When the Community Team launched the new Marketo Marketing Nation Community almost 6 months ago (I know...can you believe it!?) we approached the user experience with a 'do no harm' approach. Anyone who has launched a new version of a platform or has played a role in a website re-design knows that you always run the risk of membership and engagement plummeting because people don't like (they hate) change.
We tried to find a happy medium between utilizing the robust functionality we now had at our fingertips, and overwhelming you to where you couldn't find anything. Turns out, we may have been too eager to show you everything we had to offer so now we're taking a step back and figuring out what our customers want and need to be successful.The first step is to simplify a few pages of the site starting with & . If you take a look at the mock ups below, you will see we are trying to move toward a 'less is more' design. But...only you can help us know if we're on the right track.
Here are a few ways you can help!
- Provide feedback for the Marketing Central and Support mock ups. Let us know what you think by commenting on this blog and specifying which page you're referring to. If you need help getting started, you can answer questions like:
- What three things do you like / what three things do you not like / what are three recommendations for improvement?
- How long have you used Marketo?
- What do you use community for most?
- What features or widgets do you find most useful when you get to a page?
Marketing Central Mock up
Support Mock up
- Blog blog blog! We know you are knowledgeable about several different Marketo and digital marketing topics and we strongly encourage you to use our open forum as a way to showcase your expertise and build your brand. Only you can prevent bad marketing!
- If you don't see something you need, ask us! Marketo customers are GREAT at providing feedback as exemplified by our hot to trot ideas section that has had over 400 customer ideas put into the product, and we'd like to encourage you to keep it coming. The more the Community team can have a bidirectional line of communication with you the better we can improve and tailor the user experience to fit your needs and drive you toward your business objectives. You will see Marketo employees ask for feedback all over the Community, whether that be a quick poll in the Support page to see how we're doing or a survey featured on the homepage that has a monetary incentive (yes, we do offer cash money for your participation sometimes!).
- If you want to blog in our Nation Members Blog, email swilder@marketo.com or loseguera@marketo.com and we'll give you access.
Marketing Central is where our users can go to become better digital marketers. It is no secret that Marketo is a complex and robust product that you will not learn overnight. So it is silly to assume that product docs and training videos alone will allow our customers to accomplish excellence in using the tool. Marketing Central is about more than just Marketo. It's about thought leadership, best practices, trends in the industry, and strategic concepts like how to build out your marketing team, or what role Marketing Operations can play in your organization.
Thanks to you the Community has been healthy by most definitions of the word. We have had an increase in metrics across the board. We have more engagements, more questions being asked and responded to, and we had a 66% increase in active users*. And although overall membership has increased from an average of 10% of customers logging into the old Community to 30% logging into nation.marketo.com, we are still trying to 'crack the code' on what it takes to get more of our customers to log in and engage with each other.
If you ever have feedback in general about the Marketing Nation Community, please visit out section. Thanks in advance.
*Active users are defined as anyone who logs in and engages with content, such as a like, comment, post or bookmark.
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