Best methods to implement custom landing pages and web forms in Marketo?

[Anonymous]

Hi, 

I am trying to figure out if we are going about the implementation of custom landing pages/web forms in Marketo created by our design team correctly.  Instead of creating the landing page/forms directly in Design Studio. Our design team creates the landing pages, web form layout, web form styling and functionality outside of Marketo and then sends the completed assets over to my team to implement in Marketo.

My Definition of Custom Landing Pages/Web Forms:

1. Show and hide web form field requirements (if user selects x value show x form fields etc.)
2. Dynamic follow-up pages based on x behavior by user (button submit, URL parameters etc)
3. Landing pages web form layout is in 2 or more columns
4. Web form fields have to preserve a certain look and feel via CSS

At this time these are the steps we take to get the provided custom landing page creative/web forms into Marketo:

• Step#1 - Create a dummy form in Marketo with all the required web form fields
• Step#2 - Create a dummy landing page and place the dummy form in this landing page and generate the appropriate html code (web form names, all the hidden form details, and the form ID and form follow-up details)
• Step#3 - Create a landing page template and load the provided landing page source code including (HTML, CSS, Javascript etc.) from our design team in this template and update the code with the correct form field names and details etc. We also write any custom JQuery or CSS requirements in the template.
• Step#4 - Create a new landing page from to the newly created template
• Step#5 - Test, Approve & Launch

This process seems a bit convoluted  to me. Is there a better and faster way to handle this type of setup? 

Thank you in advance for your help...

[Anonymous]

Are you using the step 3 and 4 so that the field values will be prepopulated and progressive profiling etc will work (in addition to other custom jquery and css your design team develps)?
Or is it ok to forgo thiese functionalities? In that case you can just host the pages your design team developed directly on a webserver and http post the responses to Marketo behind the scene.

[Anonymous]

I would spend some time creating a robust template that included styles for standard Marketo elements--like forms, headlines, rich text blocks, etc. If you got a template with styles that you were happy with, you could just use that template for your Marketo pages, and build them using the drag-and-drop functionality in the landing page editor.

You can also add JS to those pages using drag and drop. The process you're going to does appear somewhat convoluted to me--I can see how you would have a hard time making it very scalable.

And Rajesh is right--because of the way you're building your forms and landing pages, you're foregoing most of the functionality that makes Marketo so popular and easy to use. You might be better off just setting up an HTTP post and embedding the form code in a non-Marketo page hosted on some other CMS.

[Anonymous]

Hi Rajesh/Kate,


Thank you for your feedback and taking the time to respond to my inquiry.

You are 100% right on the idea that we are currently forgoing most of the functionality that makes Marketo so popular and easy to use. I like the idea of hosting the pages on a webserver and pushing the submits to Marketo, but unfortunately that is not an option for us as all the assets have to be in Marketo.

@Rajesh, I am using step 3 mainly to write any custom JQuery, for example state/province show and hide logic when a country is selected. (Is there a better way of doing this?)

@Kate, in regards to the drag and drop method. I am assuming you are referring to the "HTML"  drag and drop option in studio correct?



Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Like Kate said, in the 'Marketo landing page designer', you can drag and drop a 'HTML' block. In this block you can write your javascript / jquery statements. Did you try that?

[Anonymous]

Hi Rajesh,

Yes, I have tried that in the past with some mixed success maybe I am doing it wrong. But I am sure I will get the hang of it after a few more projects under my belt. This is the main reason I generate the landing pages as "Templates" because I can control the JQuery code a bit more there. But like I said, I will keep trying the HTML blocks in "Landing Page Designer" etc.

Thank you for your feedback.