Creating Scalable Landing Page Templates - Best Practices

[Anonymous]

Hey all, 

I've typically used a CMS for landing pages but circumstances are requiring us to leverage Marketo landing pages more and more for different purposes. 

I'm wondering if anyone can share any considerations or best practices for making these pages scalable and easy to update. (Edward Unthank has a great post on tokens that opened my eyes to some possibilites and I'd like to learn lots more.)

To take one example of something I'm trying to figure out:

We have a global nav and global footer that will be re-used across multiple different landing page templates. 

Is there a way to make these elements modular, so that if your global nav changes (for instance) you could update it in one place and have it change all your templates? 

I understand using My.tokens at the campaign folder/program level, but is there anything similar at the level above templates in design studio? If not, how do you update something that without needing to modify multiple templates? 

A shorter way of putting all this is: I'm looking for tips, tricks, hacks etc. to make it easy, quick, and scalable to keep all your pages looking fresh. 🙂

Thanks in advance for any input. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Justin,

To allow for quicker edits to a nav bar on landing pages would be to have one landing page template (or a few if necessary) that contain the nav bar. From there, you would create as many landing pages as you'd like, utilizing these few templates. If you decide to change your nav bar, you would make the edits to the template, and have the ability to approve all landing pages that use that template in a matter of seconds.

It's important to note, first, the difference between a Landing Page Template and a Landing Page. The template is used to drop in your own html, and the landing page uses this layout for WYSIWYG editing.

Steps to Create Easy Nav Bar Editable Templates:

1. Create a few main templates (Design Studio > Landing Pages > Templates)
2. Create landing pages using these templates (Design Studio > Landing Pages)*
3. Edit your nav in the template. When you click "Approve" on the template, it will immediately change all landing pages that utilize the template to "Edit" mode (they will have the little pencil on the icon).
4. To approve all of these "Edit" mode templates, click on Landing Pages in the Design Studio. You will see a list of all landing pages.
5. Right-lick on "Approved" and sort descending.
6. Select all of the pages that use the template you edited, and right-click "approve draft"
7. Check your work...all of the landing pages should have the global edit made to their individual pages.

*Note: To keep the Design Studio clean, I would create a few main Landing Pages globally and then clone them to individual programs to keep them "local". As a result, your instance will be more organized, and you will be able to find landing pages more easily. Another hint, create a naming convention for the pages and emails and share it with your team so that searching for design elements does not become a headache.

[Anonymous]

Hey Jackie, 

Thanks for the helpful response. 

I was aware of templates which solves part of the problem, but doesn't address the issue where you have elements that span multiple templates. 

I guess what I was looking for was a type of "snippet" that could be used in multiple templates (not just multiple pages) and allow one step updating for common elements. 

If you think of four page templates that share a common global nav, then you could see the use case for something like this. 

However it seems pretty clear this doesn't exist yet so more like an idea suggestion I guess!

Thanks, 

Justin

[Brice_Dunwoodie]

Yes, I'm looking for the same thing. We're having maintenance issues as we scale. Being able to use snippets in templates would be helpful. It would also be helpful to have some kind of "include" we could use, so that we could include thing in the head of the document.