Marketo has been a wonderful product!

Marketo is primarily used by our marketing department as a tool to help communicate with and engage prospects as they travel through the pipeline towards matriculation. Recently, we have started using Marketo to communicate with our students and alumni too!

Accessing Marketo through the REST API, we were able to crawl through old data and extract information related to lead behaviour (not readily available through the normal user interface) for the entire database. We took this information and were able to apply it to a newly created lead scoring model, years after the events had taken place. Our organization has a long selling cycle (years for some) so a lot of the older data was still applicable to our goals and profiling.

Using Marketo Sales Insight (an additional feature which strengthens the bond between Marketo and Salesforce), the Marketo user has access to many reports, dashboards, and activities which help indicate which assets are working, or when a lead is ready to be contacted by sales. Our organization had a unique situation which made Sales Insight unusable, and our department was requested to find out which emails of ours were the specific ones driving conversion. To accomplish this, we created a new field for each stage in our Sales cycle and created a campaign which, using trigger tokens, would timestamp and appropriately label the name of the last email used to drive conversion (if clicked on within in a 24 hour period before movement up the cycle occurred). At the end of the month, we could run a simple report of leads that had moved down the pipeline, and use a spreadsheet to simply find the name of the email that had caused the most movement. It was pretty clever.

Marketo has recently started making learning the platform, with all its bells and whistles, very easy to do with the newly launched, Marketo University Online: https://universityonline.marketo.com/. This takes a similar approach to learning as Salesforce does with its trailhead program. Through Marketo University, you get a very detailed explanation of how to use the platform, opportunities to try them out with hands on exercises, as well as Marketing automation, and Marketing law, ethics basics. I wish they had this when I was learning years ago!

There is a lot of cool stuff you can do behind the scenes with Marketo when you start playing with custom scripting and manipulating webpages, forms, etc. with JavaScript. There are a core community of programming power users to regularly find posts relating to using advanced techniques in Marketo and how to get them to work. Just recently I read about pushing jSON into Marketo and building elaborate campaigns and emails off of one single field. Look it up!

They don't tell you on the surface, but Marketo has an order of operations in which it prioritizes certain activities over others. This is important to understand, especially if you're setting up a new instance. In a former life, we built a lot of campaigns which heavily relied on the "Call Webhook" flow step. What we didn't know was that Marketo ranks Webhooks at the bottom of the list of priorities so when we were sending emails to millions of users, it would sometimes take hours for Marketo to finally get around to calling the webhook for those users waiting in the queue.

Check out this article here for more information: https://nation.marketo.com/docs/DOC-1137