A brief overview of Marketo’s summer 2024 updates:
- The Interactive Webinars and Dynamic Chat Conversational Flows were enhanced
- Better webinar room management
- A more consistent inferred data for marketers
- A refined LinkedIn LaunchPoint integration
Dynamic Chat Conversational Flows enhancements
Marketo’s Conversational Flow - designed to trigger an action based on a user’s specific action, clicking on a call-to-action button, upon page load, time spent on a page, etc - has now the option to create multiple steps in a flow.
This makes it easier for marketers to sketch the same transition flow to trigger through other channels, like forms and Landing Pages and to map the same flow across all the Dialogues that have that goal.
Reminder: the Stream Designer for Conversational Flows is nearly identical to the one for Dialogues.
This is a good opportunity to remind you of the differences between Dialogues and Conversational Flows.
Interactive Webinars now have custom templates for Room Layouts. This is awesome!
Interactive video conferencing has been a powerful tool for marketers for quite a while now, and Marketo’s Interactive Webinars, one of the most encompassing dedicated tools out there, got even better. Marketers are now able to save a lot of time by using the easy-to-use custom templates feature.
Marketing teams who rely on webinar events should take advantage of the multiple prebuilt and easy-to-customize meeting templates, where attendees are able to enjoy perks such as computer and file sharing, chat, broadcast audio and video, or participate in any interactive online activities one could think of.
Be careful! The Interactive Webinars are not automatically recorded! After the webinar begins, marketers need to click the drop-down next to the name of the webinar and select Record Session. Another important thing to note is that the host needs to manually end the recording or press the End session for all button. However, the recording will automatically stop 10 minutes after the last attendee leaves the room.
Did anyone say analytics? The Dashboard tab has 4 widgets, where marketers can see all the stats they need thanks to the Adobe Connect capabilities:
- Event Program Status
- Attendance, where we can check out the attendance duration of every single attendee compared to the overall webinar duration
- Poll Performance
- Click and File Download Activity
An engagement dashboard is also available, both for live sessions and for the on-demand ones.
There are 6 types of metrics available:
- Event Summary
- Engagement
- Interactions
- On-demand activity
- Participant activity
- Download reports
Interactive Webinar Room Management
An Interactive Webinar room - powered by Adobe Connect - is the virtual space where the online events happen and where Marketo stores the uploaded content and recordings from webinars.
The rooms have 2 main tabs, Content and Recordings, to make it easier to manage all the necessary assets needed for a webinar.
A more consistent inferred data for marketers
It’s no easy task to coordinate large marketing teams to have the same data collection workflow and guidelines, so Marketo made inferred field data consistent across all collection points.
As of June 2024, the data source used to populate inferred fields when a person is created following a form-fill with no prior web activity has been updated to use the same data source as other person-collection methods.
A refined LinkedIn LaunchPoint integration
As LinkedIn upgraded their Marketing APIs used by Marketo Engage LinkedIn integrations, we will need to re-authenticate all LinkedIn LaunchPoint services in our Admin section, in the LaunchPoint menu, between July 26 and December 15, 2024, to avoid service interruption.
A crucial detail to keep in mind is that the LinkedIn account needs access to all the LinkedIn Business Accounts.
Also, the service automatically expires one year after authorization, so we need to use the Re-Authorize option.
Salesforce Lead and Contact Field Deprecation
As of June 2024, Marketo is deprecating the Salesforce Lead and Contact fields, but this doesn’t mean that we’ll not be able to retain the same information on your Leads, Contacts, and Reports in SFDC.
Marketo leadership explained in a blog post why they took this action:
- Discarding the need to export to the Lead and Contact objects frees up bandwidth and API Calls, leading to fewer SFDC API credits used and improved processing speeds.
- Fewer direct object interactions will translate into fewer validation errors or permission issues for our SFDC - Marketo-connected user.
- These changes will also take off some weight from the data infrastructure, by preventing unnecessary duplication of core data points and minimizing reliance on related objects for data flow.
What Marketo users can do:
- Create new Report Types for Leads and Contacts with or without Touchpoints.
- Create reports which capture the functionality of any existing report that utilizes the removed fields
- Remove Lead/Contact FT/LC and add Touchpoint fields
- Delete any pre-existing reports that utilized the removed fields from the Lead/Contact object to no longer reference those fields.
Which one of these do you think will help you the most with your marketing automation projects? We are eager to talk to you about it or talk through any of Marketo’s ins and outs.