review sites. Marketo partnered with TrustRadius to go beyond traditional advocates to accelerate the pace of review acquisition, strengthen its brand and amplify customer voices. “We’ve been able to accumulate reviews at a faster pace than when we just used personal asks or our advocacy program to drive reviews. We’ve also found that there was not a large delta between the reviews we received from advocates and those from our broader customer base,” said Katie Pope, senior customer marketing specialist at Marketo.

By leveraging customer reviews, Marketo could also draw out and respond to feedback and implemented a customer review feedback loop. “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 been getting top marks,” said Stephanie Roodhouse, Marketo’s director of customer marketing.

Marketo also uses reviews to enable their demand generation and field marketing teams. “Our SMB team commissioned an SMB product profile report which would have not been possible had we not had new and fresh reviews,” said Roodhouse. Moving forward, Marketo plans to focus on gathering reviews from specific customer segments, such as industry and size, so that Marketo’s demand generation teams can leverage these reports in their programs.

For more insights into Marketo’s review program, check out our interview with Stephanie Roodhouse and Katie Pope. 

About the Author

Bertrand Hazard
Bertrand Hazard was previously the VP of Marketing at TrustRadius. He has over 15 years of experience in product marketing, demand generation, brand and community efforts. Before TrustRadius, Bertrand held leadership roles at Solarwinds, Troux Technologies, Universal Weather & Aviation and NetIQ. He has a Diplome d'Etudes Superieures Europeennes de Management from CESEM Mediterranee in Marseilles, France, and a bachelor of arts degree from Middlesex University in London.