Cleaning Up with SOAP

I'm seeing more websites these days utilize the Marketo SOAP API's on forms than the standard form/landing page combo and it's a good sign. For the marketers out there, there are a few ways that leads can get added into Marketo and much more clean in terms of how it's done as well as having full control of the design of the web pages.

1. Standard. Use the standard form and landing page pair by creating a form and adding it to a landing page. This works well if you don't have too many form variations since you build the form as a single object with all the fields you want and then drag and drop into a landing page. However, it doesn't work as well if you want to use one form but with just some additional fields. Also, it's a bit tricky to get the right form styles to pass a good designer's eye.
2. Web to Lead. Use a form similar to the Salesforce web to lead form by creating a form and cutting and pasting the code onto your own non-Marketo landing page. You get to control the look and feel but have it go directly into Marketo.
3. API - There's the Munchkin API and SOAP API. Munchkin uses the same javascript cookie that tracks leads to insert them. However, for some of the more nifty things, the documentation says to go with the SOAP API. 

Again, for marketers, I would pass along the documentation and samples for the SOAP API to your web developer. They eat this stuff for breakfast and the PHP and JAVA samples should give enough info to go on. Key takeaway is that there is much more flexibility to control what you can do with the lead information. You have full control of the design elements, but added benefit of being able to look up lead records, append/upsert information to the record as necessary. 

Personally, I've used it (with lots of help) on separate occasions with great success. One for an account management function where a user can manage his/her profile as well as sign in credentials to get access to files, support (on a different system), and website materials without having to resubmit this information. The other is to signup for a demo environment (hosted on our servers) and using the API to pass along the lead information to Marketo. 

https://www.sumologic.com/demo/index.html

On the Marketo side, all you have to do is create a trigger for the API and a value such as lead source that you are using to differentiate the call.