Managing Recurring Webinars in Marketo

There are usually multiple ways to solve a problem with Marketo and this flexibility may make certain configurations seem daunting. For example, the standard webinar channel has nine progression steps for a single program, so running multiple weekly webinars increases required management time exponentially. In addition, there is no easy way to share one form across multiple webinars without building individual registration pages.

After solving this problem for many of our clients, we were able to develop an elegant solution that works very well. Here’s how we do it:

1. There is no way to get around creating individual programs for each webinar, because the details of each event are directly associated to its program. However, cloning from an existing webinar program (without its members), and then modifying the webinar date for the new event, takes just a few minutes from the summary tab.
2. Second, I create a separate program that has the master landing page for all the listings. Here’s a link to a live page (http://pages.intermedia.net/monthly-recurring-webinars.html). In this example, I had to also create individual landing pages that included multiple listings since each of them were for a different topic and different dates for each of the topics.
   
3. Use date tokens on the page as well as in the form drop downs. This will allow you to change date values in the tokens and have them appear with the new dates on the landing pages as well as within the registration form. We suggest using a custom “recurring webinar date” to store these token values.
   
   
4. Have a processing campaign that looks for these dates and uses a campaign request to add the registrant into the correct webinar. Also, to ensure there are no conflicts, remove the webinar date after it’s used so that the registrant is not cookied when he/she goes to register for another webinar scheduled on another date.
   

It’s just that easy. Our clients have had a lot of success using this best practice for webinar programs and we hope you do too.

Marketo Certified Expert

"Congratulations on becoming a Marketo Certified Expert....Welcome to the elite group of Marketo Certified Experts!"

I had to take a moment and just reflect on the all the learning experiences.

• Sending out 80K emails at once and wished I would've tested to a seed list before sending.
• Creating a circular set of workflow logic that kept running and putting the Marketo instance into a crawl.
• Trying to keep cool when the CEO asked why I was sending emails to "dead" people.

Above all, that rewarding feeling of "a-ha" when a complex set of daisy-chained triggers made sense, when all the metics are humming along and I am "in flow". 

Is it TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU?

Happy New Year!

I recently returned from a 1 week foundation training course for a group of future Marketo "super users". These were a hand-picked, elite few who would help roll out the system world-wide. The days were filled with hands-on activities, super-duper advanced topics that I can't reveal, and all the flows, lists, programs and drama that comes with marketing automation. The sessions often diverged into multiple tangents and the agenda became a menu of topics from left over questions. All in all, very exciting and fun to see that look of achievement when someone gets a topic.

In the final day, I realized that we covered quite a bit of ground but something was missing. While we focused heavily on the system side of things, there was very little discussion about how all of these functional pieces were addressing the larger chain of events. 

What are the programs we were creating solving for? 

Do these programs address issues with top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), or bottom of the funnel (BOFU) problems?

I suspect that we were getting more and more specialized in the sense that one person is charge of executing a campaign and anther coming up with the campaigns. It wasn't just this group or this company. Often, I'm finding more and more separation between automation, marketing planning, field marketing and sales. These folks don't really share a common idea of where exactly the issues are in their funnel in order to come up with relevant campaigns that address the fallouts in these phases. Heck, the concepts are even new yet the campaigns have been planned well in advance....sort of cart before the horse.

As we look into future campaigns, I only hope that everyone is staring at the same set of conversion metrics so we can all figure out if it's TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU we're solving for.