Common use cases of marketo custom objects

[Anonymous]

Hello,

Does anyone know what are the common use cases that warrant creating a marketo custom objects?

[Anonymous]

HI Abdallah,

I suspect that the release of objects is to start improving the way that Marketo can be used.

Of the top of my head some great uses could be:

Integrate Marketo with a webinar provide, then the provider could record details of each webinar a lead has watched against a single contact, something that would require many fields at the moment.

Integrate existing database objects.  Not something that has been mentioned, but I would imagine that eventually you would be able to sync object from your database (like we have event attendances, sales, memberships) with Marketo.

[Dan_Stevens_]

I'd like more information as well.  As part of the October release notes, this is all that was included:

[Anonymous]

I would highly suggest the series of blog posts that John Mattos from our technical consulting team wrote up in anticipation of this release. We've been playing around with this functionality in beta for a while so it's pretty well documented.

Custom Objects in Marketo - Part I

Custom Objects in Marketo - Part II - REST API

Custom Objects in Marketo - Part III - SOAP API

Custom Objects in Marketo - Part 4 - Bulk Upload

We're using them all the time for customers, especially those without a native CRM integration, for stuff like:

• Sales orders/purchase information
• Contracts
• Support cases
• Sales ownership (with multiple sales owners)
• Milestones and goals
• Product lists
• Associated organizations such as high schools, colleges, etc.
• Interest segmentations
• Certifications

Some of these could also be custom activities, but of course, if you want to put the information inside of an email with email scripting, you would need to use a custom object.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Abdallah,

you have 2 sources for custom objects : either they are created in salesforce and replicated in Marketo, in which case they will be usually populated in salesforce and used there, or (and this is new with the October release of Marketo), you can create them in Marketo.

From Marketo, you can populate them through the API or though import, but not from a form fill out nor a smart campaign flow step (at least not for the moment).

A few cases I can think of, inspired by real life ones :

• store Cart / purchase information in a e-commerce context
• Create custom object to map CRM custom objects in a non Salesforce context and have them sync'ed through the API
• Store in Marketo product consumption / License information/ in a SAAS context and use it in conjunction with Login history activity (a custom activity) and use all of this to manage customer relationship from Marketo (for instance an on-boarding nurturing program)

Hope this helps,

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Is this only limited to SFDC?

[Anonymous]

No, it is not limited just to SFDC, this can be done for instances with other CRMs or no CRM

[Anonymous]

This also works with Dynamics (custom entities, not custom objects, but same thing), but that functionality's been out for a while (since Oct 2014). We've had some limited ability to create Marketo-only custom objects for a while, but it was only something you could do through services and there were some limitations on the functionality that have now been lifted.

[Kristen_Malkov1]

I'm personally excited for Marketo custom objects because I think this will be a great way to bucket information that you normally would spread out over multiple custom fields. Something that I've considered is creating account-based metrics as a custom object from marketing activities/campaigns for your ABM approaches.