My Top Picks for the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit 2014

It might be a bit early but my bags are packed and I am ready to join the thousands of other marketers heading to the Marketo Summit this year. I’ll admit, I like to be well prepared for trips and hate forgetting things last minute—call it OCD, but I prefer “detailed oriented.” I am excited to see old friends and new folks join the Marketing Nation, and I know that the new venue at Moscone West will be outgrown in just a few years. It reminds me of my first Dreamforce when it too was just at Moscone West, but now takes over the whole city. Amazing!

As I’m going through and lining up my agenda, there are a few sessions that IMHO can’t be missed. Here are my top 5 picks.

1. Converting Trial Users to Paying Customers (April 8th at 4:30pm)

Description: You get lots of leads filling out your form and you’re tracking all trial downloads in Marketo, fantastic! How do you know if they have installed your trial yet? Discover how using Marketo’s API, creating a few custom fields, a data base and an API service can help connect the dots and give sales better visibility into trial product usage they never had before. Allowing sales to convert better engaged leads in to paying customers.

Two Cents: By now your company is in the early stages of planning a free trial offer, or already has some version of a trial beyond demo-ware. This topic creates passionate debates between engineering and marketing teams. We’re seeing an incredible amount of automation tailored to creating a unique trial experience for each user. One Digital Pi client automated 95% of their customer outreach with one-to-one sales touches based completely on the consumption and stage data from their trial process. The results were impressive: 20% increase in product activation and 26% ASP, without increasing headcount.

2. *Champion Series – Fun with Webhooks (April 8th at 10:00am)

Description: Introduced last year, Webhooks in Marketo are an easy and powerful way to share your Marketo data with external systems–especially those without formal integration with Marketo. However, many users have been afraid to experiment with Webhooks, thinking they are too complex or not useful. This session will help you understand basic concepts and show you new ways to leverage your data.

Key Takeaways:

  • The basics of Webhooks: What they are, how they work
  • When you may want to use a Webhook
  • Relationship between external APIs and Marketo Webhooks
  • Several Case Studies demonstrating the use of Web hooks

Two Cents: This sounds very promising and I’m excited to see other examples of Webhooks. If you haven’t looked into this, it’s a must. It’s about taking the Marketo platform up to another level by connecting other systems with it. Extensibility of the Marketo platform is going to be a key driver and differentiator for Marketo moving forward.

3. Marketo & Salesforce.com: Helpful Audits, Alerts, & Workflow for Rapidly Growing Companies (April 8th at 8:00am)

Description: Audits, alerts, and workflow can help keep your database clean, best practices followed, and lead to more consistent reporting. We will go through some examples of everyday problems we have come across that utilized these as solutions, and also review processes you can put into place to help align your marketing operations & sales operations teams within a high-growth organization.

Two Cents: I was fortunate enough in the early days of my career to adopt Salesforce.com (SFDC) and get my hands dirty using the platform, and if you use Marketo, chances are you are also tied into SFDC. These two systems are usually tightly integrated, but require different skill sets to operate. I think it’s critical that anyone using Marketo should also understand some simple and effective ways to optimize the use of SFDC. It just makes perfect sense these days to know how to create a SFDC workflow or understand when to leverage the power of one system vs. another.

4. Essential Techniques for Mobile-First Lead Nurturing (April 8th at 9:00am)

Description: Let’s face it – mobile devices are here to stay and have been adopted everywhere, from college campuses to corporate outbound marketing and as marketers we need to evolve our lead nurturing to address an increasingly mobile world. At a minimum, this means making sure our emails, landing pages, calls to action, and online draws are mobile-friendly, but what comes next? How can you go beyond just accommodating mobile via simple repackaging and reformatting? In this session you will discover how to start thinking about mobile-optimized lead nurturing and understand how to extend your lead-nurturing activities in ways that are uniquely compelling and effective on mobile devices.

Two Cents: We should start seeing more of this come up for the next summit. “Responsive” email and landing page designs are (if not already) part and parcel to any design. Digital Pi is starting to apply this as a standard for clients vs. having them ask for it. Any asset email or landing page created should be responsive. I’m excited to see how mobile is being utilized as part of the engagement medium with constraints in form length and if there are some cool findings in the mobile buyer journey. (A quick shout out to Eric Hollebone who is presenting on this and always pushing the limits.)

5. Using Multiple Product Lines with Marketo (April 9th at 3:00pm)

Description: Have you outgrown your single product instance? Are you implementing or transitioning to a multi-product model? This session will cover the benefits of multi-product implementations as well as tips, tricks, methods and best practices.

Two Cents: This is coming up quite often with our clients that are tracking buyer journeys for different products. When do you know you need a different model and how does one rationalize the reporting data? It will be very interesting to see how Marketo is used to handle 1 vs 300 products.

Lastly, since the sessions are on a first come basis I suggest getting your agenda together early with a first, second or third choice. Here’s a link to the agenda builder: http://events.marketo.com/concierge/cms/sites/summit14sponsors/login.html

I hope to see you all at some of the social events. It’s going to be a blast and don’t forget to sign up for the first ever Marketo Fun Walk/Run to shed a few calories before drinking them back. http://pages2.marketo.com/FunRunWalk_Reg.html

See you soon!

Your marketing technology experts.

At Digital Pi, we use technology to connect revenue to marketing efforts. We fuse marketing strategies, processes, data and applications to make marketing technology solutions work for clients' businesses.

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