How to Manage Your Marketo Instance Flawlessly

As a Marketo user, what comes to mind when you are working on such a broad marketing automation platform with a lot to work with and several possibilities. Sounds slightly complicated? It doesn’t have to be.

We’re here to shed some light on how you can make your Marketo instance manageable and easy to access. Our main focus is to share insight on some good practices which you should follow so as to see your instance sorted and organized.

First of all, while you are setting up a new Marketo instance or taking a step forward to sort or manage it, you must have a proper wireframe or process document to lead the way. The content of this process document should directly focus on different products and services that an organization offers or the roles you want to define to a specific type of user.

Step 1 – Every Marketo instance set-up begins with the Admin section. In this, you create a set of ‘users’ and assign them a set of roles for each time they use the Marketo instance. Marketo already has a pre-defined list of roles for specific users that come with the instance. Here’s the Marketo informative link for a peek into these roles.

Step 2 is to properly plan the fields to be used. The attributed field names should be self-explanatory and must be grouped under the correct field type (string, integer, boolean, etc), where they actually belong. A field name must contain the ‘type of field’ & ‘associated name’ in it for better understanding. When you later incorporate those fields into forms, a proper naming convention makes that job easier.

Step 3 is CRM sync with Marketo. It’s also necessary to define data-sync rules for allowing qualified leads to flow from Marketo into the CRM.

Step 4 is to enable DKIM & SPF. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) ensures that an email message was sent from an authorized mail server which, in turn, prevents your domain from getting blacklisted and delivering harmful emails like spam. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) detects forging sender addresses during an email delivery which can further impact deliverability rates.

Step 5 is to identify program channels to be used and tags to be associated with them. This helps in streamlining/defining marketing categories and also generating detailed reports.

For managing ‘Marketing Activities’, the foremost step is to move programs to their specific products and services. The parent folder must be a product/service name exactly as the one that you would use to promote it. The child folders can be created according to your flexibility or preference. These can be either based on ‘year’ or the kind of program that you are sending such as events, conferences, content-based email marketing, etc. Based on the method you are familiar with, you can drag and drop the programs or campaigns into the respective folders and rename them with the updated nomenclature structure. Through this process, you can easily locate all your programs as when they are needed and efficiently manage your campaigns.

If marketing activities are the highest priority in the instance management process, the design studio process is a close second. Several assets that are considered to be a prototype and forms are present in the design studio. There are 4 components in the Design Studio which are Emails, Landing pages, Forms, and Images & Files. Managing emails and landing pages in the design studio is quite straightforward as you can place the landing pages in use into one folder and the others into another folder. Locating the live website forms can be tricky as you would need to scan the website and match them with ‘Mkto FormID’ in Marketo. To make this approach easy, divide your ‘Forms’ folder into three sections – Website Forms, Active Forms, and Inactive Forms. This approach can help you identify website forms and the Marketo landing pages forms.

For images & files, keeping a structured nomenclature is considered to be a good practice. Image size and concrete name should be present in every file or image that you are importing. The banner, tile, and background images must be clubbed within respective folders based on the size of the images.