51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

Transcript

Okay. Perfect. We’re recording now. All right, guys, I’m going to kick off now because we have some housekeeping to go through before we even get down. But welcome to our May 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Mark How to Engage champion office hours. We have four incredible champions. On to answer all of your questions today. Some things that you guys have asked online and if you’re just joining I mentioned a minute ago, please use the chat button, continue to ask any questions you have that pop up during this. If we don’t get to your questions, just know that we have had a lot come through. We always do when it comes to office hours. We try to get through as many as we can. So. Well, I’ll keep this housekeeping part short and sweet, but if we don’t get to your question, just know that we will have it recorded and hopefully will. We’ll make some content or ask, ask it in another office hours. So continue to attend these. We love engaging with you guys this way. So yeah, we’ll dive into housekeeping now. Um, next slide. Yep. Thank you. So we have some just user rules for our user groups. If you guys have been to any user groups, you’ll know these. No self-promotion or pitching. This is just for us to share ideas. And so don’t don’t contact anybody who’s on here sharing their ideas without any kind of permission or consent before. And if anybody shares information here, make sure not to share that outside of this. So we just want to keep everything safe and a safe place to share ideas amongst us all. Next one, And then we are recording this. So you guys know you’ll be able to watch this back. Well, it’ll show up on our mug page because this is being recorded. If you don’t want to be part of the recording, you can leave. Or if you have any questions at all and watch this back and and reach out to us to ask us any questions then. But if you do have any questions, you can email advocacy at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Dot com for how the recording is used and then you guys should all be members of our chapter by registering for this office hours. But if you’re not, make sure that you join. And then there’s also many other chapters, some local some virtual that you can join as well. So stay connected with all the user groups that are available. But definitely with this one and we’ll let you know when the next ones are coming up. Speaking of the next one, we have one on the 30th of June. We will have champs join again and discuss best practices, share their tips. And like I said, it’s a live Q&A, so ask all your questions. And that’s like now so you can RSVP for it. And then there’s other opportunities for within Mugs and for people using Marketo, Marketo users. There’s a webinar recording. So here we have a QR code code for you that you can watch this back. It’s really, really good, especially if you’re diving into API work and working with Mark Meadows API. This is going to be really key webinar for you to watch so you can go there to get that recording. It’s available on demand now for you. And then there’s also like I mentioned, multiple user groups for you guys to be involved in. So here are some of the local ones in the States. And then on the next slide as well, we have some international ones for you and I wanted to mention that we actually do have along with these office hours, we do a regular deep dive where we really dive into a subject and sorry, I’m now going backwards, but it was on that first page when it says the US. Yeah, the North America ones down at the bottom is the next 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ deep dive as well. So you’ll want to get plugged in for that one. And then last but not least, I’m going to introduce you guys to our chance that we have our panelists. We have I’ll be your moderator. I’m Courtney Edwards Jones I’m a two time champ and have been working with Marketo for six plus years now. And I’m a master architect. And yeah, I just love diving into anything. Marketing operations, marketing operations, marketing automation, the strategic side of things and working with different integrations and APIs. That’s a bit about me, but Sarah, take it away. Hey everyone, I am the senior director of Marketing Technology and Operations at Pluralsight. It’s a mouthful, but basically what that means is that I run our marketing ops teams outside of our web side of things. So I’ve been a Marketo user for about ten years. I think at this point in everything from a team of one to now running a team of eight at Pluralsight. So I just love to dig into everyone’s use case and know like how your particular situation in your company kind of influences how you use Marketo. So thanks. Perfect. Jimmy, give me maybe unmute and we can’t. Hear you or you’re not on mute. It looks like a great introduction though. Don’t worry. Let’s go on. Chris, can you take it over and we’ll try and figure out if we can troubleshoot Jimmy. Sounds good. My name is Chris Kelly. I am a senior consultant at Blast ex Consulting Event. Essentially, I handle pretty much all the marketing, our MarTech engineering and all that peace I’ve been working inside of Marketo specifically for about five plus years now. I am also a master architect, first year champ loving it, completely loved it, diving into the super technical and edge cases, that type of stuff. But in general, answer any questions. That type thing. Perfect. And Brittany. There we go. Can you hear me? We got that. Yep. Oh, okay. I’m Brittany Young. I’m actually a director at Digital Marketing at Prudential. There was a little typo with my title, but I’ve been in Marketo for seven years now, I think seven, eight years. And most recently my role was at Prudential is focused on our digital strategy for our advisors, and I just love being a part of the business and being able to really use Marketo for all of our customer journeys. So amazing. Sorry about that typo. I’m so sorry. All right, Jimmy, are you there? Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Perfect. Okay. Sorry about that, guys. My my headset has this funny little mute feature that won’t unmute unless I unplug it and plug it back in. So, you know, just like with all great technical challenges, just try to restart it. Right? But yeah, I’m a I’m a two time champ. I’ve been with Verizon for four years now as a principal engineer for their marketing automation platform. So I do a lot of work in Marketo. I do work in ADP and other sort of connected systems that move data throughout the organization. So I’ve got a pretty wide swath of experience out there. I’ve worked for software organizations, nonprofits, financial institutions, Verizon, obviously. So I have a pretty varied background, like some of my contemporaries here. You know, I’ve been a team of one, I’ve managed teams, I’ve been part of large organizations. So, you know, I really like to see the nuance and implementations and sort of how you can make these systems work for your business. And hopefully in the sessions today we can contribute some information in that vein. Perfect. All right, guys, let’s dive in then. Like I said, we have so many questions to get through. We kind of started to group them together. So we’re going to start off with some general best practices. Just things to remind you, if you’re already doing them, what’s kind of a good way to do and what are ways that we like to do things? Or if you’re just now starting out, these will be great ways to start implementing great things, to start implementing in your instance. So, Brittany, I was actually going to start with you and I was going to ask you how best you optimize marketing with forms. Forms are always there’s tons of questions around them. I am like a Forbes nerd. I will just say that I think one of the best ways to optimize forms is having branching logic, like especially for for marketing and wanting to streamline where the data in that form is getting routed to. That’s one thing I’m very picky about on my forms and also like have an open text box that I know that could be like a blessing and a curse. But I always encourage people to have at least one open text box on their form because you actually gain a lot of insight from people filling it out. And I know that was one way I optimized the generic contact us form. We had it one company and it started off where people could literally put anything they wanted in the form. I added the branching logic in the back end and then from the open text box, text box, I was able to identify other like use cases of audiences that we weren’t necessarily addressing with our branching logic. So that would definitely be my tips for optimizing that. That’s great. And then continuing down with some best practices, is there a way to track leads from a campaign without using UTM codes? And give me I’m going to hand this one over to you. Oh, okay, great. Yeah. So it really depends on the context of of what you’re talking about. So, you know, if you use it in sort of an omni channel approach, depending on the systems that you use, you may use, you know, different identifiers that extend beyond typical UTM parameters. So it’s it’s a little bit of a sort of Yes byte answer to that question. Like, yes, you can definitely, you know, track records from your campaigns without UTM parameters, but it’s going to be a little more of an indirect pass in a lot of cases. And you’re going to have to do some stitching between platforms, right? So if you know, you’re using some type of CDP or something else that’s capturing that information, it’s a little bit easier because you have sort of a centralized repository and, you know, you kind of have a place where all of these different elements like your socials and your display and all that can sort of meet in the middle there and you can do your tracking that way. There are other sort of query string parameters that people use. It’s probably good to sort of dispel the misnomer about, you know, UTM parameters. A lot of folks think of them very statically, right? Like you sort of have these I can’t remember like the original standard UTM parameters. I think there was about five or six of them. Right? You have like term and source and medium and and so on. Right. You can actually put practically anything that you want within the query string and use that for your tracking purposes. So going outside of UTM, you can still use that query string to kind of get really creative with how you’re tracking things throughout the, you know, the system, right? I would say the most obvious use case though, is when you’re meeting in the middle for those other channels, like if it’s socials or if it’s display, direct mail, whatever, wherever you’re gathering that data is where you can sort of perform that that joining and track where people are either, you know, journey data, you know, from Marketo or Salesforce or what have you, but you can sort of marry it all in the middle and get that campaign performance that you’re looking for. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point too, when you’re talking about how you can add anything in to the query string, people can get creative to what their what their business needs are. And I think sometimes when you’re just starting to use you teams, you kind of think it’s narrowed down to those those five like you mentioned that we all know and have been around, but it doesn’t have to be. So I really like that We did get a really great question about forms and we did get that one. I just wanted to call out that we did get that one. I probably should have paired those together when I was asking them. That one came in as well. So I’m going to come back to you before I come back to that, which is moving to global forms. Before I come back to that one, I just kind of want to get through some of these best practices, tips and tricks that we have here real quick. So, Sarah, I’m going to come to you next and ask your tips and tricks for maintaining demographic scoring. Yeah, so demographic scoring is great. I’ve also seen it. I’ve had some nightmares with it as well. If it’s not implemented correctly. So, you know, I would always recommend that, you know, you have demographic scoring be if you have a standard like behavioral demographic scoring model as well. Just to start there, if you have the demographic scoring, make that part of your initial processing. When you have new leads come in, you know, make sure you have all the data that feeds into the demographic score before you assess that so that you can make sure that it’s as accurate as possible for all new leads. But then in terms of maintaining it, you know, my first implementation of the scoring model, I made the mistake of just continuing to update the score when someone’s title changed, for example. So congratulations, you went from director to BP. Unfortunately, instead of having the four points for being a VP, instead of the three points for being a director, now you have seven points because we just added on top of it, right? So I think making sure that when you’re adjusting the demographic score that you are reevaluating the score holistically, or at least for that particular data point and not just adding on top of it, you can, you know, keep an eye on this as well. If you monitor what people scores are, you’ll see pretty quickly when you have demographic scores that are above the norm as well. That’s a good way to kind of see that type of behavior. But also, you know, make sure they’re especially outside of the initial processing, I think, you know, make sure that they are batch campaigns. You don’t you don’t need to, you know, to trigger off of them. And especially when you have have some of this data updated, there will usually be like a title or some other additional information that’s like more than one demographic attribute updated at one time. So you don’t want to make my second implementation mistake where you have the you know, you you’ve learned that you’ve learned to reevaluate the whole thing, but then you reevaluate multiple times within one session. And so you’re just kind of clearing it and your readers are looking at sales insights and they are saying, What the hell is going on with this scoring? Like, why is it like zero +30 plus three? And just because it goes over a number of times in one day. So, you know what I’ve learned from my past mistakes Definitely keep on keeping matches and get it. Also reduce the stress on your Marketo instance to now. I love I love that. Sarah That’s definitely a great insight because that’s definitely something I got burned by as well is just the constant updating and never holistically readjusting To that end. One Hayley for ease of use so you don’t go crazy because of just a random number somewhere that you forgot to update. If you can, I would suggest trying to make any of those edits based off of a value, a a my variable. So you can just go to that top level, change it in one spot and then wherever that is being used, anywhere within your scoring demographic or not, you only have to change it in that one location and everywhere it’s being used will be updated correctly. 100%. Yeah, Always use tokens, always centralized scoring, don’t have scoring. And like every individual campaign they’re coming in from or new thing. Yeah great great. I don’t care. I think I’m like a. Oh. I will never ever stop sharing about how much I think people should tokenize where they can. It just makes it so much easier. And definitely, like you said, having centralized scoring versus it pulling in from everywhere when you want to make updates. And we had a question come in in the chat that’s around scoring. So it’s a great time to do it, which is what I was saying before with forums. I should have pulled that right in, but we will get to that global Forum question Don’t worry. But following on from this, when someone else do you zero out the person score or do you set it back to what their demographic score is and what’s best practice? Or does it depend? I mean, I would always say it depends. Yeah, I would say it depends to for sure. Yeah, I, I personally don’t zero out their score. I think you know, we when, when they well you do also want to make sure that they actually like meet that mutual threshold. Some of it depends on you know like the will have have different types of behavioral activities that will eventually get to that mutual threshold. Let’s let’s pretend like we’re all using 100 as as that threshold. But then there are also some like contact sales activities, make sure that those are like either equaling 100 or, you know, at least adding up to 100 there. But I generally wait until after they have been just positioned by the by the sales team to to adjust their score. Yeah. I generally like to run to K models to bring that score down sort of I guess you could say organically. But what I’ll do is I will sort of throttle their, their pathway, whatever that may be, in to CRM so that they’re not sort of either re triggering whatever internal process sales has to sort of notify them that, you know, you have this lead or, you know, depending on your setup just completely exclude them from that process for X amount of time. I, I like that just because you don’t start somebody all the way back from zero, right. I mean, just, you know, just because somebody does it make it all the way through the sales process that you know, that happens for myriad reasons. Right. And if you especially if you have like a very compact sales cycle, you don’t want to sort of make them jump through all of the hoops all over again. If, say, in a month or two months, they could be really a genuine prospect again and write back with sales and maybe closing a deal there. So that’s that’s the approach I take. But it’s different for everybody. And you really have to really just like with everything having to do with scores, you really need to partner with sales, right? To see what makes sense there, because it’s different for every business and every team. Yeah. To build on that the way and the reason I’m wary about doing out scores is because it removes information and it doesn’t matter how that information is brought in or what have you. Just having that information really lets you dig into everything about the process. So for example, one of my clients, they had their whole scoring set up and getting information across, but there is a particular sticking point and they couldn’t figure out what was going on, but being able to excuse me, being able to follow along and see where the scoring was happening, we were able to understand that their process was not set up as they expected or they didn’t think of a certain edge case. And if we were to zero out all that information, we would lose the valuable data that we used in order to figure out why are most of our leads not making it into sales when they should be right? All the demographic information, all the interaction should say that this person has a legit lead. Why isn’t it happening? So in general of getting rid of information or zeroing out, I tend to avoid that if I can. But like everybody else said, it really depends. That’s really good. We have a lively, lively conversation around scoring in the chat as well. So I just want to ask a couple more questions and then we’ll jump back into some of the questions that were that were sent to him when you guys all registered. But and there’s a lot of information on scoring online as well, and we can put up some resources following this around that so that once we release this video, we can get more resources in there for you guys. But one thing I did want to touch on is because somebody has a couple of good questions about Ask.fm and not everybody will have used that. So I wondered if anybody wanted to jump in with information on the core stages that they would set up in our CRM for a B2B model, and then maybe what KPIs you’re tracking at those stages as well? We’re not. It’s okay. This is don’t worry about it, don’t worry about what we can do is So I’m in the middle of actually building out a new lifecycle for us at the moment and diving into what our stages are in our lifecycle stages and everything. So I’ll pull some together, some stuff together on that, like I said, and when we published the video of this, we can add some information in there for you to go and read. But diving back into the questions, Chris coming to you for the next one, we got several server questions all around on deduplication. Now Marketo obviously dupes where it can, but it isn’t always perfect as we know. So how can you detect when a duplicate has been created and how? What can you do in place to set good standards to be able to do with that and and how you do that within smart campaigns? Or do you use the CRM or how do you do that? Yeah, a lot of a lot of really great questions about this one. And I know it’s a really common issue. So first off, I would like to say that there is so much information online about this that you can really dig into to try and find something that will really fit your specific industry or your specific needs. And another thing, there’s some information coming out for in product just by trying to bring a lot of these questions to the forefront, right? So everybody can try and get some of those best practices. But in general, how do you detect actually Marketo has a system smart list that will automatically search your database for an email. And the reason it does email is because that is by default. Marketo is unique identifier and it will essentially say if you share the same email, you are a duplicate person. So obviously that will depend on your specific instance. If your instance has for whatever reason, a requirement for duplicate emails, you might need to try and set up something as specific or a custom variable as a different unique identifier. So there’s a lot of documentation or communication about that. But to answer that specific question inside of the database table, if you go in your system, smart lists, there is a duplicate possible duplicate smart list. So that’s how you can detect them. The other pieces that you can do is create your own smart list. So look for information that you know should be unique. And you can say there’s a specific filter that you can say possible duplicate, and then you can choose that variable that you would like to use and then that field that you would like to use and then be able to check for your specific instance. If that is a duplicate handling duplicates. There are so, so many ways that you can go about it because Marketo is just that nice to you, right? Gave you all the bullets and allow you to shoot here and if you’re so inclined. But there are, there are a lot of different ways going about it. So it really depends how technical you are, what resources you have available. If you need to stay specifically in Marketo or if you’re able to utilize something like an IPS tool or CRM, or if you are able to create your own API, that would be the gold standard for trying to eliminate as many duplicates as possible. Is having an API set all the information in Marketo as you are able to choose specifically how data enters and on what parameters data comes in. This is a very technical, meaty subject, so I’m trying to keep it higher level, but there is a couple of different options so you can do it manually. So the same place where you found the duplicates in the first place, you can actually go in and start manually mashing them together, right? You can choose. I want this to be the master record. I like all of this information and then take some of the updates from the other possible duplicates. So if you are someone who needs real specific information and all of this information is is really important and you want to be really careful about how you merge going in and doing it manually is the most time intensive, but it’s also the way that you can for 100% sure know that it’s merging the way that you want it. There are more automated ways or one you can actually pay Marketo to have a service where Marketo will come and do it for you. You can set up how you want those leads to win. Who who is going to win what and for what reason? Things like that. You can start building out your own. Okay, so this is when you really need to be customized and you like being in there. It’s not a black box. So you can understand exactly why your data is doing exactly what it’s doing. So you can do that using a high pass tool. So it’s going to be more whizzy wig, it’s going to be less in code, it’s going to be more user friendly. It’s not always the most customizable for what you’re trying to do. That depends on the service that you choose. But CRMs are also a great way to do it. One thing I would like to say, having implemented quite a few instances, is Marketo. Always, always, always, always treats the native integration with your CRM as the system of truth. So let’s say you’re moving from some sort of legacy map, HubSpot, you know, and you’re trying to make sure you don’t lose any of that information. Well, wait, don’t bring that information in until you have done your CRM integration first and then bring in the information from your legacy, because Marketo is just going to accept. So if you have an entire list of 100,000 people from your legacy instance, and then you bring in your CRM, your salesforce, what have you, it’s just going to accept. It’s not going to check automatically to see if that information is there. I’ve had many clients had this issue before. It’s not fun, so make sure you’re doing things in order. But that’s actually the majority of where you’re going to see your duplicates is from people processes or coming in from your CRM. So for example, if your sales team enters that new prospect, that new lead manually and they don’t check to make sure that Chris Kelly already exists inside of the CRM, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to be brought in anyway and it’s going to create that duplicate because the CRM always wins. So I can go on and on and on about this, as you could possibly tell, but I’m going to get the floor back. But there’s there’s so much meat to this question that I’m happy to have any conversation about it. I’m sure the rest of the champs have their own experiences, horror stories, what have you, their own tips and tricks. But I’ll release the floor back to the group now. That’s great. I was going to pause there to see if anybody wanted to dive in. But on this, in this threat of anyways, having duplicates, having clean data, the best ways to do that. I think it’s a good time to talk about how how do we keep our database clean. Brittany, do you have any tips and tricks for us on that? Yeah, I’m actually glad, like Chris talked a lot about the duplicate thing because I didn’t know if that was part of that question because I was going to say that’s its own beast. But for other things. On keeping your database clean I like to at a past company I had to clean up a few instances and at the same time because I was managing like four different ones. So one of the things I did to like just tackle that is create categories for what I wanted to clean. Like was it bad email addresses, Was it really old data? Like, you know, people that haven’t engaged in a certain amount of time? Was it even data that was just like missing, you know, being able to see was was I missing a lot of job titles, company names, things like that? So I created all of those categories and then created smart lists to really analyze and be able to see how how many people fall into that category. Then from there, I’m a big fan of using people performance reports with custom columns, so a lot of that’s how I really did that analysis. I took the people performance report as like my name that like my database cleanup and each of those smart lists I reference as a custom column. And then from there I like to keep like a clean up program. And within that program, any of the smart campaigns, smart leads or static lists that are going to be a part of that cleanup. I like to keep it all in that program, especially if I have to go back and reference anything. But that’s that’s really where I would say to get started is just understanding what are those categories of data that you need to clean up. I was on I was on mute. That’s a perfect one of the categories that I think is always good is to keep track of your subscribers as well. Obviously, from there you won’t have to be worried about cleaning up to send out your emails and whatnot. But we did have a really good question that came in about that, about migrating data. So again, in this thread of like keeping our data organized and how we’re doing that, if you’re migrating from a different marketing automation platform into Marketo. Sarah, what are some of the best ways to kind of keep track of of those unsubscribed and migrate them over? Yeah, I think before you migrate them over, I think you need to have a conversation with the business around how you want to handle them. If you’re going from one system to another, especially a lot, some if you if this is part of an acquisition or a merger, for example, you could have people in your in both databases, right. So, you know, have the conversation if they are opted into one but not the other, what do we want to happen there so that you can make sure that, you know, we agree on how how to actually handle them. So but I would say like if you are just moving to a brand new Marketo instance, not already tied to a CRM, I would do that first and make sure that you like you can get them into Marketo however you want to. Easiest way is usually just a list import depending on the size of your database. That may be easier than others, but you know, get your your unsubscribe from from the other system. Import them with unsubscribed equals true and then they’re in Marketo and then get rid of them. Just delete them. You probably don’t need them either, either in your CRM or if you want to keep them. Again, that’s part of the the business conversation. Do you want to keep them or not? But if you can’t email them and they’re not active in your CRM, you probably don’t need them in Marketo. So I’d say let them free, but also make sure that you’re capturing that that unsubscribe information and even when they’re deleted, if that unsubscribe is true, Marketo will keep that durable unsubscribe. So should they come back in through another list, import that data is there and now Marketo can you can take advantage of the durable unsubscribe feature in Marketo. Oh that’s brilliant. So guys, before we kind of turn away from this best practices segment, first of all, thank you. I think we’ve shared so many tips about a few different several different topics as we’ve kind of quick fired our way through best practices. I do want to pull it back to the question we got at the beginning, which I really should have just thrown in at the time. But forms again, we did have a question about what to consider before moving to global forums. And then in the chat somebody just asked as well, like, how do we use the same forms for multiple languages and just any tips around that? Jimmie, do you have some tips for us? So for multiple languages, you know, there’s a there’s a few ways that you can approach that. You know, you can use snippets, you can use individual forms like based on language, you can use personalization within the page itself. So it kind of depends on I know we see that a lot. Like it depends, right? But it really does depend on your individual set up that you have as to, you know, how you’re going to approach that. I think everyone does it a little bit differently and it just, you know, depending on the stack that you have, will sort of determine the route that you go. Personally, I think snippets are a great way of approaching that type of personalization because you can essentially use like, you know, the same block of text and just, you know, have it updated based on, you know, whatever segmentation someone belongs to geographically. The page personalization is also nice and it’s getting better and better as the tech matures, right? So you’re able to do that a little more quickly. There’s a little less of the flashing and stuttering effect that you get within page personalization these days. Obviously, that’s not something that everybody has access to. So that’s something to sort of keep in mind. If it’s something that you guys are considering, you know, getting access to it. If that’s in the cards, that’s a, you know, a method that I personally like. But you can you can really do it any number ways. There’s a lot of options out there. There’s a lot of good documentation with an experience to get self about how you can approach things like language specific personalization. For a fact. Okay guys, I’m going to change up our focus for a little bit. I do want to get to we got a lot of questions around getting more involved with 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Mark, how to engage. There are certifications that we have becoming a champion, so I do want to get to that. But before that, just I have a question for the whole panel around a round robin. Question What is the most underused or valued feature in Marketo and what’s a feature you highly recommend and for what basically, what’s your favorite features? What I want to know if you had to pick. We don’t have favorites. We don’t have favorites. Anybody can jump in and it’s just a free for all chat. I think Velocity scripting is probably one of the most powerful tools within Marketo. It’s rapidly approaching parity with with other things that are, you know, sort of in the works. And there are still new but in terms of like bang for your buck, so to speak, velocity scripting is really great. And you know, for those who don’t know about it, there’s a ton of information on scripting throughout the community. So, you know, you can do a Google search and sort of find out about it. But just sort of in a nutshell, it’s a type of token that allows you to do some really fancy personalization. And not only are you able to personalize based on what’s on the person object, but you can also personalize based on anything that you have stored on your custom objects, which makes things, you know, really powerful. Right? It’s really hard to do that just in a in a a more standard and basic way. So I think velocity scripting is great. They’re sort of a high barrier there because it is relatively technical. You know, the the fancier, the personalization that you’re trying to do in your email content, the more technical gymnastics you’re going to have to do within the coding itself. And yes, there is coding involved. It’s it’s based on Java, but once you sort of get over that hump, it’s really powerful in terms of the types of personalization and customizations you’re able to do. I mean, from languages to limited time offers to, you know, cross-sell opportunities, you can basically build all of your emails on the fly if you want to, using velocity scripts. So that that’s the one for me that is sort of like the shining star at the moment. Yeah, you definitely unlock so much potential in Marketo when you have that. I will say there’s a question on how best to learn Velocity script. You know, there is, like you said, a lot of information on the Community Center blog. I think that’s, you know, probably where a lot of us have at least tried to have together some velocity script. It’s not actually learn it. If if you do want to learn it, there are definitely people who would pay you a lot to come and help them out too. So just, you know, from a career perspective, if you if you feel inclined to do that, definitely can. Is a good market there for for people who really know Velocity script and want to make their mark out to email shine so my you know I’m a token nerd. I think we’re all kind of token nerds here. But definitely, you know, no heavy usage of tokens. I would say a lot of people are using using tokens, nested tokens. Don’t forget about nested tokens. There’s a lot that you can unlock when you have that structure there as well. But one of my favorite features of Marketo is not actually a feature of Marketo. It’s the community right? That’s where you there’s so much information on there, like don’t you know, like the people but also like all, all the information that you can get for from, from other people who have been in the same situation. So yeah, definitely don’t forget about that part. And then I mean, that is one of the best reasons to be a part of Marketo is the community hands down, one of the best communities I’ve ever been part of. But since Sarah and Jimmy took my name, I will go ahead and say that one of the best unused or underutilized, especially when you’re getting started is the product library, the the program library, where you can go and download a best practice library or best practice programs of every type preset ready to go, all of the tokens, all of the content necessary get you started. And it is really, really a great way to jumpstart your learning to get going into Marketo, understanding why you need to do this or I’m missing a step. What is it in is killing me. But yeah, that is just a treasure trove of information. I would say for me, the custom views feature on smart lists. I know a lot of we use like at least I do. I’m always using smart lists to like analyze different sets of data, and so I’m big on having multiple custom views. I’ll have one that has like all of my fields I would need for unsubscribe or all the fields I want to see for like a newly that’s created things like that. So if you haven’t set up custom views before for your smart list, I think that’s an underused one. And I also mentioned before for just analyzing data, especially if you inherited an instance people performance report with custom columns, I will say that again, that will really help you at least get a base understanding of what the heck is going on in your instance. Totally. I would say I’m not a heavy user of the Marketo reports just because I’ve always had something external from Marketo, but the people performance reports just for seeing what is even happening that is is so important. And also on the custom views, I just want to say like I have my custom views, unfortunately we cannot share our custom views across the instance like feature request. But also, you know, when you’re onboarding people, I find it really helpful to have to say like, you know, these are some of the custom views you probably want to set up as well, just kind of make that part of your onboarding process. That’s perfect. All right, guys, I kind of want to change because we’ve had some exciting news this week, which is applications for being a champion for the next year are open now. So I wanted to kind of switch gears and talk. We got several questions about it as well, but talk about becoming a champion, but also talking about the certifications that can lead up to that. So you do have to have some certifications to apply for a champion. And then there’s different ways. So let’s start off with certifications. So Brittany, can you talk us through any resources or tips and tricks you have for passing the business Practice Practitioner Expert Exam? Sure. I highly recommend like Chris mentioned product docs because a lot of times there may be like features that you might not use typically at your organization, but the product docs is everything. Marketo. So I think it’s always good to go over a space, especially for like core pieces of Marketo, whether it be like Smart Lists or what goes in a program, all of that definitely review that. I also know there’s there’s a lot of like quiz there the site quiz has flashcards out there that has been very very helpful for a lot of those kind of like standard questions or like basic questions you might find on the exam. So those are two things that I know I’ve used in the past to help me. Add to add on to that, Brittany on percent agree. But sometimes if you’re lucky or if you reach out to a local mug, you can ask them to try and provide a how do I get ready for the exam sessions and they’ll that’s how I learned. And when I first got started or just searching like previous mug recordings, they usually have something out there where you can do a deep dive of the specific sections on getting started. So I absolutely agree with you, Brittany. And just getting more involved with the Marketo community around you to possibly study together. Right? That’s a great. Idea. I like that. I especially like that I did a study group when I was studying to become an architect, which for the record, you don’t have to hold the architect certificate in to apply to be a champ, but you do need to have the business practitioner expert. But before we kind of get more into how to become a champ on that notice study, study groups, that was really, really helpful. Chris, do you have any other tips because you are also an architect. Any tips as several others are, on what exactly. Of my like, Oh my gosh, So hundred percent get in and try and break Marketo. So that is that is my that is my number one recommendation is get in the system. Try and figure out like set yourself a ridiculous goal and try to engineer or architect your way to it because on a very high level that is what the exam is going to be. It is going to be very nonspecific, but it’s going to ask you questions along the lines of if you were to do X, Y, and Z, how would you do it? And then they would say you would need to first create a smart program, but they won’t tell you what it does. Then you would need another smart program. Then you would need a smart campaign with a custom variable and then they would kind of jumble it all around. So like, you really need to understand the processing of how Marketo will try to do something, but you don’t need to like go into the super nitty gritty of the answer because that is holistically the type of question, the level of question they’re going to be asking for. So if you understand at a really solid level, this is how the data comes into Marketo. This is how a smart list will happen. A smart list will supersede or it will happen before or this process. Or you need to make sure that a certain application, a certain update of information happens before it’s processed somewhere else. So there’s a lot of, I would say, talking about Marketo, trying to utilize, like Courtney said, other people who have gone through it or are preparing to go through it, trying to go through that list, that’s what I did is there’s a list of required information to know. And then I would just talk like brain dump everything with the people around me and say, This is what I think a marketo program would do because of this. What do you guys think? And then like try to hash it out because that really expands just the understanding of Marketo, because think of it in terms of granularity your expert is going to be. You need to go to this exact spot inside of Marketo and you need to choose this exact option to get something to happen. And the architect level is a bit more removed. But it’s it’s an architect, right? You need to understand your processing limits. You need to understand how to set up and how people are going to come into Marketo. Either APIs and things like that. Oh great. Yeah. Udemy has a S Marketo course. That’s great. So I mean, utilize the community is the biggest thing. Talk about it. Ask your mugs to talk about it. Get for me, getting in and trying to break Marketo is how I got through it. The some of the hardest clients that I had had really weird edge cases. Like why are you trying to do that with Marketo? But okay, I mean, but those are the type of clients that got me through it because they forced me to go in, read the documentation, understand it to a really unique degree, and that’s how I got through it. Talking, studying as a as a group, getting into the system, the documentation, seriously, the documentation, I can’t stress it enough. Britney Thank you. But it’s there. The information is there. Don’t feel bad about missing it. The first time since the really hard exam is a really and just a first in general. You can retake it within 24 hours immediately and then you have a week, two week break that they enforce. So at first you don’t succeed. Try, try again. It’s really nice to have it because you don’t have to pay for it again. And they’re free retakes and you don’t have to be on camera for updating your certification. So you have no excuse for staying up to date. Yes. Yes, that’s so true. And I would add real quick, when you’re saying get in and break it, if you have a sandbox, please break that one first before you break your live incident. But if you. Don’t. Yes, good clarification. Chris and I agree. No, that’s really good. Anybody else have any tips for any of the certifications? And then I’ll. Just double down on on like studying as a group. I think when you like, I would definitely divide and conquer. Not only is it less for you to to dig into you, but make sure when you’re doing that you take the pieces you don’t know as well, and that will force you to really solidify that. And then the act of teaching will help you really solidify that knowledge as well. So you share the burden, focus on on your weaknesses and not your strengths, because that’s what you actually need to focus on. And, you know, just yeah, really have you know, I’ve I’ve done a study group with my team where we’ve had really, really different levels of knowledge across, you know, across the team and, you know, just helping everyone to kind of come up, come up to speed has been really helpful. And, you know, just also really bond people as well. You know, don’t underestimate underestimate the importance of trauma bonding. So, yeah, definitely do it together. That’s so true. So, yeah, so kind of talking about the community, which we started to do and I wanted to get in these tips and tricks first before we talked about it. Marketo Champion Program 2024 2025. The applications are now open. Brittany Can you talk to us a bit about how to become a marketo champ and anybody ever? That’s too I was. Definitely say, get it, get involved with the community and and always like I think sometimes there’s this perception that you have to be really, really, really smart in Marketo and know all things Marketo. So like when it comes to maybe posting something, you don’t know what to post and stuff like that, I’m, I always say Marketo as new is always going to be new to someone. So even if you’re making like a LinkedIn post because you want to, you know, be engaged and show your support for Marketo and it’s something very simple or basic. There’s someone that doesn’t know that tip or that trick because they’re brand new to Marketo. So I would say definitely like get involved, you know, share information that way and also befriend a champ. I found that helpful, at least for myself. I met Reko from the Dallas mug and he’s the one who told me all about it. I originally had I knew of champs, but I wasn’t like going to apply. And he’s like, Oh my gosh, no, you should totally do it. So definitely be friend a champ. I think that helps as well. Jamey was actually the one who got me into the champ at him, Met him at Summit, met him at Summit, told me all about it and he’s like, Yeah, get into it. Sounded great. Yeah. Yeah, as well. No, go ahead, Jimi. Oh, well, I was just going to say, you know, I think it just goes to Brittney’s earlier point. Like, you know, a lot of folks sort of have this imaginary barrier and and everyone does it right. Everyone has a certain degree like imposter syndrome or hesitancy or what have you. But I would say that there are probably a lot more people qualified to be in the Champions program than actually ever apply. And if you find yourself engaging with us at this level, right on a consistent basis and you’re part of the community, you know, you’re giving back, you’re you’re, you’re helping other people. Like it does not hurt to take a swing and try like the worst possible thing is they say try again next year and you’ve lost literally nothing but a little bit of time. And what you’ve gained along the way is a plethora of contacts and information and learnings that are going to boost your chances for the next time. So I would say like if you’re on the fence, if you’re like, Oh, you know, I don’t know, take a shot, right? Just just take that shot. Because if you’re here with us and you’re learning things and you’re helping others, you’re you’re you’re right there. So, you know, don’t think that it’s not for you. Totally. I would, you know, definitely on the imposter syndrome thing. Right. Like I often I think we were at Summit and all of the first year champs were talking and like, you know like I just feel so much imposter syndrome is like, wait, the person who is making me feel like, I don’t know what I’m talking about also feels like he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And so, like, we’re we’re all there in that same situation. And it’s not it’s not about, you know, being the smartest or like the best Marketo, like most knowledgeable person. A lot of it is like, you’re a champion for Marketo, you love it, you want to share. It’s, you know, like you love the community. I think there’s a large aspect of that. So definitely like getting involved. Like everyone said, you know, I love the user groups. Definitely join those. There’s no excuse now that they’re virtual and you know, lots of them are on, lots of the recordings are on YouTube as well. So just get involved as much as you can, you know, jump into people’s LinkedIn comments and DMS and all that as well, like just become part of the community. Yeah, I would say the best thing that helped me would be to start sharing on LinkedIn or other social part of the application process is to show proof. What, what have you done for the community? How have you given back and things like that. So saying that you are a member of a mug, you go to mugs, you speak at these events, speak at 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ events, Marketo events, sharing your information back on a blog post and your own personal blog or on LinkedIn, things like that. So being able to show that you are as engaged as you say you are is is quite important. You need to have that certification, whatever level it is, and just showing that you truly care about the community and things like that. So if you feel like you’ve got it, then absolutely you never know if you get it or not. No, that’s really great. I want to reiterate a couple of things that you guys said. That one, if you if you don’t if you go for it and you don’t get it, please don’t be discouraged because there are so many people apply. But like Jimmy said, it just really it shows everybody 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ, how involved you are and you come back the second year like it’s never it’s never looked down upon if you applied and didn’t get it one year to come back to the second year, third year or whatever and say hey I really want this, I’m going to go for it again is really, really great. So don’t be discouraged at all. If you went for it and you didn’t get it, but equally I would say are not equally, but also on that to to to mention how you guys say it’s not the smartest in the room. I think having these office hours, as much as I’ve worked in Marketo and am very lucky to be a champion alongside you guys, I learn something new from these office hours every single time. So with that impostor syndrome or whatever you want to, you want to call it, like we’re constantly learning as well so you don’t have to be up there and have the answers to everything. There’s things that some of us are great at within Marketo and within marketing automation, and there is things that we’re still learning and other people are great at and they’re the strengths that they come. So really, you know, play into that and know that you know what you’re interested in and what value you can add to the community, because it is just a community. We’re just here to all learn more and strengthen our skills and share tips and tricks as we learn them. And and it’s it’s really it’s a really great place that so just don’t be just don’t be discouraged and and on the on the point of before I wrap up I know we’re a bit over time so I guess I’ll let you go. But on the point of that I when I was applying for the first time, I just reached out to Champ. So reach out to us. If you have further questions, just find us on LinkedIn, pick us a message with any of those questions and we’ll come back to you. I reached out to some previous champs and just asked a bit more about the program. What does it take once you’re in? What does it involve? All that kind of stuff. So there’s lots of good information out there and then we’re happy to just like provide our insights and and what it’s what it’s meant for us and our careers and everything. So on that note, like I said, we’re over time. Thank you guys so much. You guys are all incredible at what you do. And I really appreciate jumping on with the four of you guys today and answering a plethora of questions. We had a lot more on the API, so I just want to also draw about people’s at the beginning. I mentioned that webinar on demand. It’s all around the rest API, so go watch that. If you ask one of those questions we weren’t able to get to, there were lots we weren’t able to get to. So hopefully we’ll see you guys on next month’s office hours. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much. Hey. Thanks, everyone.