Universal Tokens in Marketo – Are you using them?

As a Marketo user, how many of us have spent hours, and even days, to update the copyright before Christmas and then approve all assets after the New Year Eve?

I believe many would raise their hands for this. I did the same when I was a naive Marketo user. I had a footer copyright snippet in my design studio, used in 1500+ pages. I updated the snippet to update the copyright year and then spent hours approving all the landing pages and emails.

Next year, everything changed. I was able to update the footer copyright year in 2000+ pages in less than 5 minutes. Well, by this time, I had implemented Universal Tokens in my Marketo account. Universal tokens are just like every other program tokens. However, they are created in a master folder and then inherited in every folder/program created under that master folder.

Copyright year is just an example. You can create any token as a universal token, which is used in different assets. To get started, here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new folder ‘!Universal‘ in your Marketing Activities. If you are curious about the exclamation sign, we add it to ensure it always stays on the top.

2. Move all your folders under this !Universal folder.
3. Go to !Universal folder > My Tokens, and start building tokens. Some of the tokens which I would recommend are:

4. Once you have created all the tokens, go inside your templates and replace hard coded text with these tokens. You’ll have to approve all the assets which are built using these templates. This would be the last time you will have to approve them manually.
5. To update any element, simply edit the universal token and save it.

No need to approve your assets all over again, or think about different versions of code in different assets.