Overview

This year’s 2023 Adobe Summit was an exciting one, for many reasons. After a 3 year stint of strictly virtual Adobe Summits, we all finally got to be together again in Las Vegas. And, we had a good time, too!
At Etumos, our eyes are always peeled for improvements, innovations, and the like for Marketo Engage. And, after this year’s 2023 Marketo Engage Roadmap session at Adobe Summit, we’re excited to see all the new updates come to fruition.

So, what was in the 2023 roadmap for Marketo Engage?

The session highlighted the newest innovations which centered around key themes:

• Scale Marketing Teams
• Reimagine the Partnership between Marketing and Sales
• Maximize Revenue Impact

Scale Marketing Teams

Even amongst all the product announcements throughout the event, Adobe continues to focus on scaling the capabilities of the core Marketo Engage product, recognizing the need for marketing teams to produce campaigns at high volumes, often with limited time and resources. With the announcement of the Interactive Webinar Management platform, marketers can now create and deliver webinars from within the Marketo platform via the Adobe Connect suite, eliminating the need to rely on a 3rd party platform. Not only will you be able to complete all of your webinar activities straight from your platform, but you will also be able to collect Q&A and poll data and tie it directly to the lead or contact in your database, automate follow-up trigger activities, and enhance scoring or nurturing activities happening behind the scenes. MOPs Professionals should pay attention to this enhancement, especially for smaller-sized teams who don’t have all of the resources and budget to delegate webinar responsibilities to multiple stakeholders.

Adobe has also made key updates to how we view smart campaigns in Marketo. With the introduction of visual journeys in Marketo, Marketers will now be able to view their smart campaigns in two ways: through the normal rule builder that most users use today OR through a visual environment where you can view all of the smart list criteria, flow steps, and scheduling on one page. For new Marketo users, who may find the use of smart campaigns to be daunting at first, this feature will make the experience of validating and troubleshooting your automation logic easier to complete.

Calling all Workfront users! Adobe has also announced an integration with the Workfront project management platform and Marketo Engage. Workfront and Marketo users will now be able to skip a few manual steps normally required after you create a campaign request within Workfront and before you create the corresponding Marketo program. Workfront users can create Marketo campaigns upon finishing a campaign request in the tool. It even populates tokens in your program with information directly parsed from the campaign request in Workfront.

Keep in mind, these innovations are not meant to replace third-party webinar integrations or how we build our smart campaigns. Adobe is simply introducing new ways to scale and create our normal everyday Marketo activities.

Reimagine the Partnership between Marketing and Sales

Adobe knows it, (and frankly, we’re seeing it too), the B2B buying journey has gotten significantly more complex over the years. With that, Marketing and Sales must be in lockstep more than ever. This means, Marketing is charged with sending even more leads over to sales of the right buyer criteria, at the right time. Enter dynamic chat.

Conversation marketing via a chatbot tool is becoming more popular and occasionally expected by prospects. The days of talking to humans are virtually over. Marketo’s dynamic chat already has chatbot capabilities, the ability to book a meeting with sales, and basic routing that can be set up in the backend of your CRM. In 2023, it’s getting some improvements. You’ll now be able to deliver personalized experiences to buyers on your website through the Adobe Sensei Generative AI tool through live or templatized scenarios, like suggesting additional blog content for a buyer to browse while on a whitepaper landing page. Dynamic chat will also provide the option to pull in a live sales representative to lock in that meeting or answer any additional questions, delivering an altogether more humanized chat experience. The best part, in our opinion, is that the entire experience that just took place in that chatbot will be logged in your CRM under chat insights instantaneously. Better reporting for the win! It might not be time to hang up your hat on Marketo Sales Insight quite yet.

Now, if we had a dollar for every time we had a sales rep ask us “Hey, does Marketo do Account Based Marketing?!?” *shudders*… and you would say “well, yes and no. But mostly, no.” Marketo Engage was historically built to segment your data at the person level, but not really at the account level. Until now….This year, Adobe is rolling out the ability to create account-level segmentations via data pulled in from the person, account, and opportunity-level objects. You can uplevel your nurture targeting with these segmentations, or even sync these lists to a platform like LinkedIn to run paid media campaigns.

Maximize Revenue Impact

Adobe has made significant strides in updating its advanced analytics capabilities within the Adobe Experience Cloud platform. Did you hear about Marketo Measure Ultimate at last year’s Adobe Summit? That’s now available as of a few weeks ago.

In 2023, with Marketo Measure Ultimate in the Adobe Experience Platform, you’ll be able to connect any source of CRM data, any marketing automation platform, or even your internal data warehouse, as long as it’s available as a source within the Adobe Experience Platform. This goes for both online and offline data sources. Once you have the data in your platform, you’ll be able to set up specific field mapping as defined by your attribution reporting to run all the reports you know and love in the Marketo Measure tool (i.e first-touch, multi-touch, lead creation, opportunity creation, etc). You’ll even get your own personal warehouse to push reporting to as an extra step.

In addition, Adobe is making strides in attribution reporting using advanced AI modeling powered by Adobe’s Attribution AI within the Marketo Measure platform. The updates will allow marketers to ask “What do I need to do to get a buyer from a specific point in the funnel to a closed-won opportunity?” You’ll be able to use AI to identify which campaigns, and how many of them you need to run before you see the desired result. This AI modeling can help you plan your campaigns to be the most impactful for your different audiences.

When can we expect these improvements to be released?

Here’s what is available to Adobe Marketo Engage customers right now:

• Marketo Measure Ultimate
• Marketo Engage & Workfront Integration
• Various updated capabilities of the newly improved Dynamic Chat

Here’s what is expected to be available to Adobe Marketo Engage customers in H2 2023:

• Visual Journeys in Marketo Engage
• Interactive Webinars in Marketo Engage
• Dynamic Chat with Adobe Sensei Chat AI
• Real-Time CDP: Account level list segmentation and activation
• Marketo Measure Advanced AI Modeling

Conclusion

We’re pleased that Adobe continues to improve and scale the core Adobe Marketo Engage product that we know and love, and that most of these improvements will be included in existing contracts for both Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure. We’re excited to try out some of these new features ourselves and understand the impact of how these improvements will take marketing operations to new heights.