Session 1 of 2026: Fundamentals of Marketo Engage

Transcript

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our foundational Marketo User Group meeting, first session of 2026. For anybody that is coming back from our five part session last year, welcome back. If this is your first foundational user group, welcome for the first time. We have great plans for this year. We’re going to actually have six sessions, but I’ll talk about that in a few minutes. I am your MC throughout these last these next six sessions. My name is Brad Bedford. I run our Marketo User Group program and our Marketo Champion program. If any of you all are coming to Summit, look out for me there. We will be hard to miss in a fixed hat that is to be announced. So I’ll just leave it at that. Look out for all of us as the Adobe Champions wearing a special hat.

A few house rules before we get started. Make sure that you are being a good person. You know, do not contact anyone outside of the group without their consent. Do not try to promote yourself or your services or your business. And make sure that we are here to share content with each other to make everyone better. That is really what the goal is. Be a good person. I’m going to leave it at one for this. If you’ve attended another user group before, the same rules apply. This user group is being recorded. Just Alex, Raven and myself will be on camera. So we will be communicating with everybody else via the chat. But if there’s any reason that you do not want to participate, feel free to drop. We will be posting the recording later today on YouTube and then also probably on Experience League, I would say, early next week. And we’ll be posting our next session there. But if you need me to send you the recording individually, feel free to contact my email that you can see at the bottom there or reach out at advocacyatadobe.com. This is a big one. If you want to join the next versions of these, this is one of six, join our user group, the foundational mug. I have that linked at the top of the chat as a pin. So feel free to go in there and sign up so you can get all the alerts on when our next meetings are happening, how to stay in touch with Alex and Raven if you have follow up questions, or anything else you might want to be chatting about with the foundational user group. I already kind of previewed a few minutes ago, Adobe Summit. I think we’re exactly 19 days away from this getting going, which is incredible. So excited to see 10 to 12,000 Adobe users in Las Vegas for this summit. I mentioned, look out for the hats. The hat people will be around. All right, what to expect by attending these foundational Marketo user groups. The big thing that reason why you’re here is we want to help get you certified. We want to help you propel your learning so that you can take the professional certification with confidence. Who these sessions are for. For newer users, hey, maybe I just inherited an instance or maybe I used a different marketing automation platform and I’m just getting into Marketo. Maybe I’m a new practitioner. I’ve just got new responsibilities to get my hands on in Marketo. These are the type of people that we’re really focusing these this type of content on over the next six or seven months we have these six sessions. Resources, we have a lot of great resources this year. Got a lot of work. Last year that we needed more homework, everyone, which is surprising. I don’t know, people asked for homework, but they wanted more homework. So we’ve got you on some homework. Each one of our sessions correlates directly with one of the six sessions or parts of Core Concept 1. So if you’re attending this session today, and you’re like, Hey, I really liked what Raven and Alex were talking about, I want to get my hands on and practice this myself. You can go into Core Concepts 1 on Experience League and actually complete the take-home assignments that are with that course that so you can prepare and come ready to go for our next session, which will be happening at the end of May. And this is the big one. This is the dangling of the carrot. We will be, I’ll be giving away 10 Marketo Engage certification codes at the end of these six sessions. So if you are really, really interested in getting one of those six, or sorry, if you’re interested in getting one of these 10 professional certification codes, stay engaged. We’ll have discussions here on Experience League, attend these chapters live. We’d love to see your activity on LinkedIn, complete the take-home assignments. We will do an honor system and ask if anybody has any feedback on the homework. But that is who we’re looking for, for people that can get engaged. And 10 lucky participants at the end of these six sessions will get a code to take any exam that they want. There’s nothing just to be professional. Quick overview of what our six sessions will focus on. A lot of content on this slide, but we’re just going to focus on the first one here, which is the fundamentals of Marketo. So that’s what we are at today. But if you’re interested in seeing we have planned over the next few months, you can see we have deploy a newsletter, a new product announcement, promote a special offer, nurture a new prospect, and then maybe even encourage someone to download a CTA or some type of, you know, content piece. So as you can see here, there’s a natural progression that we have planned, so that you can actually start to take the information that you learned from one session, deploy it within your Marketo instance, and then go on to the next one. If you want to jump ahead, and you want to get ahead in the Core Concepts course, feel free to do so. But like I mentioned, we’re going to be following along exactly with what exists in Core Concepts. So what you’re seeing here is exactly what you will see in Core Concepts.

All right, with that, enough of me chatting, I would love to turn it over to Alex and Raven, who will be talking about the fundamentals of Marketo Engage. So, Alex, I think you’re up first, right? That’s me. Yep. All right. Perfect. Afternoon, well, actually, for me, afternoon, everyone, but for a lot of you, it’ll be good morning as well. So, yeah, today, what we’ll do is we’re going to run through, there’s a lot of content to get through. But what we’ll try and do is we’ll kind of start with the very basics. So we’ll start with, you know, what is Marketo Engage? Where does it fit into our marketing stack? Then what we’ll do is we’ll start to have a look around the actual UI for Marketo as well. So the idea being that you guys will, hopefully, you’ve been into it and you’ll start delving into some of those more interesting elements. We’re then going to have a look at the core building blocks. So we’ll start having a look at the people, assets, programs and campaign elements of the platform itself. Then what we’re going to do is we’re going to explore some of the different automations. So having a look at smart campaigns and the two different flavors that they come in. And then we’ll run at the end. And at the end, we’ll have a look at some of the common pitfalls that you will find with Marketo, but not just Marketo, Martech in general as well. But there is one thing that I actually forgot to do, which is actually to do a little bit of an intro to myself and Raven. So Raven, if you wanted to introduce yourself. Sure thing. Hi, everyone. My name is Raven McFarland. I am a Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Bluebeam. I am a current Marketo champion, a former Marketo user group leader, and I have passed the Marketo certification exam four times myself. So I am super excited to have the opportunity to be here today to help you all set a solid foundation to help you get started at Marketo. So thanks for having me.

Perfect. And then yeah, myself. So hi, I’m Alex Seabrook. Most people will call me Seabrook. So if you fire up questions, feel free to fire them over to Seabrook. That’s fine. And I’m the Director of Technical Delivery at Clever Touch Consulting. And I’m also a Marketo or first year Marketo champion as well. So this is my first foray into the murky world of being a champion as well. But that’s enough about myself. Let’s have a look at the platform that we’ve all come to have a look at. So Marketo or Marketo engage as it now is, Adobe Marketo engage is essentially at its core a marketing automation platform. So the idea for this is pretty much what it says on the tin. It is there to help you guys automate your marketing tasks. There is no need for you to send 10,000 emails out via a mail merge anymore. We’ve kind of moved away from that a little bit. And what Marketo does is it helps us not only automate our marketing in the sense of sending emails, but it also helps us to centralize our marketing operations. And what we mean by that is things like our lead scoring, our lead management, our consent and compliance. So it’s all of the operational elements that go around our marketing, not just the ability to send, you know, specific things like that. What we can also do though, is rather than just sending a singular email, we can go a little bit further and we can start to bring in a lot of automation around our campaign as well, which helps us to do things like build engagement programs, nurture campaigns and things like that. And these are all things that actually Raven is going to delve into a little bit more detail when we start having a platform. But essentially at its core, it is that marketing automation platform, it is a way for us to send emails at mass in a very sophisticated way. Now, what you’ll start to see as we go through these six sessions is that can get very complicated very quickly. But at its core, we are here to send emails as a sort of a channel activation piece, which ties in quite mostly to where it sits inside the spine itself. So when we have a look at our entirety of our marketing stack, flick up to the next slide. So what we can see here is the system itself integrates with the rest of our marketing stack. So if we are using something like Salesforce and Dynamics as our CRM, we’re able to ingest that data, but not only able to ingest the data from CRM, but once the activity in marketing has happened. We’re also able to ingest data from our website, or use Marketo forms and things like that directly on our website so that as somebody fills in a form, we bring that data into Marketo, and then we can build campaigns around those. We can also bring it into our marketing, sorry, our social media, and things like that. So if we want to use it for creating LinkedIn audiences or form ingestion from LinkedIn and things like that, we can do that as well. And then we go even further because what we can then start to do is have a look how it works with our Event platform. Sorry, easy for me to say, Event platform. What that could be is that could be with Zoom, it could be with Cvent on 24. Or you could be using interactive webinars directly through Marketo itself. But the idea here is that Marketo starts to become that marketing hub for all of your various channels. It doesn’t just have to be simply a way of sending emails, which ties in beautifully into the powers that we are seeing. So as I’ve mentioned, obviously, we have emails, but we can build landing pages directly in the platform as well to host our forms. Or what we can do is we can put forms directly onto our website, and we can embed those directly there. So if you’ve already got a website that’s custom coded or built in WordPress and things like that, you can embed your marketing system directly into that platform. We can then do things like lead scoring and lead management, which means that as you know, Jane Doe, she fills in a form, she has activity, we can start to score that, and then send that intelligence over to our sales team so that we can start to then help with that lead management cycle so that the salespeople not only know what people have engaged with, but when they’re at a point where it’s actually the best time for them to talk to them. And then the other thing as well is while sales are doing the magic of sales, we need to keep those leads warm. And that’s where our nurture campaigns come in as well. And these are all things that are built natively within Marketo. So on the surface, it sounds very complicated. And it sounds like there are lots of parts. But what it does is it boils down into some very, very cool fundamental elements, which we’re going to look at in a second. I think I’ve got one more slide to look at just before we start having a look at some of the ways that we can bring this in. And I think this is always quite a nice one to look at, which is where does Marketo actually sit in in our marketing stack? Because, you know, with marketing, it’s getting bigger and bigger with more and more things. But Marketo itself sits right in the middle. It sits right at the center of our stack as that channel activation piece alongside our journey orchestration as well. And it’s one of those things where we see data moving both to, you know, things like our CPP or our BI platforms like a Tableau or something like that, but also down towards our Salesforce and Dynamics. So as I said, it sits right in the heart of our marketing stack. So once we’ve kind of got an idea of what Marketo is and what it does, what are the foundations of success? So as I said, Marketo can get very complicated very quickly if we let it. But the easiest way to make it a little bit easier to use when you’re first taking on a platform, if this is, you know, as Brad said, a platform that you’ve inherited or you’ve recently moved away from another platform into Marketo. Some of the easiest things we can do. First thing, set ourselves some goals. Specifically set SMART goals. We’ve all probably come around SMART goals at some point. But the main thing with these is make sure that they’re specific, they’re measurable, achievable, they’re relative, and they’re time bound as well. Now what we can do is we can look at that potentially being a specific campaign that we want to get out. You know, we know what the campaign is going to be for. We know how we’re going to make that measurable. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at KPIs in a second. We need to make it achievable, you know, using this platform to start with. There is no point giving yourself the target of being a Marketo expert in the next three months, because it’s probably not achievable. But give ourselves a little bit longer. Give ourselves 12 months to do it.

Then we’ve got our target audiences. How do we work through our target audiences? Well, Marketo has a database built directly into it. So we can build our target audiences using our SMART List and SMART campaigns. But again, it’s making sure that we understand what our data is doing and who it is that’s going to be buying our different products. And then the last thing is establish some of those KPIs. So how do we make our KPIs work in the platform? How do we know if our campaigns have been successful? Well, the good news is we can build reporting directly in the platform, which is always quite nice. But it gives us things straight out of the box that are going to help us set those KPIs. Things like program statuses. That is one of the easiest and surefire ways that we can make sure that people or our campaigns are being successful by watching people move through those statuses. So if we move on to the next one. So when we’re looking at KPIs, the easiest way is to kind of break these down into three categories. We’ve got our tactical KPIs. And the easiest way that we can look at those tactical KPIs, again, we’ll have them built into those SMART goals that we’ve already set ourselves. But we’ll look at the number of email opens we’ve got, our opens to click through rate, page visits, and our form submissions. All of these are things that we can build natively and we can pull out of our data natively within the platform. We can also use these. These are things that we’ll see later on. We can use these as trigger campaigns or triggers for various things as well. Then we have more strategic goals. These are things that potentially take a little bit longer to run. But things like the amount of opportunities created. No, we’re not just building the campaigns because we love sending emails. We want things to happen off of the back of them and creating opportunities is definitely going to be there along with the amount of pipeline that we are driving as a marketing function. And at the end of the day, the thing that we all are trying to do is create more and more revenue. And having these as a specific target, something that is specific and measurable is going to be those two points of our SMART goals ticked off. And then the last one we have are the ones that maybe they’re not the most glamorous of things to look at compared to our strategic and our tactical goals, but we have those operational ones in the background as well. So, you know, making sure that we are sending enough leads to our sales team, making sure that our conversion rates are good, making sure that our lead rejection rates are nice and low as well. And you may ask, okay, well, how do I control that? That’s where we bring in things like lead scoring and lead management to really help. So it’s probably enough from me and what I’m going to do is I’m going to hand over to Raven now to talk around the actual platform itself. So the things we’re going to look at today is going to have a look at marketing activities and have a look at our database area, our design studio, and then touch briefly on our analytics areas of the platform as well. But I’ll hand over to you, Raven.

Yeah, with that, Brad, would it be okay for me to steal the screen share and hop into our Jamf Marketo instance, where we’ll start with the analytics section of Marketo. Go ahead here, entire screen. Here we are. All right. So here is Marketo and all of her beauty, starting with the analytics studio. This is where you can create and share reports to understand the success of various marketing activities. So as strategic as understanding the performance of your lead life cycle, understanding what stages people are in, the velocity in which they’re transferring from various stages, as well as how quickly those leads are making it over to your sales team. But you can even create even more tactical reports, such as email performance, web page activities, or your engagement stream performances. Within the next section of Marketo, we’ll look at the database. The database is where Marketo will store all of your prospect and customer records. And you’ll see here on my screen, there are predefined buckets created for you, and ones you can build off of. Within Marketo, you have smart lists and static lists. Smart lists use various person attributes to define a segment of individuals that we either want to investigate or look into deeper or pull into a targeted journey. Static lists, on the other hand, are a point in time list used for a specific initiative, where we manually add those individuals to the list, and we manually remove those individuals from the list. Static lists are smart lists, on the other hand, because those are using person attributes. As people have, for example, a job title with manager, they are pulled into that smart list. But as that information, their job title changes, or the value shifts, they may qualify for a different smart list set of criteria. So to put that in perspective for you, let’s open up a group smart list of folks that are, this is the out of box smart list provided to you by Marketo of people that are marketing suspended. And what you’ll see here is that’s created by simply pulling in that person attribute. So this is related to the lead or contact, depending on how you have Marketo set up. That says, hey, marketing suspended is true. And in Marketo world, marketing suspended is an individual that may need to receive transactional communications from you, but should not be receiving marketing communications. You’ll see you’ll never, you’ll have another system smart list provided for you to help you understand the health of your database, for example, possible duplicates. And what’s interesting in the current version of Marketo is you now have a filter called duplicate fields, where you can use any person attribute to identify the duplicates within your database. For some of us who’ve been working in Marketo for quite a long time, this is formally restricted to just the email address fields. But with the duplicates field filter, you can now use any attribute across your leads to identify potential duplicates. So this puts in perspective a little bit of top level what a smart list is versus a static list. You could see for example, right here, it’ll just show you how many people are on it if we had people added. And then you have some actions where you can either remove or add people to it either through a manual action, through a smart campaign, or through importing a file that contains leads and information.

Moving on to the design studio, this is where you will have all of your assets stored. Assets include email templates and landing page templates, standardized emails and landing pages, meaning emails and landing pages you want to use across multiple marketing initiatives, your forms. Once you get more familiar with Marketo and start and have the opportunity to use the new email designer, this is also where your fragments will be stored. And within the design studio, you have the option to upload your own images and files. Keep in mind, there is a file size limit of 100 MB when uploading files into Marketo, but that is pretty big file size. So you should be set for most of your use cases. Other elements that we have within design studio are called snippets. Snippets are pieces of reusable content. The most easiest way to conceptualize this is thinking of your email footers or your landing page footers. Your company’s name, address, copyright and privacy policy links probably won’t change very often over time. And by creating those as snippets, you have one centralized place in all of Marketo where you can keep that information up to date and reflective of your current company’s information.

Now let’s hop into marketing activities. This is really the heart of Marketo where you will spend a majority of your time. There are four main program types that you will use when working in marketing activities. Programs are buckets, ways for you to organize the different marketing initiatives that you may be running at any point in time. Or a program may be used to create a workflow or automation that helps you ensure that as new people enter your database, and as existing people engage with your database and provide you new information, that all of that information is processed and stored in a similar way. So as you go to report on the success of your marketing initiatives, your data is clear, consistent and reliable. So let’s hop back into those four different program types. The most common program type you’ll engage with is the email send program. This is intended to be used for a singular point in time email send. So you wouldn’t be able to have multiple emails within this program and send multiple emails with this, but just one. And the idea here is, and you’ll see this terminology repeated across the various program types we cover, is each program build starts with defining your smart list, which is who do we want to send a message to, who do we want to participate, or who do we want to take action with? That’s your audience here. You have, as Alex had mentioned, there’s a lot of different ways to accomplish the same thing in Marketo. And as you continue on with these core concept courses, you’ll slowly start to learn the general best practices, aka things that will save you time and make sure you’re working in Marketo efficiently. However, for the sake of today’s session, we’re just giving you an understanding of all of the various possibilities that exist and to help you conceptualize these core building blocks, such as programs, smart lists, smart campaigns, and assets.

So here you’ll see that within the smart list, I’ve decided to use a smart list, a separate asset to define who my audience is. But we could make this much simpler and just start searching for person attributes such as job title or job level. As you get started with Marketo, it might be helpful for you to dig through the filters options on the side. So filters, again, are information we have about a record in the database. Triggers, on the other hand, which I’ll show you in a second, are activities or updates that can happen with people in our database that Marketo can listen to. And when that action occurs, it can then take a performance specific automation or update. As you get more familiar with programs, smart lists and smart campaigns in Marketo, I recommend you start looking through these filters where you can see that these attributes are created in various buckets. So I’ve been talking about person attributes such as job title, first name, last name, company name. However, you have other options such as special filters where you can use people who are a member of an existing Marketo program, people that are a member of an existing smart list like you see on my screen here. When you have Marketo integrated with a CRM platform, you will also have the option to use all of the fields exposed from your CRM platform. All the fields in your CRM platform which are exposed to Marketo will also be available for you with in person attributes for you to define your smart list with. What’s nice about Marketo is you also have inactivity filters. So if you want to pull in a list of people who have not opened an email who have not engaged with you, there are various activity types that you can use to identify those individuals. Like I said, there’s a lot to absorb here. And as Alex said, it’s definitely nothing that you’ll become an expert on within three months time. But as you start working with various use cases, segments you try to create in your database, there’s marketing campaigns you tried to build, you’ll have an opportunity to start pulling in some of these filters. Once you have the audience defined, then you get to get to the fun stuff of creating your email. So here I’ve got just an example pulled up that uses a starter email template available from Marketo. So similar to the cases where you have a fresh instance, you’re inheriting an instance or you’re starting from scratch, Marketo has some starter email and landing page templates so that you can still get your marketing campaigns out the door quickly while you work with internal teams to create something that has something a bit of your own branding and flavor to it. But here you can see an email asset can have a header image, a button for a call to action, and different types of modules or layouts. So two column versus one column to help send your marketing communications. Within the email preview, you’ll also be able to see you can see at a glance how that email may look on desktop, and how it could render on mobile. However, these are just previews, it is highly recommended that you still use an external email rendering platform to understand what that HTML and CSS will look like across Outlook, Google, all the various ESPs you have found because it’s a bit more specific to how you coded it. This just gives you an at a glance preview of are my layouts where are my alignments where I’m expecting them to be? Or is all the content there? That’s really what that should be used for. Once you have your email created, your audience defined, you then can use the schedule tab to tell Marketo when this email should be sent. What’s awesome about an email send program is there’s two major functionalities in there to help you optimize the performance of these emails over time. First being is a B test functionality. So if you head into right over here, you can see add a B test, it’ll allow you to set up a subject line test, a whole emails test, a click email touch, you can define what percentage of your audience receives the sample versus how much receives the winner. And you also get to define when the test is completed. So one good one great feature within an email send program to help you optimize your email sends over time. And lastly, is then the recipient time zone and headstart. These two functionalities together help you ensure that if you have a communication that needs to send to the Pacific Coast in the United States, and the eastern coast of Australia, you are respecting the recipient time zones without having to create multiple programs in Marketo to facilitate that. So this is where Marketo will use information on the lead record to understand what time zone they are in, and then send the email at that recipients related time zone. So here this email would send April 3, 2026 at 8am local time zones. Headstart functionality is just a simple way to tell Marketo, hey, I know you’re doing a lot of things for us at one time, you’re processing new records coming in, you’re scoring our leads, you’re, you’re identifying when our leads reach different stages of the by your journey. So for example, as they become marketing identified to marketing qualified, that’s a lot of processing power you have to do. And this is a very important communication. And because my send list has, it’s a significant volume, I want you to start preparing this send a little bit before you normally would to help ensure that that 8am send time is hit exactly at that 8am send time or as close to possible that at that send time. So those are some features within the Email Send program that you can use to help you optimize not only the send time of your emails, but as well as the overall performance of of the emails. Within all of Marketo programs, and this is probably one of the most important features I should have started on I should have began with is a program is not simply just a bucket for marketing communication. It allows you to define for various marketing channels, such as emails, trade shows, webinars, online advertising, it allows you for those channels to define a anticipated journey. Meaning when somebody attends a trade show, there are four key milestone activities that tend to happen, they register, they’re invited to the trade show, they register for the trade show, they either attend or do not attend this trade show, and there’s some follow up activity. Program statuses allow you to define those milestones, and then indicate when the success of that of that channels initiative has been met. So to put that in perspective for the email channel, the anticipated journey would be somebody is sent the email, and then somebody engages with the email, typically by clicking the the main CTA or the button within the email, we can then use a Marketo smart campaign and program statuses to track when somebody has received the email. And then when somebody has successfully met the goal of our marketing initiative, which is engaging with it by clicking with clicking that main CTA. So those program statuses, again, are they’re designed to help you define milestone events that you anticipate to happen on different marketing channels, and also indicate when a success has been has been met with that, with that channel or that initiative. These tend to be standardized across all of your marketing campaigns, the standardization that allows you within the analytics studio to create reports to see how people are processing through or how people are processing through your programs. So for example, by using a standardized set of program statuses for your trade shows, you’ll be able to see at a different time, across all your trade shows, how how often people register versus attend versus no show, the moment that you start using different statuses and different successes across your program channels and Marketo, the more difficult it will become for you to report on the success of that. So it’s very important to Alex’s earlier note about setting a very clear goal, meaning a SMART goal and tying that back to a business objective and a KPI for a long period of time to ensure that your Marketo instance as the as you build new programs and monitor performance of those that it remains scalable, so that as your business needs change, your team structure changes, you’re not having to revisit these foundational pillars, or having to re standardize them later on, because too many success statuses, too many different types of program statuses made it impossible for you to see at a glance, how people how a specific persona of prospects tends to engage with you across events. This is also going to be really important when you start looking into integrating Marketo with CRM platforms, and you start using objects within those platforms to share similar information. So that’s more advanced information for a later time. Lastly, to ensure that that program status success can be measured, we typically use a smart campaign to facilitate that. And this is another core building block in Marketo. So programs, core building block, smart lists, another core building block, emails, landing pages, forums, smart campaigns, this is again, the part of the heart of Marketo. You have, you can build smart campaigns, smart campaigns, in various ways, two main ways, that’s going to be using triggers or filters. Triggers are activities that can happen at any point in time. So on my screen here, because we are looking to track when somebody meets the success of our program, aka engaging with the email, what I’m looking here is for Marketo to tell me when somebody clicks on the main CTA in my email. When that action occurs, we then use the flow to tell Marketo what update to process or what action to take. So here, my goal again is to track that that success has occurred. So I have here changed the program status for my email send program to engage success. You can also build a campaign using a filter. The difference here is that when you use a filter, you are telling Marketo to query your existing database to find individuals who match that filter criteria and then take that specific action at a predefined time. You’ll see here, however, it’s not allowing me to define a set date and time. That’s because we are using a trigger. By the nature of the definition of a trigger, we’re listening for an update to occur. So the main difference between trigger campaign and batch campaign. Trigger campaign, we’re listening for an update to happen. As soon as that update happens, Marketo will execute whatever actions you’ve had defined in the flow. Whereas a filter, a filtered or matched campaign will use a filter to define a segment of your database and execute that update at a predefined date and time. You do have some extra functionality when determining how often a trigger campaign can fire. And that is monitored through the schedule tab here. Similar to a batch campaign, you have the option to define the date and time and frequency in which it can fire. So here we’re seeing that we’re controlling how often people can trigger through this smart campaign through the smart campaign settings down here. And it’s very, tries to make it very straightforward for you to say if a person has been in the smart campaign before, they can only run through it once. So even if Raven goes back to the email and clicks on the main CTA Marketo will only ever attempt to move her program status to engaged on the very first time. Here you also have the option to determine how Marketo treats email assets that may be in the flow. So as you see here, I kept it very simple. Just change a program status. But there are some scenarios where you may want to send an email. Think about your evergreen content on your website, I want to download an ebook, I fill out a form, I receive a copy of that ebook. You typically would use a trigger campaign for that activity, right? Because we are listening for a form fill to occur for content to be requested. And then we send that request to content. This is where communication limits and your smart campaign settings start to apply. Earlier on in our database, I mentioned we had marketing suspended folks that would receive operational emails, or aka transactional emails. Here is where you can start to manage who receives what emails. So for example, in the scenario where somebody has requested an ebook and you want to send an autoresponder, that’s a transactional communication, somebody has requested something from you. So you go ahead and you request it. However, if this was a marketing communication, we want to control how many emails an individual can receive over a period of time. So here we’re saying, regardless of how many other emails of an individual may have received from our keto, we’re going to just ignore those limits altogether. However, you may have scenarios where you say if somebody has already received two emails from our keto today, do not send any more emails. And in later sessions, we’ll be able to provide you some use cases to help conceptualize that a bit better. I just wanted to spend some time here talking a little bit about that these settings exist and provide high level use cases to help you start to get a little bit of an idea of how they would be used. But a high level this is an example of a trigger campaign that could be changed to a batch campaign if you were to use a filter. Whatever flow steps you select here on the side will then be executed by marketo either when that trigger activity has been met. So click link from the email or in a batch smart key batch campaign scenario, when marketo queries the database and finds individuals that meet that filter criteria, for example, job title list manager industry is engineering. So that was a lot of information for an email send program. But I think there’s a couple core building blocks that you could be that you may need within marketo with the time that remains. I’m going to give you a quick glance over of the three other building blocks or three other main program types that you’ll work with marketo. Keep in mind all of the building blocks I just covered in our email send program, our assets such as emails, our smart list, our static listener smart campaigns can be repurposed in all of these other program types we’ll cover as well. Another common program type we’ll use in marketo is an engagement program. An engagement program is designed to help you nurture prospects and customers within your database. So regardless of what marketing or channel activation they may be applicable for now, you consistently had to have a feed of personalized content that matches where they’re in the buyer’s journey at that specific point in time. You use streams to identify what those point in time what what those you use streams to identify those point in time. So for example, here, if I was a marketing operations, marketing operations consultant, attending the summit coming back from the summit, there are various types of marketing operation roles that work within these technologies, and I would want to send communications based off of that type of role. So somebody who’s primarily focused in building marketing campaigns, emails and landing pages receives a different type of content than somebody who’s primarily focused on reporting on the success of your lifecycle or your marketing attribution model. You can use these streams then to ensure that you have a consistent flow of communications aligned with that messaging. These streams also then allow you to determine a set date and time in which the emails will be sent. And you can also use triggers like we saw in our smart campaigns to listen for activities that would qualify somebody for a better fit stream of content. As I mentioned before, we have an overview here separate from an email send program. The overview for an engagement program will show you how many people you have in each stream because again, here, the goal of an engagement program is not a one specific marketing point in time marketing initiative, but an always on activity where we’re trying to listen to where they’re at in their in their buyer’s journey, how they’re engaging with us what they’re interested with to send an email to help them send communications that help push them further along that journey. Next really common program type we’ll use in Marketo is the event program. Event programs are used to track the performance of your trade shows, your hosted events, or your online events. So think of webinars or virtual trade shows. Here again, you’ll see in that overview, we’re using program statuses and success to monitor the performance because this is a point in time initiative, a one off trade show and a one on one campaign. So we’re going to be using those now. Here we then use again program statuses to identify those key milestones throughout the marketing campaign, those who are invited, who registered for an event, and then ultimately met the goal of the of the marketing initiative, or the success which would be attempted. Within an event program, an email program, you can have various assets. So again, you can have your emails, a landing page, a form, lists to help you keep track of those as they’re registering. Sometimes and with a trade show, you receive a list from a vendor, you use you could then use a static list to import those individuals onto one of these static lists. And then within your smart campaign, use filters or a no show static list, change their program status to no show. To give you an example here, you can also use the to cover up the event program can also use smart campaigns to send your follow up communications or your pre show communication. So here we have just a skeleton smart campaign that would say, you know, here’s send up follow up emails, and you could use the smart list to say, either the member of program is my event program, and the status is attended or no show. Or you can say member of list is in the attended or no show list. And if they are, send an email, which is a nice drag and drop interface. And then to the schedule tab. Oh, it’s not gonna let me do this now, of course, because I don’t have it defined correctly. But you could schedule lists to run now or at a set time. The last most common program that you’ll use in marketing activities is the is your operational programs or your default programs. So these are intended to help you manage how new people and existing people are processed within your database. So really, so very common examples would be, you would use a default program and an operational channel, because then here, this channel indicates what, what type of activity we’re taking here. So as we saw with the email send program, right, the channel was email, this is the vehicle we’re using to send the message. So here again, channel would be nurture, it’s an engagement program type, but the channel in which we’re using to initiate the to send the marketing activity is a nurture. And then same here with your event program type. In the event program type can be an event, or it could also have a trade show channel, or it could be a webinar channel. Similar with a default program type, you could use this just to bucket test assets as you build them out. There’s this bit of exploring that you need to to get familiar with Marketo. So she build example emails and smart lists, you can use a default program to store those as like a training program for yourself. And you will also need them for this operational channel where you’re using where you’re using smart campaigns to manage how people are flowing through your instance. So for example, I have operational programs in my marketo instance to to control lead scoring. So as people fill forms, engage with emails, provide us information, we use those triggers to then set a behavioral score. And we use their lead attributes such as job title, company size, to set a demographic score, and an operational program in marketo to manage and store all of those automations. You could also use an operational program in marketo to have a a what I like to refer to as an initial processing program. So as new people come into the instance, there is a core set of steps or automations that will be executed to ensure their lead attributes match the accepted picklist values that I use within not just within marketo, but the tools connected with marketo. So just to kind of get the wheels turned in a little bit, that operational program can be used really to manage your manage your instance, keep your database clean, and help you ensure that the data within your local marketing programs is consistent and clear. So as you go into the analytics studio and try to perform a report on the success of your programs, your nurtures, your lifecycle or scoring workflows, you have consistent data across the board to look into. So yeah, with that, that kind of brings me to the last of the four program types in we’ve covered all of the core building box again being your your list, so your smart list and your static list. Smart list being dynamic list, you use filters or triggers to create segments of your database, static list being manual list point and time list that you either manually add people to use a smart campaign to add people to or import a list of information to your smart campaigns.

which use then ongoing activities to execute a certain action. And then your batch campaigns, which then use person attributes to define a segment you’d like to take action with. So for example, you might have a cleanup activity in your database, where you need to correct the maybe somebody imported a list and the job title value was manager and manager was spelled incorrectly. You can use a smart campaign, a batch campaign to identify everybody who has a job title with that incorrect value, and use the flow step to to change that to the correct spelt value. Lastly, then you have your four program types, your email sent program for point in time communications, your engagement program for always on nurtures to ensure that even if somebody isn’t actively engaging with you, they’re receiving communications that help push them along that buyer’s journey, your event program types to help track the performance of trade shows you attend events you host or webinars you host online. And lastly, your operational program, which then helps you manage the manage the inflow and organization of data across not only marketing activities, but your lead database as well.

All right, so with that, I think that covers what I was hoping to show in Marketo. But with the time we have left, I think we have five common pitfalls we wanted to share next.

Thank you so much, Brad. Alright, so a lot of information to absorb a lot of different ways to accomplish the same thing in Marketo. The most important thing to take away from today’s lesson or today’s session is understanding the organization of the instance, how each area of that instance is intended to be used, and try to keep these five, five pitfalls in mind as you start to build in Marketo.

So the very first one that we’re to start with is that lack of organization, the programs I showed you on my screen today, I think you could see they had a consistent naming convention, or we had folders that had a consistent structure to them. This organization will yield you dividends over time. And it’s very important that you get aligned with your marketing and sales teams early on in Marketo to understand how they bring campaigns to market. So your marketing activities folders reflect that. They reflect how those campaigns are brought to market. To put that in perspective, at my company, we don’t just have global campaigns, we have regional campaigns. So I have a set of marketing activity folders for the global webinars we host, the global emails we send. But we also have a section of marketing activities for the EMEA specific ones, or to get more country specific, our German marketing campaigns.

When you set up that organization up front, you have a recurring check in with your marketers. And sometimes sales to understand how campaigns are being brought to market, it makes it easier for you then at the end of the year to say, hey, all of these 2023 marketing activities, we don’t need any of these workflows to still be listening for updates. These are these are old, we can archive all of these and hide them from our view in Marketo. So it helps you kind of create a lot of that. A standard of process that you can repeat over time. Another area that’s underutilized is tokens and testing. So as I mentioned with the email send program, Marketo provides you some at a glance understanding of how an email or landing page may render. But it’s really important that you still use external tools, such as, you know, rendering.

I’m forgetting the correct term, I want to stay in much of vendors, I’m trying not to use vendor terms on this call. Just a lot of you want to use a rendering platform to ensure that you can see what that email looks like across different email service providers. Tokens, I didn’t spend too much time talking about this, but at a high level tokens are placeholders for content. These are variables. They allow you to build in Marketo more quickly. There is a ton of content on the community or the knowledge base right now to help you get started to understand how to make a token. I believe a subsequent session in this core concept series will give you some ideas on how to use those. But essentially, it’s a feature within Marketo that allows you to build more efficiently and scalably. The idea is you don’t want to be spending two hours drafting an email in Marketo as much fun as the creative outlet may be. You have more important things to do as a marketing ops professional. So tokens, program templates, standardization for your naming conventions and your success is will help ensure that you only need to spend a couple of minutes bringing that great marketing campaign to life and getting it out the door. Privacy and consent management, this is another big area of where you want to keep an eye out for. This is going to be very specific to what your company’s rules are. Please always work as closely as possible with whoever your legal advisors are to understand who are you allowed to communicate with? Who are you not allowed to communicate with? And start to document and build workflows in Marketo that respect those boundaries. So if you, for example, at my company, there are certain countries we don’t do any business in. And I have workflows in Marketo that listen for an image of those with those country values. And if they exist, they don’t receive our marketing campaigns. They don’t get into our CRM. They’re not they’re not followed up with because we can not allowed to do business there. So try to have those wheels turning. As you get started in Marketo, think about your your opt in flows. Do I have a job? Do I have a workflow that sets a date timestamp when somebody opts out? If marketing came to me today and said, how many people in our database have are opted in to our emails and also have this industry value? Do I have a means of providing that information for them? If not, the knowledge base and the community are great sources of ideas on quick workflows you can build to get started. If this applies to you, and this kind of goes in with that one right in the center, because it’s core to everything we do in Marketo, data is the foundation of what we do. If you do not have clean, standardized, consistent data, you will not be able to go back to your marketers and tell them, here’s how many new names you’ve generated from these marketing activities. Here are other new names engaging with various channels and, you know, use that information to send more communication on those channels. As our ICPs are engaging with us on these on these platforms. But that ties it that goes hand in hand with, of course, your CRM integration. There will be a separate session about that, I believe. There’s a ton of content on the community that can it can be a really advanced, squirrely topic. So to keep it high level, I think the one takeaway I’ll share with you all is setting setting clear expectations with whoever your CRM admins are documenting as much of those decisions as possible, and having recurring conversations with them about what fields do does Marketo need visibility to how often are those fields updated by our sales team? What information does Marketo is Marketo able collect for these fields? And is that data formatted in a way that our CRM needs in order to process that and share that and share that with our sales team? So two big areas dirty data and your CRM integration, CRM integration best practices, that’s a whole separate topic for another day, another time. But the foundation that sets you up for success is having a strategic conversation about what is allowed, what is not allowed, what format it’s allowed in. And lastly, ensuring that you’re setting up workflows to ensure that those decisions are respected, and that you’re coming back to your Marketo instance on a recurring basis, and checking to see if your workflows are truly processing data in the way you expect them to and optimizing it over time. Yeah, those I think I think that was already a lot of information. We only got two minutes left. So maybe I should just stop talking here. That is, that’s enough. What do you guys think of Alex and Brad? You got anything to add there? No, I think I think you pretty much nailed it. I think we’ve a lot of these pitfalls. We could go into these in a massive amount of detail. But I think one from my side is definitely around privacy consent. We’re sending you spent a lot of time on your on your marketing content. Make sure you’re sending it to people that want to that want to see it. And a nice way to just stop people from just unsubscribing purely is to put in preference centers and things like that so they can look into what types of communications they want to receive. Rather than you losing somebody completely with a unsubscribe from it.

Totally agree.

Well, with one minute left, we are perfectly on time. Had a lot of great questions in the the Q&A. So if you haven’t got a chance to review those yet, I think it’s a great place to look at some of those questions. If you’d like to continue this conversation, I would definitely recommend continuing the discussion via either our foundational user group page, or I’m going to be starting a foundational user group page. or small group on community. So I know that there’s some, some ongoing questions about Marketo sales insight. We could definitely continue to have those conversations there. And we’ll, last thing I’ll shout out to is that we have a monthly Adobe Champion office hours. So those happen every second Thursday of the month. So if you’d like to continue this conversation with super knowledgeable folks like Alex, like me, and definitely register for the Adobe Champion office hours. And with that, we will finish right on time. Thank you so much to our speakers. Raven, Alex, you guys are the best. Everybody that came today, thank you so much for joining. And look out for all of us at Adobe Summit. See you guys later. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye bye. Bye.