Finding ways to track historical data on customer topic interests

[mmcvey]

Hello friends,

The company I work for regularly promotes complimentary webcasts to our clientele, ranging in topics from Gen AI to professional development. We typically promote these webcasts through dedicated sends, where we track their RSVPS and whether they attend, no-show, and/or watch on-demand after the live event through GlobalMeet, which has an API through Marketo. We also push all of this data into SFDC so our Sales teams can easily track this as well.

I recently set up an internal alert for our Sales teams to notify them when a client has accessed an on-demand webcast, with the thought that if we can keep track of the subject areas/topics interests of these clients, whether at an individual or an account level, we can better program our future events and notify those folks of events that may be of interest.

That said, I obviously don't want to leave it to the Sales team to try to keep track of on their own. I'm wondering if anyone here has set up a field or incorporate an existing field to keep track of subject areas that clients have interacted with/shown interest in. Obviously, I would want to be able to access all historical data, so I'm also concerned about Marketo's data retention policy, but am open to hearing what you may have figured out, and whether that has also synced into SFDC, or if you maybe have a smart list subscription, etc., set up to monitor on a regular basis.

Additionally, if you know of any other community posts that are related to this, feel free to link! Not looking to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily 🙂

Thanks in advance for your help!

Cheers.

[SanfordWhiteman]

This is a pretty standard ask. The most common solution (though not the one we recommend) is a simple multivalued string of interests, linked to a list of checkboxes that sales can manage. 

The problem, as you note, is that doesn't preserve the history of people's interests: knowing when somebody moved in and out of an interest is important. You can keep a separate history field that snapshots + timestamps the field value whenever it changes. But we go further and use a Product Interest Custom Object. Each record has fields like who/what flagged the interest, whether it's still considered an active interest right now, etc.