Marketo calls it the Marketing Platform for a reason – it’s meant to host ALL of your important Marketing information.
However one thing the Marketing Platform may be lacking is a way to make great looking landing pages. So many Marketers look to third party tools (Knak being one of them) to help them solve this problem.
There are some really great tools out there for you to choose from, but make sure you understand the impact of selecting one tool over the other.
One of the biggest questions you should ask should be: Will my landing pages live in Marketo? If the answer is no, here are some things you should be aware of:
No More Marketo Forms
Forms are the entry point of all of your leads, and when your landing pages don’t live in Marketo, it likely means you don’t use native Marketo forms. This means you’re losing out on functionality. Namely, the ability to auto-complete all of the people who are already cookied by Marketo. See: big drop in conversion rates. In addition, your inferred data like inferred country, state and company are no longer going to get passed through. Oh, and now you need to setup another integration and new sub-domain. Form triggers are also impacted which typically means new custom fields need to be created.
Can’t use Marketo Tokens
Marketo tokens are a huge timesaver, and many Marketo marketers like to build out scalable programs using tokens. When your landing pages don’t live in Marketo, you simply can’t use this powerful functionality.
Program Data is Fragmented
When your landing pages don’t live in Marketo, it means when you review your Marketo program to see how its performing, critical metrics such as page views and conversion rates are not there. This means you don’t get a full view of your program performance in one spot.
Say bye-bye to Dynamic Content
Dynamic content is a feature that many Marketo marketers are excited about, and for good reason. It allows you to setup segments in Marketo so that you can show certain individuals content tailored to them. When your landing pages don’t live in Marketo, you can’t take advantage of the rich dynamic content capabilities found in Marketo.
Some of the landing page creation tools out there are super powerful and offer an editing experience unlike what’s available in Marketo’s editor, however, before you select a new landing page partner, you should definitely ask if it means your landing pages will still live in Marketo… and I’m very happy to say that with Knak, they most certainly do 🙂
