Is it possible to make a PDF a marketo form?

[dmedua]

Hi all,

I’m wondering if it’s possible to make a an entire landing page a marketo form or make a PDF a marketo form?

For context: we currently have a visually appealing PDF with fillable-fields we send to clients/prospects to fill out their information. So once they fill out the fields in the PDF they send it to their CSM/sales rep for us to use and input that info into SFDC manually.

What we want to do is automate that experience - so in a dream scenario we’d love to send them a page or PDF with all the same fields in the same visually-appealing “worksheet” format (if possible, not just an ordinary top to bottom form where it’s just row after row) that a client/prospect could fill out and all of that info would automatically sync to SFDC.

Would this be possible with marketo? Any recommendations? Any recommendations, if not Marketo?

Thanks in advance!

[Raghav_Chugh]

I believe certainly you can achieve this.

There's a way you can create a custom form over the Marketo landing page.

After this step just saves that page as pdf and send it to your client. Once they fill out the form in pdf they will see the thankyou page upon submission.

-R

[SanfordWhiteman]

I don't share Raghav's optimism at all here.

In fact, getting a functioning, cross-platform (that is, cross-reader) PDF form that posts to Marketo - which even in the best case requires that the end user grant special permission, since PDFs will not run remote JavaScript actions by default - is extremely difficult.

I'm 100% sure that all the visual appeal of the PDF could be replicated in HTML, JS & CSS. In fact, the PDF readers built into browsers are built using those technologies, and those readers come darn close to the Adobe Reader experience.

[Dave_Roberts]

Can you share an image of the creative your working with here for context?

I would agree w/ Sanford that a .pdf seems like the wrong choice of application for something like this, but you could certainly style a Marketo form to not be so square and boring. I think it would take some careful thought and planning, and it would be a technically complex thing to do (Marketo forms are notorious tricky to style). The reason I might not go this route is that it'd be really hard to update the layout of the page and do much other than swap "this-field-for-that-field" b/c there'd have to be a ton of custom styling to get a form to look and behave like a custom LP layout. 

That said, you might also think about putting together a Landing Page with custom inputs so you could have more freedom in your layout -- you wouldn't have to build it all in a form. You'd need a script to pull the inputs from your custom HTML fields on your Landing Page and populate those on a hidden Marketo form (or some other way of passing them to Marketo) to get a combination of the behavior and creative freedom your looking for. This route would be a bit easier to make changes to by comparison to using a form for the whole thing, but would require some script magic to pass the data between fields and post them to Marketo.

FWIW, I'd love to see what you've got in mind for the layout - I like thinking "outside the box" about different ways to put forms and landing pages to work in Marketo and this sounds like a really unique situation.

Thanks,
Dave