A 2023 Comprehensive Guide to Marketo Integrations

“Not implementing a Marketing Automation solution may be the ultimate career-limiting move for today’s marketers. If you haven’t gotten started you’re already behind the 8 balls.” - IDC Group

Marketing automation is being used by more than 79% of B2B companies, out of which 58,890 companies use Marketo. Marketo Engage, commonly known as Marketo, is a comprehensive marketing automation tool that aids marketers in engaging prospects and customers with its amazing capabilities such as lead generation, management and nurturing; email marketing; A/B testing; and web activity tracking.

Most marketers believe that marketing automation is responsible for at least some of their sales success! Marketo, in particular, should be integrated with certain sales and marketing tools if you want it to produce the best results and help scale your business.

Marketo has over 550 integration partners to help you get things done faster across platforms. But before you go ahead with Marketo integrations or start looking for the best API integration tools, you must ask the right questions:

• Is your marketing team sending emails to leads who have previously been in contact with sales?
• Is it possible for Marketing to track the impact of leads that moved on to Sales?
• Are you missing out on opportunities because your data is inconclusive?

Once you have answered these questions, you will be clear on whether you should use Marketo integrations or not. If your answer is yes, you will learn about the tools that you should integrate your Marketo instance with, and why they are the best for your business!

What Is Marketo API Integration and Why Integrate?

Marketo API integration connects Marketo with other software applications or systems using its Application Programming Interface (API). The in-built integration platform allows developers to enable the exchange of data, which automates marketing-related tasks. Marketo, when integrated with a third-party app of your choosing, helps you get the most out of your Marketo investment by displaying data in an actionable form. Be it a basic lead synchronization or a complex data integration project, connecting your Marketo and integrating accounts helps you quickly capitalize on prospect and customer data to drive demand generation program performance. Here are some benefits of Marketo API integrations - 

• Data Synchronization: It allows you to integrate Marketo with your CRM system, ensuring seamless transfer of leads, contacts, and other relevant information. It results in consistency across your marketing and sales processes.
• Lead Capture and Management: API integration allows you to capture leads automatically and transfer them directly into Marketo. You can automate lead nurturing, scoring, and segmentation based on predefined rules.

• Email Marketing Automation: Marketo API integration connects with your email service provider and lets you trigger personalized and targeted email campaigns. These campaigns can be tailored to specific behaviors of the leads or events captured in Marketo.
• Reporting and Analytics: Integrating Marketo with your analytics tools or BI platforms can help you consolidate marketing data from these sources. You will be able to generate comprehensive reports, track the performance of your campaign, and measure marketing ROI.  

The most common Marketo integrations are: 

• Customer relationship management (Salesforce)
• Content management systems (WordPress)
• Webinars and events (Eventbrite, Webex, Cvent)
• Ecommerce (Electronic Commerce, Magento)
• The Internet and social media (Facebook, Twitter)

Basically, you can connect Marketo with any software, application, or device, both in the cloud and on-premises, with the help of a strong third-party API integration platform. It can assist you in developing effective bi-directional integrations that will help you get the most out of your marketing solutions.

You save time by not having to build your integrations when you use a third-party integration platform. An integration platform is built by integration experts who are aware of the pitfalls in the process and allow you to quickly prevent and troubleshoot issues.

Apart from the numerous technological advantages, a strong third-party platform may provide Marketo with several key additions:

• Better lead quality
• Better campaign messaging targeting
• Single source for all lead information in one system 
• Ability to monitor leads from initial contact to signed contract
• Automation of tasks that saves time, money, and prevents human errors

Understanding Marketo Integrations

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, businesses rely on various software and platforms to execute their marketing strategies effectively. Integrations refer to the seamless connection and data exchange between different software applications or platforms, allowing them to work together harmoniously. In the context of Marketo, integrations enable the marketing automation platform to collaborate with other tools and systems, streamlining workflows, enhancing data accuracy, and automating repetitive tasks.

Key Reasons Why Integrations Are Crucial for Marketing Operations

Data Synchronization: Integrations facilitate the smooth transfer of data between Marketo and other systems, ensuring consistency across customer information, leads, and campaign performance metrics. This synchronization helps marketing teams make data-driven decisions and create personalized experiences for customers.

Streamlined Workflows: By integrating Marketo with complementary tools like CRM systems, social media platforms, and content management systems, marketers can streamline their workflows and eliminate manual data entry. This efficiency boost enables them to focus on creating compelling content and devising innovative marketing strategies.

Enhanced Marketing Insights: Integrations bring together data from different sources, providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This consolidated data allows marketers to gain valuable insights into campaign performance, customer behavior, and overall marketing ROI.

Personalized Customer Experiences: Integrating Marketo with other tools enables marketers to deliver highly targeted and personalized messages to customers based on their preferences, behavior, and interactions with the brand.

Marketing Automation: Integrations empower marketing automation, which significantly reduces manual intervention, automates repetitive tasks, and nurtures leads through the sales funnel more effectively.

Benefits of Integrating Marketo with Other Tools and Platforms

Integrating Marketo with other tools and platforms offers numerous advantages that enhance marketing capabilities and overall business success:

Expanded Marketing Reach: Integrations allow marketers to extend their reach to various channels, reaching customers where they are most active and responsive.

Comprehensive Data Insights: By combining data from Marketo with data from other systems, marketers gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and interactions across multiple touchpoints.

Cross-Platform Campaign Optimization: Integrating Marketo with other platforms enables cross-platform campaign optimization, ensuring consistent messaging and experiences for customers regardless of the channel.

Increased Efficiency: Automation through integrations reduces manual tasks, increases productivity, and allows marketing teams to focus on strategy and creativity.

Enhanced Lead Nurturing: Integrating Marketo with CRM systems enables seamless lead handoff to the sales team and ensures that prospects receive personalized nurturing throughout their buyer's journey.

5 Best Marketo Integrations for Improved Operations

The best Marketo integrations for your business will be determined by your current tools and preferences. You, too, may build up a Marketo integration that saves you time without having to add too many. Just the correct Marketo integrations are required. 

If you ask us, we would recommend the following five best Marketo integrations:

1. Google Sheets

If you find yourself manually updating your marketing data in Marketo and in the popular spreadsheet tool, Google Sheets, separately, you can save time by integrating Google Sheets with Marketo.

You can complete a wide range of marketing activities using advanced Google Sheets tactics—all for free. Competitor research, A/B testing results management, and content planning are just a few of our favorites. Thus, establish a seamless workflow between your Google Sheets and Marketo.

Since Google Sheets does not seem to have a direct integration with Marketo, thus you can connect the two platforms using an automation provider like Zapier or Automate.io.

Connecting Google Sheets with Marketo using one of these technologies usually entails the following steps:

• Use the automation service to connect your Google Sheets and Marketo accounts.
• Select a trigger action, such as adding a row to a Google Sheet.
• Choose an action for the service to take when the first action occurs, such as establishing a Marketo lead.

2. Slack

Slack is the lifeblood of internal communications in many companies. It has distinct discussion and direct message channels for large and small-scale correspondence. Marketo may be connected to this platform to make marketing communications a breeze.

Marketo and Slack are connected via webhooks. You can design and trigger anything you would do in Marketo using fairly simple messaging guidelines from Slack. The major advantage of this [connection] is that you'll send fewer alert emails to your team or corporation.

You can send a Slack message to your reps instead of sending them an email when a new opportunity is given to them. Also, when advertising a new product to your clients, instead of contacting the entire organization via email, you may send a general slack alert to everyone at once.

3. Zapier

Zapier connects apps and automates tasks. You can make an action in one app and trigger another action in a different app once you link Zapier to all the apps you use. Users may simply combine a variety of digital products with a pier without having to know how to code. Zapier employs "zaps" to initiate activities in one system in response to events in another.

The tool can automatically upload attachments from your Gmail inbox to your Google Drive. Zapier makes it easy to connect various apps with Marketo, such as:

• Gmail
• Facebook Ads
• Calendar
• Trello
• Stripe
• HubSpot
• Shopify

You can integrate Zapier with Marketo in a few basic steps:

• Set up the Marketo REST API according to the instructions in the help center.
• When generating a new "zap," select the Marketo app.
• Enter the Marketo account information that Zapier has asked for.

4. Optimizely 

Optimizely makes it possible for you to A/B test your landing pages, checkout funnels, product pages, and mobile sites. You can see how little changes on your page influence how your audience interacts with it. Also, you can work on improving the productivity of your landing page based on the findings.

Marketo allows you to manage your landing pages, creative assets, and A/B testing, whereas Optimizely provides more A/B testing options for those resources. It's never a bad idea to have more data and analytics skills, especially when it comes to A/B testing.

Through an HTML snippet, Optimizely interfaces with Marketo form pages. If you've never worked with HTML before, this may appear hard, but it's just a matter of careful copying and pasting.

5. Salesforce

Salesforce, one of the most widely used customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, allows you to keep track of client interactions and connect with those clients. It allows users to send emails directly from the platform, thereby tracking and updating the account to reflect the latest email action. 

Besides, Salesforce helps keep track of your interactions so you can strengthen your customer relationships and follow up with leads to convert them.

Marketo matches your content message to fit the conversion stage, while Salesforce helps you better understand your clients and their position in the sales cycle.

If you want to streamline your sales process, integrating Marketo with Salesforce's strong CRM is a must.

The Salesforce-Marketo integration setup process differs based on whether you have an Enterprise/Unlimited or Professional account, but it generally involves the following steps:

• Salesforce should be updated to include the Marketo fields Score, Acquisition Program, and Acquisition Date.
• In Marketo, create a Salesforce user.
• Start permanent sync in Marketo with that Salesforce user.

How to Choose the Right Integrations for Your Marketo Instance

Assessing Your Marketing Needs and Objectives

Selecting the appropriate integrations for your Marketo instance requires a thorough assessment of your marketing needs and objectives. Begin by conducting a comprehensive Marketing Process Audit, analyzing every aspect from lead generation to customer retention. Identify any pain points, inefficiencies, or gaps in your marketing workflows that could benefit from integrating Marketo with other tools and platforms.

Next, clearly define your marketing objectives and what you hope to achieve through Marketo integrations. Whether your focus is on enhancing lead nurturing, improving customer segmentation, or accurately tracking ROI, having well-defined goals will serve as a guiding force in your integration decisions.

Identify the core platforms and tools that your marketing team heavily relies on, such as CRM systems, content management systems, analytics platforms, social media management tools, and more. Understanding these foundational elements will help you identify which integrations are most crucial for your marketing operations.

Research Marketo's integration partners and prioritize those that align with your marketing objectives and complement your current toolset. Consider factors like the popularity, reputation, and track record of these integrations to make informed decisions.

Anticipate your future marketing needs and evaluate how potential integrations will support your business's growth. Opt for solutions that offer scalability and flexibility to adapt to your evolving marketing strategies as your business expands.

Compatibility and Technical Considerations

Verify API Compatibility: Check if the platforms you wish to integrate with Marketo offer well-documented APIs and support seamless data exchange with Marketo's API.

Data Mapping and Field Matching: Ensure that data fields in Marketo and the integrated platforms align correctly to prevent data discrepancies and synchronization errors during integration.

Evaluate Technical Expertise: Assess your team's technical capabilities to determine if you have the necessary resources to handle integration setup and ongoing maintenance. Consider seeking guidance from experts or utilizing integration platforms that simplify the integration process.

Understand Integration Complexity: Evaluate the complexity of each integration and whether it aligns with your team's skillset. Some integrations may require extensive development effort, while others can be achieved with minimal coding.

Analyze Data Volume and Performance: Assess the data volume that will flow through the integrations and ensure it meets the performance requirements of your marketing operations.

Marketo Integrations Best Practices

Here are some of the best Marketo integration practices to follow:

Batching

When executing inserts or updates, records should be aggregated into as few transactions as possible to provide the greatest speed for your integrations. When extracting records from a data store for submission, rather than making a request for each modification, the records should always be aggregated before submission.

Acceptable Latency

Many, if not all, of the decisions you make when developing your Marketo integration, will be influenced by your latency tolerances, or the maximum amount of time that can pass before submitting an API call. Marketo offers a variety of methods and configuration options that are appropriate for various use cases and latency classes.

Daily Limits

Each API-enabled Marketo instance has a daily allocation of at least 10,000 REST API requests, but more frequently 50,000 or more, as well as 500MB or more of Bulk Extract capacity. While more daily capacity can be purchased as part of a Marketo subscription, the common restrictions of Marketo subscriptions should be considered in your application design.

Capacity is shared among all API services and users in a given instance. It's essential to avoid making duplicate requests and batching records into as few calls as feasible. Marketo's bulk import APIs, which are accessible for Leads/Persons and Custom Objects, is the most efficient approach to import records. Bulk Extract for Leads and Activities is also available from Marketo.

Caching

The following results are usually cached for at least a day:

• Results from Describe operations
• Partitions 
• Activity Types

Caching specific asset categories, such as programs, emails, and folders is also ideal for some use cases, such as lead or activity record data augmentation.

Marketo API Integration Testing 

Once you have integrated the API, you must rigorously test it. Marketo API integration testing ensures the smooth functioning and reliability of the integration between Marketo and other systems. Here you will need to validate the API endpoints, verifying data synchronization at every stage, and assess the overall functionality of the integrated systems. You can identify and address errors, bugs, or issues by thoroughly testing your integrations. The accuracy and integrity of the data exchanged between systems are important for the overall outcome. 

Conclusion

Marketo is a wonderful tool, especially when combined with the correct Martech stack. The right Marketo connections can help you improve lead velocity and lead attack time by making your digital interactions smoother, bringing sales and marketing closer together and more coordinated. 

Need help with Marketo Integrations instances with your preferred tools? Please write to us at info@growthnatives.com or call our toll-free number +1 855-693-4769.