This is the second article in a series about how to leverage the Marketo and Splash integration for maximum impact. ICYMI, check out the first article to learn how this integration has made me a better marketing operations pro.
Although many people perceive event marketing to be a glamorous job, those in the trenches know that it’s actually one of the most stressful jobs. Events take a lot of time, effort, and resources, so it’s no wonder event marketing holds that distinction year after year. This is why it’s so important to streamline your process as much as possible.
The Marketo and Splash integration is something that streamlines my own processes and at the same time, makes me a much better marketing operations professional. During my time using this integration, I’ve learned a few best practices that I want to share with you today.
Anyone creating Marketo programs to support their events knows this all too well: They take a lot of time to create (and recreate). For every event you run, you have certain things that are always going to be there — confirmation emails, auto-responders, event date, event name, event time … the list could go on.
Anything that saves me time is a no-brainer (like the fact that building an event in Splash auto-creates a Marketo program), and Marketo templates are another example of that. A good set of templates will give you everything from the program structure and tokens to alerts, auto-responders, and progression status tracking.
For me, the best part of building Marketo templates is that I can reference them in Splash. So whenever we have a new type of event, I can tell Splash to automatically use a specific Marketo template as our base program.
For example, we host a lot of webinars, so I have a Marketo template made specifically for those webinars. They include all the information we need to communicate for webinars, and nothing extra. When I set the event type in Splash as a webinar, that triggers a Marketo program using my webinar template. Instead of taking me one hour to set everything up for one event in Marketo, about 80% of it is already done, and it might take me 15 minutes to finalize the program.
Plus, templates do more than just save time and alleviate stress — they also reduce user error. We’re all human. We get busy, make mistakes, and forget steps. Templates are a solid solution for this.
Pro Tip: Marketo has community and pre-built templates you can import into your instance. If your instance is new (or if you’re new to Marketo), these are a great starting point. They give you most of what you need, including things like progression tracking and naming conventions.
Anything that reduces the chance for errors in a must-have in my book. Mapping tokens across systems is an example of this. Once I set things like event date and time in Splash, I can map those tokens to Marketo tokens. I set this up once and then I can use them in many places, including email communications, so I don’t have to worry about errors.
I actually didn’t use tokens until very recently, and I couldn’t tell you why. I think a lot of people simply don’t realize that they’re available or how easy they are.
Pro Tip: You can set tokens at the program level as well in Splash, which you can see in the screenshot below. This is a huge time savings and gets you even further ahead in the integration game. Plus, it’s just one more way to make sure we are doing our highest-quality work.
Every event marketer and marketing operations manager wants to do as much as they can when it comes to reporting on event success. For me, connecting our Splash and Marketo instances with Salesforce was a turning point. Splash and Marketo will get you great data points for event and email activity, but connecting to Salesforce will take it a step further by incorporating that data into all-up event and marketing reporting.
Now that I tie our Marketo programs to Salesforce campaigns, our sales team can see who was invited, registered, attended, or didn’t show up — giving them the insight they need to follow up with prospects or close deals. For example, I can say Joe Smith initially came to us from The Key to Integrating Event Data webinar on February 11 and an opportunity was created for him. Now, my webinar is stamped as the primary campaign source on that opportunity in Salesforce. If I didn’t do that, I’d never know that, and the data wouldn’t get integrated into the larger picture.
Events are time-consuming and can be expensive, so at the end of the day, knowing how much money our team influences through our event programs is extremely powerful. It gives us a seat at the table and proves the impact of our efforts. (And it can do that for you, too.)
Pro Tip: If you utilize reporting with Salesforce data, tie the campaign to your Marketo program for closed-loop reporting. If you’re not familiar with this, Marketo allows you to tie one Salesforce campaign to the program in the Setup tab.
Bonus Pro Tip: While you’re finalizing setup in Marketo, set your period costs and tags. This lets you keep track of all event costs, and in the end, it’ll tell you your cost per lead.
As a marketing operations director, inconsistency in our technology instances is something that gives me a huge headache. My biggest piece of advice: Think about your naming conventions before you create your event in Splash. Whatever you create there will carry over to your program name in Marketo, so it needs to make sense in both places.
Here are a few of my naming conventions below as an example:
Trade Shows: TS-Event Name-Location-YYYY-MM-DD
Webinars: WB-Event Name-Location-YYYY-MM-DD
User Groups: UG-Event Name-Location-YYYY-MM-DD
To give this a more specific example, let’s go back to that February 11 webinar from which I learned John Smith was a new opportunity from that event. My naming convention for that event would be WB-Integrating Event Data-Virtual-2020-02-11.
Everyone has their own preference. The important thing is to be consistent, so you can search for anything and group events appropriately.
Kara has been a Marketo Certified Expert since 2013, and has spent much of her career in marketing automation consulting and marketing operations for both startups and enterprises. Prior to Splash, she spent more than three years at Amazon Web Services helping run their Global Lead Management and Marketing Automation team. In her free time, you can find her at the stable with her horse, Money, or spending time with her three children.
