Intake and Create blueprint intake-and-create
The number of marketing requests coming into a marketing operations team to launch new campaigns can turn a high functioning team into a revolving door of repetitive tasks, causing burnout and stagnating innovation.
By establishing a process for submitting campaign requests and automating the creation of commonly requested marketing campaigns, you can: increase the velocity of your campaigns, reduce errors, route requests to the right member of marketing operations, balance and improve resource utilization, and focus more of your marketing operations on more strategic tasks.
With Workfront and Marketo Engage, a system-to-system connection allows details from a Workfront request form to create a Marketo Engage Program, then fill in key variables such as: subject lines, email copy, images, dates, times, event information, and more.
To achieve this integration, you’ll use Workfront Fusion, a work automation layer that allows you to automate workflows between Workfront and other systems.
The workflow below shows a request for a webinar being made by a campaign manager using a Workfront request form. The details submitted in the request then trigger a program and email to be created in Marketo Engage for the webinar. Additionally, details are taken from the request form to populate the content of the email.
Prepare your campaign development process for automation prepare-your-campaign-development-process-for-automation
Behind every great workflow automation is a defined process that ensures teams and stakeholders are getting the most value from the automation.
What types of marketing requests will you receive?
Think about what types of marketing tactics you’ll run such as emails, nurture, first party webinars, and events. Do you also run 3rd-party Webinars or Display Ads? Each of these requests should be considered as they may need specific input fields in the request form and will map to different program templates in Marketo Engage that will be cloned.
You’ll also want to understand if you’re running campaigns in multiple regions. If this is the case, you’ll want to account for one Project in Workfront creating multiple programs in Marketo Engage, with each program representing different language support.
It’s important to know up front what types of marketing requests you expect to receive to ensure requests can be facilitated in an automated manner.
What information should be captured in the campaign request?
Think about the key pieces of information that will need to be captured in your request form for each of the different tactics you run. Below are some examples of information that you can capture in a Workfront form to help automate your campaign development.
Establish your center of excellence establish-your-center-of-excellence
If you want to automate the creation of programs, you’ll need a center of excellence in Marketo Engage. A center of excellence includes templatized programs and assets to help expedite and standardize the campaign development process. For example, you might have a program template for your different campaign needs: email, nurture, in-person event, and webinar. Additionally, you may have multiple email program templates that you use for different regions or different types of email announcements.
Building out your center of excellence with program templates in Marketo Engage is one of the first steps to having a more programmatic approach to campaign execution and will act as a foundation to automating campaign requests.
Once you have a set of reusable program templates, you can further scale your efforts using automation outlined in this blueprint to drive more velocity to your campaign development.
To learn more on creating your own center of excellence, check out the Marketo Community for best practices.
Use tokens to populate content use-tokens-to-populate-content
With Marketo Engage, tokens can be used to populate content into your campaign assets. For example, after cloning an email template from your center of excellence, Workfront Fusion can take details from the campaign request in Workfront and pass them to the My Tokens in the Marketo Engage program. The token values can then be inherited directly into the email to build the email out.
Populate images from AEM Assets populate-images-from-aem-assets
You can further automate your email and landing page development by utilizing Marketo Engage tokens in combination with links to assets in AEM Assets. Campaign requesters can submit published image links from AEM Assets as part of the request process. Workfront Fusion can then take those links and embed them into the HTML of an email using Marketo Engage tokens.
Remember, you will need to build out your Programs and Program Templates in Marketo Engage to utilize My Tokens so that Fusion can update the token values with the information submitted in Workfront.
Assemble a lookup library for all program request types assemble-a-lookup-library-for-all-program-request-types
When automating the creation of new Marketo Engage programs from Workfront requests, it’s important to include a step in your Workfront Fusion automation that can take information from the Workfront request and lookup the correct program templates that should be cloned in Marketo Engage.
To do this, you can import a dataset in Workfront Fusion that includes a list of all the different program templates in your Marketo Engage center of excellence.
Some basic information to include in your Program Template Lookup Library are:
Intake and Create automation flow intake-and-create-automation-flow
Here’s an example of how the workflow logic can be assembled in Fusion using prebuilt Workfront and Marketo Engage modules that enable you to deliver automation faster.
