Previous Series Posts
Part 1: An Overview of Marketo Engage Integrations with Adobe Experience Cloud
Part 2: Use Cases for Marketo with the AEC Connector
Part 3: Use Cases for Marketo with AEP Connections
In our final post in the series about Marketo’s integrations with the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud (and beyond), we’ll review some of the common “big picture” questions we receive from clients, as well as questions you might ask yourself when considering if leveraging Adobe Experience Platform might be right for you.
Where should “audience building” be done – in Marketo or in RT-CDP?
It is going to depend on the use case, but we would expect most Marketo users to still build their audiences (smart lists) in Marketo. Most data that they would likely use for targeting is already in Marketo, either as data directly collected via Marketo or from their CRM or other integrations. Unless or until the destination connector can support pushing data directly onto existing person records and their associated tables, Marketo users would have to leverage static list membership – one for each data attribute from AEP and for each value, and that could get complex.
Example:
A marketer wants to send an email to people based on their favorite color. Attribute “color” is only available to Marketo from a source in AEP. There are five possible values. A static list would have to be created for each value: Color-Red, Color-Blue, Color-Yellow, Color-Green, Color-Purple. AEP would then push records onto the appropriate list based on their color value, because AEP can’t push the value ‘blue’ onto a field on the existing record in Marketo.
Now imagine that you have 50 attributes from AEP you want to leverage, each with 5 value options. There are now 250 lists for the Marketo user to navigate, having Marketo query if someone is a member of certain list. That’s why we think that the best use of AEP data into Marketo (i.e. lists) today is for very discrete use cases – such as the persona-based use case we explored in part 3 or for very ‘binary’ scenarios like storing opt-in/opt-out across systems.
An additional consideration is that if the Marketo users aren’t also the people building audiences in AEP, they would have to wait for the audiences to be built by someone else, possibly in another department, and pushed as one multi-attribute static list to Marketo. This is less efficient and could create work bottlenecks – part of the power of Marketo is that it was built to allow marketers to leverage marketing technology without reliance on IT, because the data is in Marketo, can be easily queried and then immediately used for automation without needing to know code.
Should reporting be done in Marketo or AEP?
Why not both? Certainly, the value of the Marketo source connection to AEP allows organizations to pull all of that rich Marketo data into AEP for use by other reporting systems. They can do this today via middleware – and many enterprises often do – but now we can leverage AEP and the connection, which doesn’t count toward Marketo’s API limits. But there are reports in Marketo that are useful to marketers (who may not have access to the enterprise’s reporting system) and it’s worth continuing to leverage those very marketer-centric reports. Of course, it’s also important to note the reporting in Marketo is limited to the data values Marketo can see. List membership can be used in some (but not all) standard Marketo reports and is not available at all for use in advanced reporting (Revenue Cycle Analytics or Marketing Performance Insights).
Where should lead scoring be done?
Given the considerations noted above about audience building, and that most of the data Marketo would score on is probably mostly in Marketo itself (both record attributes as well as their engagement with Marketo activities), we would expect scoring to be done in Marketo. The current state of the Marketo destination connector would require AEP to put people on lists per score or score “range.” Theoretically, you could just have one list that just reflects they’ve met the lead qualifying score so that Marketo can then act on that with the CRM, but many Marketo activities (lifecycle mapping, nurturing) are based on scores below or above the qualification threshold. So, you’d likely end up having to have multiple lists, one for each score value or score range of values. Instead, you might consider just creating very discrete lists that AEP pushes records to in order to reflect key conditions you might want to score on - the persona use case or opt-in management being good examples: change score –10 if they are on the unsubscribed list; change score +10 if they are on the Tech Industry Procurement Officer persona list.
Should I be considering a Marketo – AEP integration for my organization?
AEP has something for everyone, within and outside of Marketo, but you might ask the following questions:
- Do you have multiple Marketo instances? Marketo instances cannot sync directly with each other (even via webhook). If your organization has multiple Marketo instances and it would be ideal to share certain data attributes (say, communication preferences), AEP might be right for you.
- Do you have multiple Adobe Experience Cloud products? If you have Marketo as well as, for example, Target and Campaign, AEP with RT-CDP would allow you to sync record data from Marketo to activate segments for web personalization and emails
- Do you have more than one CRM? Organizations that might have multiple instances of Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics for different business groups can now bring the data into a common platform for sharing with cloud storage like Amazon S3 or customer success platform like
- Do you have other marketing tools that don’t natively integrate with Marketo? Some organizations may have both Marketo as well as other marketing automation systems that don’t have a native connector to Marketo. AEP has a wide variety of source and destination connections to other marketing tools
- Have your custom integrations with Marketo created challenges with API volume? Many Marketo customers need to send data to other systems via non-native integrations, all of which can leverage Marketo’s subscription-based. Provided that these systems integrate as destination connections with AEP, data from Marketo can be shared with them via AEP (and back to Marketo as lists) and it would not count toward Marketo’s API subscriptions
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