“[Adobe’s software] can be a cheetah or a house cat depending on how well you put it together and operate its machinery1,” wrote Ted Schadler, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, in an article highlighting the crucial role digital agencies, consultancies, and tech service partners play in helping marketing departments get the most out of their MarTech.
And we couldn’t agree more. Adobe Marketo Engage, in particular, is a marketing automation beast. It boasts a myriad of functionalities, enabling highly customizable campaigns and flexible workflows, which are especially crucial at a time when the B2B buying process has become increasingly non-linear and sometimes unpredictable.
This means companies with even the most complex buyer journeys—those with multiple decision makers, long sales cycles, and various product lines—can achieve personalization at scale and ultimately, drive revenue.
However, marketing departments often have to work with razor-thin budgets, operating with limited staff that rarely have enough bandwidth to support all stakeholder groups. With limited time and capacity, they rarely reach deep enough inside Marketo’s virtually bottomless toolbox to deliver all that the platform promises—operating the powerhouse platform instead with the ferocity of the proverbial house cat, as Schadler feared.
“Due to talent and budget constraints, many marketing programs aren’t run to best practices—emails aren’t tested, drip streams aren’t built, lists aren’t segmented well enough, landing pages aren’t optimized, scoring models aren’t evolved over time, data aren’t connected and analyzed, and so forth. Marketo is such a powerful tool. It has so much potential that’s waiting to be unlocked. With the help of our certified Marketo experts, 2X can unlock it for you,” said 2X CEO Domenic Colasante.
We are proud to announce that 2X is now an Adobe Solution Partner with a specialization in Adobe Marketo Engage, providing 2X clients access to the platform’s full suite of functionalities, plus a pool of certified Marketo specialists with a wealth of experience running targeted, bespoke marketing campaigns.
Gain Unparalleled Access to 2X’s Certified Marketo Talent
A 2022 survey2 of 800 marketing operations (MarOps) professionals found that companies shelled out around $36,720 over the first seven months to train a new junior-level MarOps hire. Additionally, some 70% said they devoted five hours or more each week for at least six months to training their new hire.
This comes after a laborious recruitment process that took four months or more for nearly half of all respondents. All that time, effort, and resources spent may not be even worth it, with as many as 72% leaving their company in less than three years.
At 2X, we’ve been steadily growing our team of Marketo-certified MarOps professionals, who possess both the know-how and experience to help our clients realize the ROI on their Marketo investment. 2X’s partnership with Adobe solidifies our commitment to helping more B2B companies fill this talent gap, and in turn, implement MarOps best practices to drive profits.
2X’s Senior Marketing Operations Specialist Pei Xin Tong, who is an Adobe Marketo Engage Business Practitioner, has spent years helping clients run complex, highly tailored marketing programs, and tackle the challenges that come with them.
“Our clients often come to us saying they can’t find the reason why certain processes failed to execute, or why an automation skipped an essential flow step in a nurture stream. A certified Marketo practitioner possesses the technical capabilities required to troubleshoot sync errors or any other operational issues that may impact the buyer’s journey. For example, we might make use of Marketo’s Audit Trail and Campaign Inspector feature which allows us to easily monitor, identify, and remediate issues while ensuring the automation process is fully optimized. Highly specialized marketing campaigns benefit from highly specialized MarOps professionals.”
A New Operating Model for MarTech Management
A recent Gartner report noted that on average, B2B companies leverage just 42% of their MarTech stacks today, compared to 58% in 2020, and declared that marketing technology utilization is tumbling into a new valley of unproductivity requiring “urgent attention to maximize impact in the face of potential economic headwinds that bring on greater CFO scrutiny or forced budget cuts.”3
Transforming the operating model is key to helping companies increase utilization of existing MarTech capabilities.
Marketing leaders are moving away from assembling their own in-house marketing teams, as hiring and retaining talent has become increasingly difficult and costly. Instead, many are outsourcing their execution functions, particularly MarTech management, to an offshore firm like 2X.
Backed by a highly qualified 2X team, they gain access to a dedicated team of certified marketing technologists who have a deep knowledge of cutting-edge MarTech tools and know how to apply them—at a fraction of the cost of an in-house hire—meaning B2B companies can hit the ground running with their marketing strategies.
About 2X
A pioneer in the B2B marketing as a service (MaaS) category, 2X enables operating model transformation that drives growth in marketing’s contribution to businesses’ revenue and overall enterprise valuation. With global headquarters in Philadelphia, US, and delivery operations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2X comprises a world-class, diverse team of marketing strategists, developers, analysts, designers, and writers who work together to deliver high-impact account-based marketing and demand-generation programs, data analytics, and marketing technology management. 2X’s unique approach brings scale to B2B marketing for greater revenue impact, execution efficiency, and capacity for innovation. It currently ranks #663 on the Inc. 5000 list and is recognized as a 2021 Diverse and Inclusive Employer by The Startup Weekly. For further information, visit: 2X.Marketing/career.
About Adobe Marketo Engage
Adobe Marketo Engage offers the leading Engagement Platform that empowers marketers to build brand value, grow revenue, and prove impact. Consistently recognized as the industry’s innovation pioneer, Adobe Marketo Engage is the trusted platform for thousands of CMOs thanks to its scalability, reliability, and openness. To learn more about the Adobe Marketo Engage platform, LaunchPoint® partner ecosystem, and the vast community that is the Marketing Nation®, visit marketo.
1 Schadler, Ted & Wang Xiaofeng, ‘Adobe’s Service Partners Are What Will Make It a Proper Enterprise Software Company’, Last Modified June 26, 2020, Forrester
2 Davis, Kim, ‘Marketing Operations Talent Is Suffering Burnout and Turnover’, Last Modified May 20, 2022, MarTech.org
3 Gartner, ‘Disruptions Derail Progress in Martech Utilization’, 2022, Retrieved from emtemp.gcom.cloud