As most marketing professionals have experienced, we all get these lofty, grand ideas about ways to draw in customers, enhance our user interfaces, sell the products, you name it. But often, when we present these rough ideas to the IT or tech departments at our company, we’re met with resistance.

Talk back people, I know I’m not the only one!

Sometimes it’s a matter of not having enough resources to bring one of our bright ideas to life. Other times it’s a matter of something being extremely difficult to create, technically speaking. An sometimes the technology required is just too dang expensive for the company to agree.

We had a similar problem with landing pages recently. Not enough IT or design resources to create, code, and launch the many different landing pages we wanted to create to promote things. Without more IT people or more designers, we were faced with sticking a lot of ideas in drawers.

Until now. We came across Marketo, online B2B marketing software that offers landing page creative tools, Salesforce.com integration, Google AdWords integration in their PPC product, and soon to come will be lead management tools. A short-tech-staffed marketer’s dream come true.

From the Marketo About Us Page…

Marketo provides affordable, easy-to-use marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive more revenue and improve marketing accountability. Our solutions automate lead generation and lead nurturing processes over multiple channels, beginning with pay-per-click search marketing and landing page optimization. Our analytics bring accountability and respect to the CMO by providing forecasts and metrics that matter to CEOs and CFOs, and help turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue-generating part of the company.

Sounds great to me! This gives us exactly the vehicle we want, for not that much money at all, to launch numerous landing pages presenting whitepaper downloads and other product or project specific information. One of the best features of Marketo’s landing page optimization is that you can sent the pages to appear under your company’s URL. They’re a great invisible partner, with pretty thorough reporting tools available.

I highly encourage anyone remotely interested to use their Test Drive feature to play around with a dummy account or to go ahead and sign up for the free 14 day trial. Once you see how easy it is (seriously… practically everything is drag & drop) you’ll be intrigued to learn more about how it can help you.

Added 1/13/08 – Marketo agrees!

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