Landing pages are most often used to provide information and collect it. Once you know more about your prospects, you can start the lead nurturing journey and pass the best possible leads on to Sales. It’s important to build landing pages that match your specific campaign goals. “Companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15.”
As with most marketing automation platforms, Marketo offers robust capabilities around landing page management. We won’t go into details in this post but to simplify, Marketo offers stand-alone capabilities to build, create, and manage landing pages. If you didn’t have a website, you could use Marketo to collect all of your data and host all of your landing pages.
Which Marketo Landing Page Option?
Once you have chosen Marketo, there are many Marketo best practices, but landing pages and forms tend to have the most variance. It’s like the top 40 playlists of all your friends—everyone has about the same songs but there are always differences. For example, Guns N Roses might make it onto our list even though they haven’t had a hit in 25 years.
The Question: Should you use Marketo-hosted pages or your own internally posted pages? What about forms? Let’s dive into many of the pros and cons of the various models to see which model fits your business best.
The big trade off question to ask: Do you want massive design flexibility or do you want to sacrifice a little bit of that design for ease of deployment, streamlined management and additional functionality?
1) Marketo-Hosted Pages with Marketo-Hosted Forms
The Perfect World solution
This is the default recommendation that we make to clients. By far, this method is the easiest to get up and running and maintain while enabling the organization to leverage full Marketo functionality. We love when companies go this route as we know they’ll have repeatable pages that look great, are easy to clone, and leverage personalization.
“Very easy to deploy.–allows you to tokenize and clone the pages in programs to launch new pages in minutes.” Justin Norris, Perkuto
Justin Norris, Perkuto
With this model, the big benefit is there is no need for IT, development, or creative to get involved on an ongoing basis. This significantly cuts down the time of developing new campaigns. We can’t stress this last point enough as we have seen the pains some organizations face when working on projects internally.
“In general, always host in Marketo, it’s easy for marketers to go in and fix.” Josh Hill, Marketing Rockstar Guides
Josh Hill, Marketing Rockstar Guides
The Example
Below illustrates a Marketo landing page leveraging Marketo functionality and a template designed by third party provider, Knak.
Some notes:
- This template is easy to design and easy to manage requiring no IT involvement
- The page is dynamic, meaning that it differs based on the person visiting it. As you can see, it is very targeted towards Moms in a certain geography (As opposed to grandfathers in the Northeast)
- The page is prepopulated with the person’s information to save the lead time
- The form leverages progressive profiling to deepen the relationship with the lead
- Social features enable the form to get filled out faster by leveraging the lead’s social profile
Benefits
- Easy to use, massive efficiency gains (No IT involvement)
- Advanced Capabilities like dynamic content, program tokens and more
- Autotracking – A person’s anonymous activity is automatically captured and tied to the known lead
- Data feeds into Marketo directly
- Full Marketo support
- Social form fill to make it easier for people to sign in
- Progressive profiling enables deeper levels of questions as a prospect engages
- Social sharing built into pages (Easier to share/Easier to track)
Drawbacks
These may or may not be drawbacks for your organization but are worth consideration.
- Not exact look and feel of the main website
- Maintained through a CMS other than your main website
- Not as much design flexibility as your own site
- Loss of SEO on main site (Although this point is debatable)
2) Your Own Website Pages/CMS with Marketo Hosted Forms
Second Recommendation
In this scenario, you’d take the embed code and add the code to wherever you want a form to live on your site.
The big difference between this option and hosted Marketo pages is lost efficiency (in most cases) and loss of some advanced Marketo functionality. However, some organizations find that trade-off acceptable to keep the pages within the main website framework.
“We use Marketo landing pages for all of our events (registration page, confirmation page, etc.) and any misc. pages that may be needed quickly and may not necessarily fit within our websites’ structure. But for everything else, we use our main CMS (Sitecore) to present a common/consistent user experience across our website.” Dan Stevens
Dan Stevens
The bigger your company, the more likely you are to choose this option due to the branding element. Also, with more decision-makers in the process, other departments may not recognize the value of the Marketo-hosted option. As a side note, this is why we’re writing this article as we have several clients trying to communicate the pros/cons across their organization.
Benefits
- A look that is exactly like the main website
- Changes are maintained through website CMS
- Most Marketo features are supported
Drawbacks
- Can’t take advantage of some of the advanced Marketo features
- Not as streamlined as Marketo-hosted pages
- Varying levels of reliance on IT and/or creative team on an ongoing basis
3) The Importance of FLEXibility
When it comes to pages and forms, rinse and repeat doesn’t always work. While you may have similar themes across events or content assets, the landing pages need to be flexible to accommodate the campaign you are running.
Digital Pi has addressed the market’s needs for templates that use drag and drop modules for repeatable emails and landing pages. FLEX templates for Marketo simplifies template development.
The ability to quickly customize layouts, swap out sections, or adjust the details of a landing page or email template is extremely valuable for efficiency’s sake – and before now, a developer was required. Working natively within Marketo, there is no need for third-party integrations or overhead. Adoption is quick, and with intuitive, self-explanatory settings and highly customizable drag-and-drop modules, anyone can use FLEX.
Check out this 60-second FLEX video to learn more!
The Grid
Let’s break it all out in grid format.
- Bold = Desired choice
- No Bold = Depends on needs
|
Marketo Pages w Marketo Forms |
Your Own Pages with Marketo Forms |
Something Custom | |
|
Management | |||
|
Easy to Clone – Replicate pages for easier management |
Yes |
Dependent on website CMS like Sitecore (This may be the preference) |
No |
|
Self-contained Pages for Streamlined Management – Fewer cooks in the kitchen. No need for IT, Design, webmaster, etc |
Yes |
No |
No |
|
Enterprise Scale – Align styles and changes across all website and landing pages |
No – Pages are one offs and can create ongoing maintenance issues (Generally) |
Yes |
?? |
|
Automatic Form Data feeds into Marketo. |
Yes |
Yes |
Custom |
|
Design Tool |
(easy/standard) |
Website CMS (flexible) |
?? |
|
Look and Feel |
Landing page templates designed for conversion |
Same exact user experience as your website |
?? |
|
Access to Best Practice Responsive Landing Page Templates | Yes – Limited options available via Marketo collection. |
Depends on CMS |
?? |
|
Built in Page Conversion Report – Gain insights into how pages are converting. |
No |
?? | |
|
Acquisition Program Reporting – Auto assign the lead’s first form fill out to the proper acquisition program (Like Eval Download). |
Yes (automatic) |
Yes (With an extra campaign) |
?? |
|
Standard Marketo Features | |||
|
Progressive profiling enables deeper levels of questions as a prospect engages. |
No |
No | |
|
Auto Cookie Tracking – A person’s anonymous activity is automatically captured via a cookie and tied to the known lead. |
Yes |
Yes |
No, extra coding required |
|
Parameter Support – Ability to track URL values for reporting |
Yes (may require a little Java code) |
?? | |
|
Social Form Fill – Use social sign-ons to complete form for faster form fills |
Yes |
No | |
|
Social Sharing Built into Pages
|
No, not integrated, have to use third party sharing apps. On the plus side, some of these apps may have more functionality. | ||
|
Pre-fill – Reduce effort for the person who fills out a form by pre-filling any known data. |
Maybe/No |
?? | |
|
Advance Marketo Features | |||
|
Personalization Tokens – e.g. Welcome Ken on landing page. |
No |
No | |
|
Program Tokens – e.g. Page heading populates across autoresponders, landing page, thank you page. A big efficiency gain. |
No |
No | |
|
Dynamic Content – e.g. Photo of a young Mom for a mother segment vs photo of a grandmother for an older woman. |
No (Dependent on CMS) |
?? | |
|
Snippets / Additional Calls-to-Action – e.g. Suggested Content |
No (But website CMS is likely to have this ability |
?? | |
|
A/B Testing – Test which creative works best. |
No / Dependent on CMS |
?? |
Notes: Some of the “No” might be able to be overcome with some java code development or a third party app.
The Skinny
When making this analysis, organizations tend to get different answers from different parts of the organization–it can be a political ownership issue or an “I can do that” issue. Our recommendation is to let the marketing team drive the decision with input from others.
If you want full Marketo functionality while streamlining landing page development, option 1 should be strongly considered.
If you want something that looks absolutely perfect and in sync with your website, consider option 2. Just be aware you need to develop processes and be reliant on others within your organization. Translation: This step equals longer time to develop programs.
You could also go hybrid and use both Marketo-hosted pages (for standalone asset offers) AND internally-hosted pages (for evergreen pages like Contact Us). We’ve had several clients go this route.
What did we miss? Please share your best (and Worst) practices below? Good luck.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to Justin Norris, Sanford Whiteman, Lauren Beth, Josh Hill, Wintha Kelati, Jenn DiMaria, Erica Sanchez, Joseph Hogya, Jordan Lund, Laura Florek and Joel Mounsey for providing great input from some of the articles below.
Resources
Check out these great resources around the Marketo Community as well as a few external sources.
Community (Login Required)
- Marketo landing pages versus web site landing pages? Community Discussion started by Erica Sanchez
- Marketo Landing Pages vs Internally Hosted Pages, Community Discussion started by Joseph Hogya
- Getting Started With Guided Landing Pages, Jordan Lund
- Landing pages and SEO – marketo vs. our website. Community Discussion started by Laura Florek
- Landing Pages: Unbounce or Marketo? Pros and cons? Community Discussion started by Joel Mounsey
