Bon Voyage - Tokens Have Now Gone Global

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For those of us in marketing operations who are wired to crave efficiency, governance and time-saving techniques, Marketo Engage tokens have always been a critical part of our process. Until recently, tokens could be created at a local (program) level or at the folder level within Marketing Activities. Fast forward to today, in addition to still having your tried-and-true local tokens, you now have the ability to create instance-wide tokens that can be applied across any program or folder! 

You can add and edit global tokens by going to the Admin tab, navigating to the left-hand side navigation tree and clicking My Tokens. Here you can drag, drop and edit token types, names and values to your liking. Note that you have to have admin permissions to access this. 

These tokens will now be available to use in any program when navigating to the program itself and clicking on the My Tokens tab. 

When creating a global token strategy you'll want to think of token values that are evergreen in their use cases. The types of tokens available are: 

• Calendar File 
• Date 
• Email Script 
• Image
• Number
• Rich Text
• Score
• SFDC Campaign
• Text

Some examples could be a company signature or specific team name, the system date and time, a calendar file to request a meeting, reference to a Salesforce campaign or a text token type with a company privacy disclaimer or link to speak to support. A classic example is to use a global token for the copyright year that goes into footers of snippets of emails and landing pages. 

You might already be using tokens at the folder level (specifically local to a program) and wondering, "What's the big deal? I'm already using folder level tokens that get inherited by the programs in the folder." Well, depending on how your folders are structured, you might have to update tokens that are truly "global" in multiple folders (copyright year being a great example of that). Now, you just have to go in Admin and update it once across-the-board, leading to greater ability to scale. Global tokens also still have the functionality of any inherited token, which is that you can override it at a folder or program level. 

We recommend establishing a global token strategy with your team and baking the use of global tokens into your governance process to save time, increase efficiency by eliminating redundancies in recreating tokens and reduce the odds of human errors occurring when getting your marketing programs out the door. 

Need help or more best practices suggestions? Adobe Professional Services is here to help!