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.

Marketing 101 for MSPs: Marketing Automation

I like keeping things low-key so when I was asked to contribute to a white paper for MSPs (Managed Service Providers) on marketing automation it took me by surprise. It suddenly felt like I had to represent all of us who toil in this art each day and that pressure started to build as we got closer to the first outline. The big question was:

What do I say and how can I put all of these evolving concepts into a paper that is useful and not theoretical?

I've spent so much time reading white papers and they've become the industry standard in getting the initial inquiry. Catchy titles are great, but I've always wanted substance....something the reader who doesn't have an frame of reference can easily get.

It took a few weeks and I never thought these many pages for a 101 on the topic would come out of this. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did in putting it together.

Thanks to Ken Vanderweel and Randy Budde for making it such a smooth process.

Here's a direct link to the paper: Marketing 101 for MSPs: Marketing Automation

On Today's Program - Catch 22

Since Marketo programs launched, it has provided a easier way to manage campaign flows and assets into a single structure. Campaign reporting has also been simplified since programs consolidate multiple campaigns and provide success metrics through member progression statuses.

For the past few weeks, I've been converting most of our marketing activities into Marketo Programs and also looking into the past few years to properly associated acquisition programs for all of our leads. However, I've also ran into a catch 22 in a few scenarios.

The fundamental issue is that any lead added to a Marketo program will automatically sync to a SFDC campaign if the SFDC campaign is linked. Here are a few scenarios where this is causing problems.

1. Lists - When lists are added to a program, all the members are automatically synced to the campaign. In cases where you only want members who responded to the campaign to actually be in the program, they have to be outside of the program (in the lead database). Here's the catch.

In the list load process, if the Acquisition Program is selected you run into the syncing issue since all members would get associated to the program thus the issue above. If you don't select the Acquisition Program by selecting "none" new leads would not have any Acquisition Program assigned. Acquisition is only attributed to net new leads so they remain empty.

2. Campaign flows - As part of our email campaigns we have instrumented a couple of scenarios where if the lead is a member of our Bad Data list or Email is Bounced, they are removed from flow. This is the first flow step to ensure data quality. This rule is ignored if this is a flow within the program an you'll get all leads synced to the SFDC campaign.

3. Lead assignment race conditions - For many reason, our lead assignment are done in Marketo. The sync between SFDC and Marketo is through a license just for Marketo. The assignments are setup with a single entry point called "sync master" where the lead is evaluated based on the global territory and flows through a series of sub request campaigns that ultimately assigns the lead based on product interest and specific territory to the rep that the lead belongs. However, by default all leads end up assigned to the sync license when leads are uploaded before they have the chance to be assigned. And since there's no way to mass reassign leads once an owner is established, it's a process to get owner's changed.

4. Old leads - If you have a set of leads that are not in a Program (older leads, inactive leads, etc.) and want to add them to a program, they will also sync to SFDc when they are added to these campaigns. Depending on the number of these leads, it can get ugly.

Please support this idea by voting for it in the community: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoIdeaDetail?id=08750000000HnEkAAK

Ryan Vong – Marketo Jedi Knight

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet the ReveStar team in their Palo Alto office. I have to admit, they had me at "revenue." There are some things you can tell right away and the conversations just flowed. It felt like I found a long lost relative and decided to jump in. This is a repost of the blog announcement. Although Star Wars never came up in our conversations, I'm a big fan and the chosen theme was perfect.

Continuing on the “Mad Skills” theme, Ryan Vong has joined ReveStar as Technical Consultant, Special Projects. Like Patricia and George, Ryan has an unbelievably deep knowledge of various marketing automation tool sets, and in particular Marketo and SFDC. Like many in the Marketo user community in the Silicon Valley, I have witnessed first hand Ryan’s ability to deconstruct new “bleeding edge” business processes and layer in marketing automation practices to ensure strong demand gen and pipeline development.

If your company is implemeting advanced new business processes and looking to generate revenue from it (all this by the end of the next fiscal quarter), contact ReveStar and we’ll hook you up with the marketing automation Jedi Knight.

Decoding the Marketo Template (Abridged)

When it comes to designing landing pages using the Marketo template, the common complaint is that it's difficult to customize the template. The typical scenario is that the template should match the website standards and so marketing folks will send the template to a designer, webmaster, or design agency that hasn't seen this before. The template comes back with some of the raw html used for the website or uploaded directly into Marketo.  When the template is previewed, it looks fine. However, when it comes time to edit or add content to it, it breaks or the editor keeps spinning and nothing comes up. Then the whole notion that the editor or the template sucks.

What happened?

The trick to all of this is to pay attention to the way the template is structured. There are some specific div tags in the template which starts off with "div#mkt..." which the Marketo editor looks for. This tells the editor which area on the template it is modifying. There are also some places in the code where it says "DO NOT EDIT". Heed the warning unless you know what you are doing. For the most part, there are three "divs" to worry about. I tried to highlight them in the image. Get those right and the template is pretty easy to manipulate.

A buddy of mine asked if I could reverse engineer the template that Marketo uses for the referral program. My template is on the right and I'm pretty proud of it. It does the trick.

 

 While it's not exact it took me an hour or so to recreate this template. To save you some time, I've included the bones for it here. You'll have to replace all the places where the images point to our image library and it should look just like yours and take half the time. If you have a good web person, they can add all the snazzy navigation to match your site in no time.

Enjoy,
Ryan

My First Marketo Program Part 1

It's nice to see how all the elements of my first Marketo program is running. However, looking back it was an intense process. Honestly, it didn't have to be that way. I've been using Marketo for a little over 4 years and admittedly ignored that last release regarding programs. I was so comfortable building campaigns using the folder structure that all this talk about the advantages of using programs just escaped me. Well not escape, but completely ignored because I had gotten so good with the old structure. But, it was time...a chance to dump what I thought I knew and get on with the "program". 

This time the challenge was different. Rather than using marketing activities siloed from our application, Marketo was integral to the signup process and required a series of hooks into our application. It will hand out activation codes to our users so its critical that it functions seamlessly. To get my head around all the pieces and touch points, I started off diagramming the flow to answer some basic questions.

What happens at signup?

Which application does what?

What is the path for the user?

How does Marketo handle the user's path?

This was starting to look more like a small nurture stream. Looking at it from a 3K foot level, when someone signs up, I look to see if the activation email bounced. If so, the lead doesn't make it into SFDC. In addition, users have the ability to request being contacted instead of signing up using the same form. This would bypass the activation email and following steps to get routed into SFDC and to the right rep.

For trial sign ups, we start what I call a "pretrial" process which means you've signed up, but haven't activated your account in order to actually begin the trial. The system waits a day and starts sending out reminders to activate and does so each day for 3 days and then adds the user into an inactive static list. If activated, the user goes into a "trial" nurture stream which will have a few emails associated to encourage usage. 

All of these are managed through progression steps tracking leads as they move through all of these phases. Essentially one big program working in unison. 

Here's a link to the signup form. https://boundary.com/signup/

I'll share some of the program components in the next post. 

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. 

"Use the Source"

Of all lead fields, the lead source value gets the most amount of attention. As marketers we are trained to look to the lead source as the source of truth for ROI. However, this often gets overly complicated and at times philosophical. After all, leads are often associated to several campaigns prior to conversion and depending on who was involved in the campaigns, each party is looking to claim the credit for the converting source.

  

Depending on the final analysis, telling the full story isn't always so clear. I remember a marketing manager vehemently defending that most leads that converted were because of demos since converted leads had campaigns with the word demo showed up most often. Hmm...we do know that interested buyers tend to go to a demo as the last step before they are converted into an opportunity. Does that mean we should spend all our money on demos and that this is the source of all leads?

So here are my SFDC lead source values. Although it's only single source attribution, what I do give credit for is the originating source or the click from the place prior to the person being cookies on my site. Perhaps we will never truly know the origin of any source, however, it's a good start because it's the first time I've cookied this user. Even if this person leaves the site and comes back at a later point, the original referrer source does not change. For the form conversion, I use the campaign name. I've also tried multiple source fields (lead and web source), but the campaign seems to do the job for now.

If you are using SFGA (Salesforce for Google Adwords) there are a few lead sources that come with the package. The SFGA application will assign a majority of these values by cookie'ing the user on the initial visit to your website. It does a very good job in assigning the lead sources and you'll see these activities entered by the "License Manager" user. The only caveat is that it doesn't work in all cases. For instance, if you decide to send an email and use "Campaign" as a lead source, SFGA will look at referrer and select "Website Referral" as the source since the source was from your email blast source. This also happens for trade show lists. 

In Marketo, I add a rule to Change Data Value for the lead source in the flow preceded by a 5 minute wait step. This ensures license manager will give it the source, then the flow rule will come in after and change it vs. having it the other way around. 

Where Are My Peeps!

Does this look familiar? It's incredibly unfamiliar to me, but today I had to introduce myself to the goose egg. Yes, this is a drawing of a goose egg and out of my whole career it's the first time that I got one of these on my Adwords conversions. 0 today. Nada! It definitely takes a big blow to the ego since I can't recall any previous days like this.

I spent close to 2 hours diagnosing the issue like House would do. Let's check the list.

• Impressions were in the hundreds of thousands so the ads are showing. 
• Budget is still below the daily limits so we're ok there.
• Ad positions weren't completely buried on the 2nd or 3rd pages so the average positions were decent.
• Click activity was super low....Aha! The House moment.

So why would click activity be so low? Now that I'm at my sixth day at the new gig, I should've had some pretty good ads and landing pages. I read the ads again. They really stank. It had all the usual buzzwords but nothing that would make my peeps (IT Ops people) even blink. Add that to the fact that there's a 3 day weekend around the corner and my company is still in stealth mode so there's very little information out there and I get a goose egg. I guess if a tree falls in the forest and we're all in the city, no one gives a sh*t.

Next week I have to turn that goose egg into a hatchling.

Me, Myself & Marketo

And so it begins...again. A new year and new job and a new instance of Marketo.  On one hand it's exciting to bring a marketing automation suite into a stealth mode company and have a chance to start from scratch. There's nothing in place. On the other hand, it looks so empty at first. Beginning at the beginning again so I have create all those precious little nuggets of activities that have made life so much easier.

Here's a plan for getting up and running quickly. It's quick and dirty and you can build on the rest.

• Day 1: Marketo sent the login details and credentials. Add the muchkin code, connect SFDC, initialize the database schema sync, add the cname.
• Day 2: Build the landing page template. You don't have to wait for the standard pack Marketo installs. Look at the blank template and modify the css to fit your brand. (Do NOT cut and paste code from an existing landing page from your website and use it as a template. The Marketo editor will not work if you do that. The key pieces to modify are the (denoted with mkt) header, content, column, footer. This is what the wysywig editor looks for in order for the properties to show up correctly.)  
• Day 3: Create the first smart list for bad data filtering. Get on a kick-off call with the customer success manager.
• Day 4: Create all Adwords landing pages and run ads there.
• Day 5: Check out all your sync and conversions to see if lead details are coming in correctly. 

Up and running in 5 days. Of course if you're motivated this just needs to take a few hours.

If there's any advice, the most important place to start is to define your lead capture forms and pages. Success is highly dependent on your getting your lead capture forms correctly. It is after all the primary place where names get entered into the system. 

Begin by determining the absolute minimum number of form fields you need in order to make some routing decision about the lead. It is generally accepted knowledge that that longer forms deter users from filling it out. Over time, you can try different lengths for various assets to get a sense of the trade-offs. At this point, replicate what is there.

The Big (Adwords) Questions in Life

I recently spent time with our sales folks in our UK office. (I have to digress just for a second and say that traveling business class for the first time was buck!) There were a lot of presentations about lead intelligence, the status of our conversion rates, etc. However, the most intriguing questions to them were pretty much the same ones our sales folks in the US asked.

1. Why doesn't our ads show up in Google when I do a search?
2. If I do a search in the UK, do the results show up the same as if I searched in the States?

If you're on the hook for Adwords, you probably hear these two questions raised all the time. It should be one that is easily answered, but let's give it some more color.

For question #1, the most common symptom is that you run out of budget. Each campaign is set to a daily budget. Within the campaign are ad groups which contain one or more ads (the results you see), and ad groups are associated to keywords that trigger the ad to show. Structurally:

Campaign Name
   Ad Group 1
       Ad 1
          Keywords for Ad 1
       Ad 2
          Keywords for Ad 2

To diagnose, look into the Settings for the Campaign and see what the daily budget amount is set to. Also, check to see if the ads are running at all times meaning a 24 hour period. If so, it might be best to cut down on the times where your ad is not performing well to maximize the most efficient use of budget and conversions. We call this day-parting. It's also important to see if the ads are set to run evenly or accelerated. Accelerated would run through impressions and clicks fairly quickly as well and blow the budget.

Within the campaign look for keywords that are sucking you dry...i.e lots of expensive clicks but low conversions. See if it makes sense to find ways to cut down on spend for these to save on the budget as a whole.

For question #2, the short answer is it depends. It depends on whether or not the country in question is targeted for the campaign. We call this geo-targeting. It's helpful to check the Google Preview Tool to run both the search term on the domain in question.

 

Compete.com With the Best

Imagine this very common scenario. You have spent hours pouring over your analytics data slicing and dicing the images, trend lines, segments, referrals, etc. A few questions about what page visits mean or how unique visitors are trending and if things are growing in the right direction. Then this question comes up which you might not have thought about and usually from someone in a higher pay grade.


How do these metrics compare to our competitors?

Of course, it's an obviously simple question, but not one that is easy to answer. You don't have access to your competitor's analytics information, only yours. I'm glad to see that there are tools that try to answer some of the competitor questions. I just signed up with compete.com and paid for the pro version hoping it'll give more than just directional data. There are others such as comscore and hitwise. Compete seems to have the easiest UI to use.

In the sample screenshot of Facebook against LinkedIn you can see some overall trends and stats over a 2 year period. If I drill down deeper, there are some better details for optimized keywords that bring traffic to the site, etc. It seems to be very useful in benchmarking some trends against competition, but again just directional data. I would look at the percentage more than the actual numbers. Some of the segmentation data in terms of the age, income, gender data is just ok.

The biggest shocker is that the data under reports statistics so it won't match any of the web analytics data. Their unique visitor count is based on a very "sophisticated" measurement on a sample of the US internet population. Tracking is not cookie based but by audience sampling and reminds me of the Nielson ratings. (Yes, US internet users.)

Broad Match Modifier Makes Adwords Easier

I've been running AdWords campaigns for a few years and when the concept of using broad match modifier and this chart was rolled out globally, I almost cried.  I remember the sense of pure joy with an adrenaline rush only geeks who love this stuff can get.

For the first time in a long time, all of this finally made sense. This scheme makes it possible to reduce thousands of keywords within ad groups into a few without sacrificing quality score. It gives the best possible variations of usage without wasting money on broad terms that tend not to lead to quality conversions.

When interviewing firms or Adwords consultants, I always ask how they plan to structure campaigns and ad groups. The answers reveal a lot.

First, if anyone is asked to be paid on a percentage of the budget managed, then you automatically lose. Those goals are opposites. You want to spend less but get more. They want to spend more to get more.

Second, it never made any sense to take a campaign and add tens of ad groups within the campaign. After all, you only get to set the budget at the campaign level. So, if you have 10 dollars for a campaign and 5 ad groups, you can allocate a certain amount per ad group. If someone suggest building out more ad groups within the campaign, you just broke up the spend into more ad groups and having to spend for all the keywords. Now, you'll have to add more money for the campaign, and ding, ding...they make their money on the size of the account.

Use the modified broad match. It'll be your best friend and allow you to manage many more campaigns without splitting all your dollars across the plethora of keyword match options. Since it is available globally, I've used this successfully across all geographies.

AdWords Broad Match Keyword Targeting

SEO and Search History Infographic

This infographic helps tell a very concise story up to the early part of 2011 and a nice way to present the information. I still run across many folks who still believe that having the right meta tags will get you ranking on the first page. I've referred to this many times to explain the evolution from the late 1990's (when I first started learning about optimization) to how much this has changed.

Over time, I expect that domain-level link authority becomes more dominant in the share to search. This carries over from the initial page rank days when link juice was passed between different websites. This is still a key signal, but more and more authority = credibility and credible links are worth much more thank pure linking.

The only error I found in that pie chart at the end was repeating Page-level, Keyword Usage twice. Not sure if that was intended.

Source: The Evolution of Making Page 1 [INFOGRAPHIC]

The journey of a million pixels...

For me, it all started in the late 1990's. At the time, I was working at United Parcel Service (UPS) in the preload (graveyard shift). The career path was set as I rose through the ranks and more opportunities opened up. However, all around these "start-ups" were springing up.

At the time, I thought it was crazy for anyone to get involved in these companies. Some of the business ideas seemed outright absurd. However, I eventually caught the bug and decided take a chance. I remember the conversation with HR when I resigned. It was something I wouldn't forget and it went something like this. If I stay put, in 20 years, I would retire early. In the meantime, I would continue to do well (provided that I followed the path that mgmt wanted).

A voice inside shouted "20 years...they already thought about 20 years?" I left to see what the next year might look like and in my first startup experience typed in "beginning HTML" and web monkey was the first search result. The journey started with my first piece of code for a web page with "hello world."