With more people working from home than ever before, in-person events replaced with digital experiences, budgets are being rescoped, and brands are focusing more on serving rather than selling. It’s a time of reflection for many personally and professionally. It’s also an opportunity to pause, take stock, and prepare for the new normal that is quietly emerging.
In most organizations, just getting started with marketing automation, programs tend to be more technical than strategic. Marketo Engage is the Ferrari of marketing automation with an abundance of capabilities to streamline operations and provide valuable insight beyond clicks, views, and registrations.
Here are three ways you and the marketing operations team can leverage Marketo Engage to increase efficiencies, resulting in more time to strategize and soar to the next level.
1. Think Scalability and Growth
Marketo is a robust Marketing Automation Platform. One of the key features is Standard Program Templates and Tokens. At a basic level, programs contain tasks to complete and help manage event registration, track downloads, or send email campaigns. Having a centralized set of design assets, helps to eliminate redundancy and duplicated work across your organization globally. When set up correctly, Marketo program templates and tokens help your marketing organization become more streamlined and efficient, saving you time and money—while helping you to answer key questions on how to better target your market and improve conversion rates.
Marketo tokens are often used to personalize emails and landing pages with the recipient’s name, but they can also be used to improve conversion and efficiency and make maintenance more manageable. Program tokens allow you to level-up within a program and move beyond simply populating a field with information from the lead file.
Program tokens enable you to define content at the program asset level, all at once, for emails, landing pages, and other elements. Such as defining creative elements for your templates, like colors and images, enabling you to simplify new program setup and increase consistency across all of your programs.
You heard right! Marketo tokens enable you to dictate format to manage the look and feel of your email design across multiple products or regions with one template, while all other elements of the template remain unchanged.
Then there are layered tokens:
- Inherited: Brought over from folder tokens; default values are maintained
- Overwritten: Inherited default values are changed for a particular program
- Local: Unique to a specific program; can be updated when new tokens are created
A use case for using layered tokens would be if you had a high volume of programs across multiple regions and products, the layered tokens would help you define numerous parameters e.g. footer information based on region, product URLs and other key elements. This would involve a folder structure with layered tokens, which eliminates the need for multiple design templates for each region.
Marketo has more than 100 tokens to help you with almost every aspect of your programs. For example, tokens can also be used to track hidden form submissions, enabling you to collect lead information related to specific pieces of content, rather than asking people to fill out forms—creating a better user experience and useful tracking and reporting on your program results with assets tied to them.
In order to use this strategy successfully, you’ll need a good understanding of what your organization can centralize and how other programs can tap into those centralized processes and assets. Once you have your needs outline, for sure you would see scalability at its peak.
2. Prove Contribution to Marketing Spend
Although we began this article with “the times, they are a-changin’,” there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, marketers are increasingly required to show the value added and how programs are impacting the business. The times of how many clicks are gone and it’s how many MQLs were created and how many converted. Channels and tracking campaigns are the foundation for Marketo program reporting.
When you define and track the proper statuses, you’re able to measure the impact of your programs beyond tactical measures, such as click-throughs and downloads to look at MQL conversion and how your programs are impacting the business. As they say, “What you cannot measure, you cannot track” and with Marketo Engage if it is set up correctly, it is a piece of cake.
3. Think Globally at the Start to Drive Business Impact
When building out your initial Marketo Engage templates and programs, consider how you might integrate these across regions globally to eliminate redundancies in processes, or to mitigate inconsistencies in lead processing, in addition to long-term maintenance of your programs and assets. You’ll be glad you did!
Having a centralized global approach to standardization such as changing lead scores, synching with your CRM provides consistency in how a lead is handled.
Center of Excellence is the key here and it is powerful yet simple to achieve this with Marketo Engage.
Time to Soar
Don’t set it and forget it, perform an overall assessment regularly so you can be proactive instead of spending valuable time reactively putting out fires. Spend time to audit Lead Scoring, Programs, Key Metrics, and Business Growth. Run key metrics to analyze and reevaluate how to make the most of your Marketo Engage investment.
And don’t think you have to do it all yourself! Part of a good strategy is to leverage those with the expertise and experience you may not have inhouse, giving you the resources you need when you need them.
Via Marketo blog