SAN MATEO, Calif., Sept. 30, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Marketo Inc. (NASDAQ: MKTO), the leading provider of engagement marketing software and solutions, today announced the latest release of its Engagement Marketing Platform is helping more than 3300 organizations engage people across digital, social and mobile channels in order to build lifelong, personalized relationships.

The adoption of Marketo's innovative software comes at a time when marketing is undergoing a massive sea change. Today, marketers face rapid change and rising complexity, new channels and techniques and rapidly diminishing consumer attention. Digital, social and mobile technologies have forever altered the way organizations and marketers need to interact with people. Organizations need to engage with people, building personal relationships over time, instead of talking at them. This is "engagement marketing," where brands shift from campaigns and transactions to conversations and building true relationships.   

"The only way marketers can succeed in this hyperconnected digital world is engaging at a deeply personal level with people," said Phil Fernandez, CEO and president of Marketo. "Organizations need to understand a customer journey doesn't end when the first click happens – it is just starting. Today, people expect organizations to connect previous interactions together and to treat every interaction as a personal conversation. The only way you can do that today, at scale, is through engagement software."

In a 2014 Marketo survey of hundreds of marketers worldwide, nearly two-thirds of them feel the delivery of relevant and personal messaging is the most valuable strategy for digital marketing today. However only one-third of the respondents felt they are able to successfully engage people on a personalized basis today. Similarly, only one out of every five marketers can engage customers across the lifecycle of their journey. These results showcase the need for marketers to embrace the seven principles of engagement marketing all of which center on connecting with people:

• As individuals
• Based on what they do
• Continuously over time
• Wherever they are
• Always directed towards a goal
• With measurable impact
• At the speed of digital

"We banned use of the term 'demand generation' because it implies that marketing's job is limited to identifying potential customers, when really that's when marketing's job is just getting started," said Stephanie Meyer, head of marketing operations at GE Healthcare. "Instead, we are focused on continuous engagement to build personalized and enduring relationships with our customers. Marketo helps us do just that -- at GE scale."

Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform: Everything today's digital marketer needs to be successful

Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform blends power and ease of use to create a solution uniquely tailored to help marketers master the art and science of digital marketing. Marketo is solely focused on the needs of marketers. Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform, more than any other marketing suite or cloud, arms marketers with the necessary innovation to succeed in this fast-changing digital world. Unlike marketing clouds or suites that are still trying to assimilate disparate and disconnected offerings, Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform was built specifically to deliver a unified experience that marries the best practices of B2B and B2C marketing. Some of the core capabilities of the Engagement Marketing Platform include:

• Marketing System of Record: A single source of truth for customer marketing data, the System of Record makes it possible for marketers to understand and track customer journeys over time
• Marketing Automation: Automatically helps marketers execute marketing programs aimed at creating lasting relationships at scale
• Real-time Personalization: Using Marketo's personalization capabilities, marketers can dynamically personalize any customer experience to people that are both known and anonymous across all digital channels in real-time
• Social Marketing: By linking together web, email and now social experiences, marketers can expand the reach of their marketing efforts with fully-integrated social engagement capabilities
• Marketing Analytics: The key for marketers is to know if their efforts are working. Using Marketing Analytics, marketers can optimize their campaigns based on real-time performance metrics and prove the impact marketing is having on revenue generation
• Marketing Management: Given the pace of digital marketing, marketers must coordinate teams and activities in order to move faster and get better results
• Cross-channel Engagement: Now marketers have a marketing platform with built-in capabilities to engage people continuously across channels including email, web, mobile, events, direct mail and social media
• Marketing Ecosystem: The Engagement Marketing Platform is an open platform that seamlessly connects with hundreds of Marketo's technology, agency and services partners providing marketers with the most complete ecosystem of marketing solutions

"Panasonic is using Marketo around the world in our B2B business to enhance our customers' life cycle journey," said Stephen Yeo, marketing director at Panasonic Systems Communications Europe. "Engagement must be tailored to where the customer is in their journey.  Marketo helps us find the right prospects and turn them into customers.  Once they have become a customer we listen to their needs and use Marketo to show them additional ways that Panasonic can help.  Marketo is core to Panasonic's ability to successfully execute on this strategy."

To learn more about Marketo's Engagement Marketing Platform and this new era of engagement marketing, visit http://www.marketo.com/platform.

About Marketo

Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading marketing software and solutions designed to help marketers master the art and science of digital marketing. Through a unique combination of innovation and expertise, Marketo is focused solely on helping marketers keep pace in an ever-changing digital world. Spanning today's digital, social, mobile and offline channels, Marketo's® Engagement Marketing Platform powers a set of breakthrough applications to help marketers tackle all aspects of digital marketing from the planning and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that can be optimized in real-time. Marketo's applications are known for their ease-of-use and are complemented by the Marketing Nation®, a thriving network of more than 320 third-party solutions through our LaunchPoint® ecosystem and over 50,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in Europe, Australia and Japan, Marketo serves as a strategic marketing partner to more than 3,300 large enterprises and fast-growing small companies across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.marketo.com. 

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SOURCE Marketo Inc.