Form fields for an event landing registration page

[Sebastian_Lauk]

Hi Marketing Nation!

my first question in this forum! I'm marketing teamlead in a mid sized german software company. We are using Marketo since last year!

Following "problem":

I want to make a landing page for a trade show where interested people can register to a meet and greet. The form will ask some standard questions like company, name, email and so on.

But there are some "special trade show fields" I want to integrate in the form. First, I want to ask the registrant what his or her desired schedule is (because the trade show will go over several days). Second I want the registrant to answer me what he wants to talk about.

Now my question is, is there a best practice in which field to put these answers in the database of Marketo? We are doing serveral trade show per year and the solution can not be to create a new database field for each trade show, or is it?

An also, if I ask the questions and let Marketo write it in the same database field, will the newest entry always overwrite the older one? Or will the newer one be added to the older entry?

Many thanks for your know-how!

Sebastian

[Devraj_Grewal]

Sebastian,

I would create those two new custom fields for every event. If the lead resisters for a second event, whatever they input for those two event fields, will overwrite what they had previously, you don't want new events to overwrite the values they submitted prior. So yes, I would recreate those two event-specific fields for every event.

[Gina_Kang_]

Hi Sebastian,

I come from the event world in a past life (and sort of my current) so I totally understand the thought process here.  Like Devraj suggests, I would create those two custom fields as part of a global form for every event. Also, take note of what he says above about overwriting previously submitted fields.  We have a rule set up at my company so that if that field is already filled in, anything new does not overwrite this since everything maps over to SFDC right now and the last thing we'd want is for SFDC info to get muddied even more than it probably already is.  It's not the best option but it's what's working for us right now.

Also something to consider in terms of preferred meeting times:

• Calendly
• Marketo + Calendly integration via Zapier​

I use Calendly for all of my demos/meetings for conferences so it puts it on the prospect to pick a time that works for them and confirm. 

[Dan_Stevens_]

We run into the same situation often - since we do a lot of events.  These sorts of fields are just used/needed for each event, and if they get overwritten for a future event, that's fine (be sure to disable pre-fill for these fields).  So we use a series of custom "generic-text-field-x" fields for this.  If you do want to store historical data, you can always create "append" fields that will keep the prior values and append any new ones to that field.  For example: