Marketo Introduces New Solution to Spark Growth for Small Businesses

SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 11, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Marketo, the fastest growing provider of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) solutions, introduced Spark by Marketo™. Spark is a new brand of marketing automation tailored specifically for small businesses – the fastest-growing and largest segment of today's economy.

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Spark shares the same technology foundation that powers Marketo's award-winning solutions for larger enterprises, used by more than 1,300 customers worldwide to accelerate revenue growth. By pairing Spark with expert training, support and mentoring services, Marketo delivers a distinctive marketing automation solution purpose-built and priced for small businesses, so they can find more prospective customers – and grow faster.

Spark helps small businesses create meaningful, cost-effective marketing campaigns – using inbound marketing, search, email, events and social media. Spark automates lead nurturing efforts and accurately scores leads, so sales people can focus on the right opportunities to bring in more revenue faster. Spark also measures the impact of each campaign and program in real-time, including email volumes and leads generated, so users can easily make changes to improve revenue growth. For an easy look at how Spark works, see the Spark marketing automation video.

Marketo's own ease-of-use was recently recognized by CRM Magazine's annual awards for its user interface and overall experience, and the company has applied the same award-winning design philosophy to Spark. Spark provides an easy, intuitive master dashboard to all revenue-driving activity, with no extra technical help or expertise necessary. Businesses can get going with Spark immediately, thanks to built-in tutorials that walk users through each activity step-by-step.

Spark also offers all customers one-on-one mentoring sessions with a dedicated team of marketing experts. For help with campaign creation and strategy, or just to quickly review a new campaign before it is launched, Spark allows small business users to ask questions, seek advice and truly master marketing in a fast-changing world. Since fast-growing small businesses can quickly become thriving mid-size businesses with more expansive needs, Spark users can easily move to Marketo's professional or enterprise products at any time, without data loss or interruptions to running marketing campaigns.

"Millions of small businesses don't have the time or technology needed to truly spark rapid growth. The things that really grow their business – like marketing efficiently and finding solid leads – never move off their to-do lists," said Phil Fernandez, CEO and president, Marketo. "Spark is built just for smaller organizations. We wanted to empower these emerging businesses with the one tool they'll need to drive revenue – and access to marketing expertise – to give them the freedom to get back to what's most important: running their businesses."

Key features of Spark by Marketo™ include:

Email Marketing: Email is still one of the most powerful channels for effective marketing. Spark enables users to create reusable email templates and other creative assets, and to send automatically triggered and batch email campaigns on behalf of specific sales representatives.

Inbound Marketing: Spark improves campaign results with search engine optimization, targeted landing pages and tools to help understand which keywords are driving the best traffic and leads.

Lead Nurturing: Sales people need to spend their time focusing only on the right opportunities, so they can close more revenue faster. Spark helps small businesses identify the prospects that are most likely to buy. It also automates multi-step marketing programs to build relationships with prospects over time using targeted, consistent communications. With Spark, campaigns take only hours to build, rather than days.

Lead Scoring and Insights: Spark empowers users to score leads accurately and automatically using prospect demographics and online behavior, pointing sales people toward the hottest opportunities. That means more quickly closed business and top-line impact.

Social Media: Spark allows users to build optimized landing pages and forms with social sharing buttons (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), track all prospect interactions online without IT involvement and identify key influencers in social networks.

Event Marketing: Through integration with Adobe Connect, ON24, WebEx and other major webinar and online-meeting providers, Spark automates every step of organizing, creating and managing online events. Personalized invitations and timely reminders attract and convert more attendees into customers with intelligent post-event lead nurturing.

Expert Comments on Spark's Launch:

"The way people buy and sell anything these days has changed forever because the customer knows more than they ever have about what they're looking for," said Paul Greenberg, managing principal of The 56 Group LLC and author of CRM at the Speed of Light. "From the world's largest enterprises to the fast-growth SMB sector, businesses now must engage with customers through all marketing channels every step of the way – email, social, you name it – to truly drive their bottom line."

"Companies have all the tools they need to grow very rapidly today, provided they have access to the technology and expertise to bring their products to market. With robust and affordable marketing automation, even start-ups can compete for and win significant business that might otherwise pass them by," said Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research. "Spark by Marketo™ helps small companies jumpstart marketing and sales to achieve aggressive growth goals."

Spark by Marketo™ is available now. For more information, visit www.sparkbymarketo.com.

About Marketo

Marketo is the global leader in Revenue Performance Management. Marketo's powerful yet easy-to-use marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions transform how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work — and work together — to drive dramatically increased revenue performance and fuel business growth. The company's proven technology, comprehensive services, and expert guidance are helping corporations around the world to turn marketing from a cost center to a business-building revenue driver.

Marketo has been recognized by CRM Magazine as the "2011 CRM Market Leaders Awards Winner for Marketing Solutions," the 2010 CODiE award for "Best Marketing Solution," the "Best Sales and Marketing 2.0 Solution" from SellingPower and the "Best Marketing Automation Application" by Salesforce customers on the AppExchange. As of September 2011, more than 1,300 enterprise and mid-market clients globally have adopted Marketo solutions. For more information, visit http://www.Marketo.com, or subscribe to Marketo's award-winning blogs at http://blog.marketo.com/.

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Spark by Marketo

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