Marketo / Slack integration to notify sales team when campaigns are running

[Travis_Wittenbu]

Hey everyone,

I'd like to have a process where whenever we schedule a campaign to run, we post that info to Slack.

For example,

Let's say in Marketo we hit the schedule button for a smart campaign.

In a dedicated Slack channel (let's call it #campaigns), it posts "{Campaign name} scheduled to deploy at {schedule time}."

Anyone ever implemented something like this?

I've seen some documentation to post to Slack using webhooks, but I don't know how to trigger this unless I call the webhook in every single campaign. I also don't know if Marketo stores deployment time or campaign names as tokens.

The native Marketo / Slack integration only seems to be able to do things like notify when people fill out forms.

Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

You're right that Marketo user tasks, like executing a campaign, do not trigger webhooks.

There are a few ways of working with this, in order of (vastly) increasing difficulty:

• Have a special-purpose Resource Lead that's a member of each campaign. That lead represents the campaign itself, so when it gets sent an email, that means the campaign has been kicked off, and the lead can call the webhook. This is obviously a hack, and it also doesn't get triggered at the moment the campaign is scheduled, but rather when that lead runs through the campaign, which may not be the same time. Nevertheless Resource Leads are very useful for program- or campaign-wide tracking.
• Schedule your campaigns using the UI, but use the API to check the last run time (you'd have to poll every N minutes). Then call Slack.
• Schedule your campaigns using the API, not the UI. This would let you ping Slack right after you call the API. Though technically the signal wouldn't be coming from Marketo - you'd be telling Slack that you successfully requested that Marketo run the campaign, which isn't precisely the same as Marketo testifying to the campaign actually running. But close enough for most purposes.