Marketo's Rich Text Editor: Impact on Company Brand

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I'm a front end web developer who builds Marketo email & landing page templates for a lead gen team. Like most companies, we have a well defined digital brand that defines fonts, font colors, line-height, margins, padding, background colors, you get the picture. Any user in Marketo can change our company's look & brand with the rich text editor. Is anyone experiencing the same challenge or have a solution for keeping brand in tact? Can the rich text editor be disabled? I've already spent time educating the team about our brand guidelines but it hasn't completely worked with so much freedom at their fingertips. Any ideas would be great.

Thanks,

Lynda

[Edward_Unthank_]

Hey Lynda, you can try to put in as much system-driven constraints as possible, but at some point you're going to need to rely on process-driven constraints.

For example, as a system constraint, we use text tokens (not rich text tokens) in lots of places with specific HTML tags. Especially useful if you have sections of landing pages with specific classes that need to remain intact like in here: <h3 class="jumbotron--secondary">{{my.Content - LP_Headline}}</h3>

Those system constraints can be, well, constraining, so you're also going to have to get a quality-assurance process in place. For example, our process is to have a Marketing Operations Architect (more of an admin than a specialist who builds campaigns) be the final approval eyes upon a Marketo program before publishing it to the world. This way you can have your marketing manager or specialist create the campaigns within Marketo (95% of the effort) based on a program template the Architect has made (which contains the design and coding from the designers/developers on landing pages and emails)—it allows a fresh set of eyes on the program before it's published, and it can be used as a teaching tool for the marketing manager/marketing operations specialist of what to do and what not to do. You get more learning and better work over time, while also guaranteeing that you don't have a marketing manager becoming a designer.

In terms of what an actual landing page looks like internally with the system constraints and tokens, I wrote up how to use tokens in the example of a landing page on this blog post. And you can Inspect Element to see the code of a landing page using that approach here. The main point for designing/developing assets is to allow the rich text editor to receive inherited stylings, but have the rich text editor only contain barebones HTML: p, em, strong, ul, li, ol, h1-h6.

Cheers,

Edward Unthank | Founder, Etumos