How Perkuto Helped a High-Growth FinTech Company Fully Leverage Their Marketo Investment

Introduction

Imagine you’ve recently made the investment in a professional camera. One with all the bells and whistles – optical zoom lens, sensors, and other features you’re still getting the gist of. Sure, this all sounds great, but what would be even better is if you actually knew how to fully leverage the camera. Knowing how to utilize its features to perfectly capture moments or landscapes is what you intended with your purchase.

But, there’s one caveat. You’ve never worked with a professional camera before, and it’s turning out to be much more technical than you initially thought. Sure, you can read the manual and go by trial and error, but with a 250 page manual in size 6 font, you start to look for alternatives.

You research online courses and consult online photography instructors. Now, you can finally get what you’ve intended out of your camera. Working with a specialist will help you unlock tips that you wouldn’t have found elsewhere, and the opportunity to connect with a professional who knows the ins and outs of professional cameras is arguably the best way to get the most out of your new camera.

But wait, what does this have to do with marketing automation, exactly? Well, swap the professional camera for a marketing automation platform and swap the main character for a large enterprise, and you have yourself an everyday scenario at Perkuto. The complexities of a marketing automation platform are quite intensive, similar to a professional camera, and it can be challenging to leverage the full investment. Doing so without consulting a professional can be quite challenging, not to mention time-consuming. And these days, who has that?

That’s what happened when one of our clients, a high-growth SaaS fintech company, came to us. They made the investment in a marketing automation platform and had great ambitions to grow, but the specialized skills required to optimize Marketo and a lack of internal resources got in the way of achieving this.

The Problem

Like most companies, our client wanted to fully leverage their Marketo investment, but simply didn’t have the capacity to do so. Although they already had Marketo implemented, they needed a trusted partner to help them learn the ins and outs of Marketo that would allow them to fully scale.

While many Perkuto clients require help with large, complex projects, this client specifically needed a little bit of help across the board. From implementing proper lead source tracking to data hygiene and consent management, they had gaps that were preventing them from growing and reaching their full investment. What sounds like a simple, quick-fix actually requires the expertise of an experienced marketing operations agency that knows how to fully leverage marketing automation platforms to see true growth and scalability.

For example, our client had eight engagement programs in place. When this happens, it’s likely people are part of multiple engagement programs at once, resulting in them getting very similar emails, reducing the control over the communication strategy, and causing some program members to receive too many nurturing emails over a short period of time.

The Solution

Perkuto quickly jumped in to help our client achieve value realization from Marketo, starting with foundational Marketo training. The goal was to provide our client’s users with an accelerated path to Marketo mastery. This focused two-day course was designed to provide the most essential knowledge and to promote learning through hands-on experience. Perkuto designed the training so that our client’s users would leave with a clear understanding of the Marketo platform and the ability to perform standard marketing activities while following best practices. The two-day training program covered the following topics:

• Marketo overview, including an interface tour
• Smart campaigns – smart lists and flow steps
• Email and landing page editor
• Folder structure and organization
• Form editor
• Program overview
• Channels and tags

With each topic area, Perkuto delivered an easy-to-follow recipe containing screenshots and scenarios for users to leverage on an ongoing basis. For example, the topic for folder structure and organization included samples to reference. In this example, a sample program folder structure was shared for a webinar event program.

During an active discussion with our client’s team and while diving into their Marketo instance, Perkuto began to notice areas where our client could optimize their marketing operations. Perkuto worked with our client’s team to prioritize the following work:

• Lead source tracking
• Communication limits
• Data cleansing
• Reporting dashboards

In addition to troubleshooting and optimizing the items above, Perkuto also got to work developing program templates, adding progressive profiling to forms, and helping our client implement their new brand requirements across email and landing pages.

Perkuto reviewed our client’s current engagement program and provided a technical design document to consolidate the different nurture programs into one in order to offer a more controlled, structured, and cohesive experience to its audience based on the content the person interacted with or her position in the customer journey. Here’s an example of the engagement program streams:

Lastly, Perkuto worked with our client’s recruiting team to help hire a Marketo admin to handle the day-to-day execution of campaigns. After all, there’s no one better to recognize another Marketo expert than a marketing automation expert themself. Perkuto conducted the Marketo Practical Skills Assessment on the candidates, then shared the completed evaluation grid with our client so they would be empowered to make an informed decision.

The Results

When our client came to Perkuto, they lacked confidence in Marketo. By starting with basic foundational training, then unlocking issues as they arose, Perkuto was able to improve their internal structures which allowed them to grow and begin to see their full Marketo investment come to fruition.

It’s like our early example of a professional camera – sure, you can buy a camera with all the features you’d like to incorporate into your photography, but without a basic understanding of how the features work, it’s going to be difficult to see the full investment come to life.

Conclusion

Sometimes, it’s the combination of several small things that can drive the most impactful change. In this case, it was unlocking minor issues within our client’s Marketo account that ultimately made a big difference in their day-to-day operations. By cleaning up their data, implementing proper lead source tracking, fixing their consent management preferences, and improving their program templates, our client is able to get closer to fully leveraging their full Marketo investment.