9 Things You Should Know About The Marketo Account Based Marketing Platform

Earlier this year at Summit, Marketo announced that they would be launching an Account Based Marketing Platform. As of September 2016, Marketo has officially launched their Account Based Marketing Platform as part of their Summer ’16 launch. There’s been a lot of buzz about Marketo ABM and its benefits, so I thought I would break everything down into the top 9 things you should know about the Marketo Account Based Marketing Platform.

1. The definition of a “Named Account”

You will hear the term “Named Account” a lot in this post as well as in every Marketo product document. A named account is an account you want to target, engage and measure within Marketo ABM. Named accounts can be selected through a single flow action, a smart campaign flow step, or a list import.

2. How the matching works

Once a new named account is created, a group of contacts is automatically associated with named account. The matching logic is based on 3 factors:

1. Email domain
2. Inferred company name from IP address/li>
3. Company Name

If the contacts are under the same account in your CRM they will also be included.

3. Strong matches vs Weak matches

The ABM algorithm returns 2 kinds of matches:

1. Strong match
2. Weak match

Strong matches

When Marketo is very sure that the contact should belong to the account, it’s considered a strong match.

Weak matches

When Marketo thinks the contact should belong to an account, it’s considered a weak match. Weak matches are flagged and you can choose to add the person to the named account manually.

4. What happens when contacts enter your Marketo database

After the named accounts are setup, when a new person enters your Marketo database, via your CRM or any other source (i.e. a form submission) the matching rules will look at the email domain, inferred IP address, company name and your CRM to find the right named account to associate the lead.

5. Accounts are de-duped automatically

Marketo does ‘light’ de-duplication by CRM account names. The remove any company suffixes before matching to company names (i.e. co, inc, llp, llc) and merge companies or CRM accounts in Marketo that have duplicate names.

6. Account hierarchy isn’t supported

The current version doesn’t support account hierarchy, but this might be included in future releases.

7. ABM isn’t workspace-specific

Named accounts are visible to all Workspaces, but lead partition rules are still honored. This means you can see a named account in across workspaces but depending on your lead partition rules, you may only see leads belonging to the corresponding workspace within the named account.

8. You can score accounts

Account scoring will help you determine the level of engagement within your accounts. Account scoring takes the scores from multiple leads within an account and gives you an aggregate score on the account level.

9. It’s a paid Add-on to your Marketo instance

This kind of marketing power isn’t free. Marketo ABM is a paid add-on much like Real-Time Personalization (RTP). Marketo ABM pricing is based on the number of accounts you want to track and the number of users who need access to Marketo ABM.

Questions?

Send them to me via email, send me a tweet @jennamolby, or leave a comment