Convincing the Web Team that Marketo Is NOT Their Enemy. Help me make my case?

[Anonymous]

So we've been using Marketo for nearly a year and over the last several months, I've noticed some growing hostility an attitude change among our internal web team (who maintain our company web site) about Marketo and how much the Marketing team is using it for promotion. The attitude now seems to be that Marketo is BAD for our website, and should only be used sparingly, with most of the pages we are creating being put as pages on our website instead (read: programmed by the web team). 

Now admittedly, some of my users got a little wacky with web pages and used it as a tool to get something out QUICKLY rather than use our internal workflow/web team (which takes a bit longer.) I'm working corralling that, but it has now gotten to the point that if we even want to put a link to a Marketo page on our WEBSITE, the web team balks, saying "we are taking traffic away from the website." (Although we always link back in from our Marketo pages to our website as a point of practice and any downloadable content - papers, etc. - is NOT hosted on Marketo but on our website.)

When I try to get to the bottom of where this is coming from, these are the objections I most commonly get:

1.   Having these pages outside of our main website hurts our Google Score because the hits are going to those pages, not our website pages. I don't know a lot about Google Analytics but since we're using a C-NAME and subdomain, wouldn't that not be true? Wouldn't Google view www.companyname.com and marketopages.companyname.com as being the same "site" or domain?
2.   Marketo pages aren't "searchable" - as far as I can tell, they don't mean "via search engine," they mean that when someone searches our website (we use a Google search appliance as I recall), content on Marketo pages will not come up in the search results. I imagine that probably IS true, but is there a way to change that?
3.   Asking people to "leave our website" by going to a Marketo page is bad, bad, bad. Bad. BAD. Just always BAD. We want them to live on our website forever (and ever and ever and ever - cue The Shining twins.)

Part of me feels that some of this attitude is plain and simple "territorialness" or "job preservation" (if we can build our own pages, we need them less). But I don't want to simply dismiss their concerns (and some may be quite valid). So how do I convince them that Marketo is GOOD for us, good for them, and good for our website? That we don't need to create a policy (seriously!) that any landing page that will live longer than "X months" HAS to be built on our web site instead? Have any of you experienced this in the past and how did you work through it?

Thanks!

[Rafael_Santoni1 · Accepted solution]

Without going into too many details... on your 1, 2, and 3

1. The subdomain can contribute to the Google Analytics metrics.
2. The search appliance can be configured to index Marketo pages as well.
3. Marketo IS part of the web site, an extension of it, if you will. As long as you have created a CNAME for it, you should be ok and the paranoia should cease.

If you have good web developers, they can also try to figure out a way to embed Marketo forms within the web site content. They should be able to figure it out, creating a seamless integration between Marketo and the site. To be more specific, dynamically grabbing a Marketo-hosted landing page with its form and full functionality, and embedding its key elements within a site template. Then, it stops being a Marketo page. It turns into a site page that sends data to Marketo.

Good luck!

Rafael

[Anonymous]

Rafael, thanks! With regard to embedding Marketo elements onto our site, we have tried this some but have found it to cause trouble with forms - not sure if it's our Ektron template or something, but users of the site get locked up in it, particularly with text box fields. I'm not sure we resolved that one.

But I do very much like the idea of them being able to dynamically grab Marketo-hosted landing pages and embed them. They are very skilled web developers, so I assume this is something they could embrace very well. Is there an article anyone knows about on the community that I could point them toward? (I don't think I'm searching with the right keywords when I look.)

[Anonymous]

A couple of articles that may be of interest:

• Put a Marketo Form on a Non-Marketo Page Using an Iframe
• Put a Marketo Form on a Non-Marketo Page

[Anonymous]

Rafael has some great guidance - one would have hoped that your web team could have brought those forward.

Most importantly make it be a team issue and a team win, ultimately both are right to a certain degree and both own the solution. Hopefully the team sees the value in marketing automation and what it will do for your organization, so they can offer up solutions that help you mutually achieve your goals. Maintaining the website as is won't grow revenue, find a way for them to help enable the path forward

One of the simple things we do is use Marketo forms, but present them in our corporate site through an iframe - not that it is the best solution but I can see for you where the web team can build the pages but you can control the Marketo logic associated with the form - all the while presenting one view of the site, one search, etc. This helps with content repurposing, translations, and a myriad of other things we work with.

I'd also suggest doing a deep dive on why the other quick pages are being built, there must be a need that isn't being met. Again, challenge them to help meet the need - e.g. build a limited nav template that focuses on conversion. The new marketing environment is blended, web, MA, CRM, SFA - none of these will be successful in a silo.

[Anonymous]

Michaela: 

Just chiming in on your first point.

I believe your team might be referring to SEO value here, not Google Analytics. Hosting pages on a subdomain is, according to Matt Cutts the SEO god of Google, valued as the same as in a subdirectory in your site. That means that the Marketo landing pages lose no SEO juice compared to your integrated pages, all else equal. 


Best,
Edward Unthank
Marketing Operations Specialist
Yesler

[Anonymous]

Thanks SO much to all of you for your insights on this - I will try to report back on how it's going!

[Anonymous]

As an SEO first and lead generation specialist second a subdomain is considered a separate site and does not contribute to the overall value of your root domain. This is why you would see duplicate page issue from a non-www site and the same site with www. The one thing that can help is that since you are creating a swath of content on a subdomain it will build value to that domain quicker and you will be able to control how people your root domain website.

Marketo pages can be indexed by google as long as you review the meta="robots " tag on each of the landing pages but the best way for it to get index into search is by passing links back and forth from your root website.

As for analytics make sure your settings are set to allow all subdomains to inventory traffic. The best practice from an analytics stand point would be to create another profile within your account to track traffic only from your marketo subdomain pages.

I also wish that it was possible to be able to use a sub directory as opposed to a sub domain as i feel that sending people to a subdomain sets up barrier of entry between your marketo efforts and what the main goals of your website are trying to accomplish.