As someone who spends about 90% of my workday in Marketo Engage, Adobe Summit is one of my favorite weeks of the year. Not only do we get to see all of the new features and enhancements coming to the Marketo Engage platform, we also get to learn from some of the best Marketo experts around. While it was disappointing that we couldn’t gather in person for Summit this year, that doesn’t mean we had to miss out on any of the valuable content! I’ve spent the last few days binging as many breakout sessions as I could, and I’ve rounded up some of my favorites below, along with why I found them relevant:
1. Don’t Be a Basic Batch: Test Nurture Program Success
As marketing operations professionals, we are consistently being asked “is my program working?”, and the answer is often more complicated than our stakeholders think. While measuring the ROI on a webinar or event program is relatively straightforward, measuring the success of a nurture program is much trickier. This session does a great job of helping you define what success means for your specific nurture programs, as well as giving you actionable ways to measure that success on an ongoing basis. Their concept of the nurture score is one I hadn’t heard of previously, and I can’t wait to deploy this in my own Marketo instance.
2. Practical Uses of AI for Today’s Enterprise Marketers
One buzzword we’re constantly hearing about in marketing technology today is AI. This session explains Marketo Engage’s AI roadmap including Predictive Audiences, which uses AI to help marketers define their ideal audiences for each of their programs, as well as the updates to Marketo Sales Insight which include a new UI, Marketing Calendar being integrated into Sales Insight, and AI capabilities directly in Sales Insight. While many of these features are not yet available in Marketo Engage, they are certainly exciting updates to the platform and this session has me counting down the days until I can use Predictive Audiences myself!
3. The Best-Kept Marketo Secret: The Campaign Requested Feature
As anyone who manages a Marketo Engage instance knows, system efficiency is key. Too many inefficient triggers and smart campaigns can lead to a backlog in campaign processing, which can in turn lead to many other negative downstream effects. This session digs deep into one of Marketo’s most under-utilized features, the Campaign Requested feature, and how to use it to increase system efficiency, as well as save yourself time while building out programs. This feature is truly one of Marketo’s best kept secrets, and I plan to execute several of the strategies put forth in this session in my own instance.
4. Resuscitate and Revive Dying Leads
Most of us have a mechanism in our lead lifecycle that allows sales to recycle leads back to marketing for further qualification. But what happens to those leads once they’re recycled? Many of us don’t have a centralized strategy for how to nurture these leads back to MQL status again, thus letting them die. This session gives you a very detailed and robust setup for recycle nurture programs. It goes through how to do the system setup, how to use reporting to measure the success of your program, and several extras you can deploy to take your nurture program to the next level.
5. Cover your Bases: Privacy Compliance and Legal Requirements in Marketo
These days, you’d be hard pressed to find a marketer whose marketing efforts haven’t been affected in some way by privacy legislation. In marketing operations, it’s our job to ensure that our Marketo databases are compliant with all regional privacy laws, and with new laws being passed more and more frequently, this task can seem daunting. This session gives an excellent overview of how to ensure compliance with regional laws in a very manageable and scalable way. My current instance is set up almost exactly this way, but I’m looking forward to making some tweaks after watching this session in order to become even more efficient.
With all of these sessions giving me some great actionable ideas for database enhancement, I can’t wait to start applying them in my own Marketo Engage instance. Did I miss any of your favorite sessions from this year? Let me know in the comments below!
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