Marketo Engage and Adobe Experience Cloud: A Series - Part 3: Use Cases for Marketo with the AEP Connector

Michaela_Iery3
Marketo Employee
Marketo Employee

We’ve now explored the possibilities using the out-of-the-box Adobe Experience Cloud connector with Marketo, which allows sharing matched-cookie audiences between Marketo and some other Adobe Experience Cloud applications. In this post, we’ll look at how purchasing the Adobe Experience Platform and using its connections with Marketo can create much deeper integrations between Marketo and both Adobe and non-Adobe applications.

 

To briefly recap, AEP integrates with Marketo via two separate connections – a source connection that shares data from Marketo to AEP and a destination connection that can share data, for new records, or list membership, for existing audiences, back into Marketo. These connections are continuous. Unlike the AEC Connector, the sync does not require a cookie match between the two systems. AEP can match records on email address and can insert new records into Marketo (and vice versa) even if they don’t have a shared cookie.

 

How to Integrate

 

On the Marketo side, an API user and custom LaunchPoint Service will need to be created for the AEP connections to use, just as a Marketo admin would do for most Marketo integrations. The connections do not count toward Marketo’s API limits. The Adobe Org ID mapping must also be done in Marketo. The bulk of the integration happens in AEP by selecting one or both pre-built Marketo connections – the source connector and the destination connector. Within AEP is the control of the integration: what data is ingested or shared, mapping of data schemas and fields, and how often sources and destinations are synced. This is therefore a more complex integration – a data architect will be important for your success.

 

What Is Integrated?

 

Source Connection

Unlike the AEC Connector, virtually all data attributes in Marketo can be shared with AEP. As of this writing, the following objects and assets are mapped in the source connection:

 

  • Person
  • Company
  • A subset of Activities 
  • Opportunities
  • Opportunity Contact Roles
  • Programs
  • Program Membership
  • Static Lists
  • Static List Membership
  • Named Accounts (Target Account Marketing required)

 

Additional Activity Types, Custom Activities and Custom Objects are on the roadmap for the Marketo Source Connection. See the current lists of available data from the Marketo Source Connection here.

 

Destination Connection

The destination connection to pass data from AEP to Marketo is more limited than the source connection as of this writing – records that don’t exist in Marketo can be inserted into Marketo from AEP with their data on the person record, but AEP cannot update data on existing Marketo records; instead it will put them on static lists in Marketo for whatever data/data sets that list should represent. The static lists must be created first in Marketo. In that sense, similar to AEC, you are sharing audiences that have a certain data attribute or attributes, but unlike AEC, you can share entire audiences, rather than only cookie-matched audiences.

 

The use cases previously described with the Marketo AEC connector can all be supported by the AEP Connections, with the added benefit that it can share ALL audiences, not just those with matched cookies. So let’s explore some additional use cases.

 

Use Case: Marketo as Data Source for Ad Retargeting

Widgets International has an engagement program targeting facility managers about Widget A, its benefits, use cases, etc. Widgets International set up their Marketo source connector to AEP to ingest data continuously from Marketo about program membership. They’ve also connected their Adobe Ad Cloud to AEP as a destination of data from AEP.

 

Within AEP, a data architect has an audience segmentation created based on members of the Widget A nurture program exhausting content in the nurture program – this audience is then shared with Ad Cloud to retarget those same facility managers to download a free ebook on Widget B. This display ad links to a Marketo form.

 

The marketing manager will have built a program in Marketo that includes a smart campaign:

  1. Smart list: Fills out Marketo form
  2. Flow: send confirmation email with link to e-book, add to Widget B nurture program

 

The form fill activity, the confirmation email send, open and click activity, AND the record’s new membership in the Widget B nurture program are all sent to AEP, which removes the record from the segmentation for the Widget B ad retargeting in Ad Cloud.

 

Use Case: Marketo as Data Source for Profile Enrichment

Remember that Adobe’s Real Time Customer Data Platform, as part of AEP, collects and unifies data from the various channels into a standard taxonomy that can be used to target audiences in all of the destinations connected to AEP. Marketo holds a treasure trove of data that can help inform RT-CDP profiles, making richer audience profiles for many other systems. There’s the added benefit that Marketo can deliver data to RT-CDP, often in less than a minuteand this API connection doesn’t count toward your Marketo API subscription volumes (it’s like a native CRM connection in that way).

 

You saw in the above use case that program, form and email activity of a record is passed to AEP – that data can be consumed by RT-CDP to create richer audiences for other systems that don’t have access natively to Marketo’s data. Imagine how Widget International might use their program data to add them to a Widget B retargeting campaign, but also add personalized experiences about Widget B on their website for those audiences. And share that data to Analytics, which can then use it to further inform its predictive analytics engine.

 

 

Use Case: Marketo as Data Destination for Persona Segmentation – Two Ways

 

Personas are a popular segmentation for dynamic content in Marketo.  There are two use cases that should be considered when setting up a persona strategy in your Marketo instance – AEP building the complete persona and sharing with Marketo or AEP providing contributing data for the persona in Marketo.  For both use cases, we are assuming that there is one persona segmentation with multiple persona segments.   

 

Using AEP to Build the Complete Persona and Share with Marketo 

In the complete persona scenario, Widget International will calculate the entire persona within AEP, using a variety of data points (including Marketo’s). RT-CDP will then push audiences for each persona type to corresponding static lists in Marketo. Widget International’s marketing manager will just assign each Marketo person record to the correct persona segment in Marketo based on its static list membership.  It’s important that each persona has its own list.  

 

When creating your segmentation for a persona, each smart list should reference an individual static list.  If a person happens to exist in multiple persona lists, the one that is listed first in the segmentation ranking will be honored.   

 

Here’s how it might look built in Marketo: 

Persona Segmentation 

  1. Segment | Ideal Finance Persona: Member of Static List = Finance 
  1. Segment | Ideal HR Persona: Member of Static List = HR Persona 
  1. Segment | Ideal IT Persona: Member of Static List = IT Persona 
  1. Segment | Ideal Procurement Persona: Member of Static List = Procurement Persona 
  1. Segment | Ideal Marketing Persona: Member of Static List = Marketing Persona 

 

Using AEP to Enhance a Marketo-Built Persona 

It may be that the Marketo user already has much of the information needed to create the persona segmentation in Marketo but want to enhance it with some data from other systems via AEP.  This will require a slightly different set-up than described above.  In this case, Widget International has some additional data in AEP that creates audiences based on the type of buyer they are (e.g. value driven, early adopter, risk-averse, etc.). Certain buyer types are considered more ideal or less ideal for certain personas.

 

In this situation, each data element Marketo is "ingesting” will actually be represented by a static list, not a data element on the person record.  When building the segmentation logic, you can use ‘Member of List’ and ‘Not Member of List’ to determine if the person has that characteristic.  

  

Here’s how this approach might look built in Marketo: 

Persona Segmentation 

  1. Segment | Finance Persona: Job Role = Finance + Demographic Score is greater than 35 + Member of Static List = Value-Driven Profile 
  2. Segment | Ideal HR Persona: Job Role = HR  + Demographic Score is greater than 25 + Member of Static List = Portfolio Profile 
  3. Segment | Ideal IT Persona: Job Role = IT  + Demographic Score is greater than 35 + Member of Static List = Early Adopter Profile 
  4. Segment | Ideal Procurement Persona: Job Role = Procurement + Demographic Score is greater than 10 + Member of Static List = Risk-Averse Profile or Member of Static List = Value-Driven Profile
  5. Segment | Ideal Marketing Persona: Job Title = Marketing + Demographic Score is greater than 35 + Member of Static List = Digital Strategy Profile 

 

Using AEP, an organization can seamlessly integrate Marketo with both Adobe platforms as well as non-Adobe platforms, from cloud storage to customer success applications to other marketing automation platforms  so that all parts of an organization can benefit from Marketo’s data and vice versa.

 

In our final blog post in this series, we’ll discuss some key considerations that come up when considering AEP’s integration with Marketo, as well as whether your organization might be an ideal fit for this integration.

 

Part 4: Considerations for the Marketo and AEP Integration

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