Marketo January '20 Release Overview

A month later than initially advertised, comes the first Marketo release of the year. In late November, the Marketo release schedule was changed to align with the monthly cadence of the broader Adobe Experience Cloud. This caused a delay to the pre-Christmas Winter 20 release. In practice, Marketo have operated on a monthly release cadence since the release of the new Sky UX in Spring 2018. Updates to the core platform are made quarterly, but Bizible, Sales Connect and Sky have all been on monthly release cycles for a long time. The new Adobe aligned release schedule doesn't change that.

AEM Asset Integration

Coinciding with the change is the general release of the long awaited integration between Marketo and Adobe Experience Manager. First announced at last year's Adobe Summit, the new AEM connector allows users to pull images and media files from the AEM Asset library directly into Marketo emails and landing pages. The selected images will remain stored in AEM, ensuring that any update to the original image or file in AEM is automatically reflected in the Marketo version.

Aside from the advantages of only having one media library rather than two, integrating the AEM Asset library makes it much easier to find images and files from Marketo. AEM is a fully blown digital asset management platform, including metadata support, tagging and advanced content search; making it possible to easily find images related to a specific topic. That's impossible in Marketo because the only information you have to look for is the file name and folder location, neither of which is typically standardised. All this is before the impact of AEM's asset lifecycle and workflow capabilities are considered, given that ownership of these features usually sits in a different team from marketing automation.

Both Sky and Classic users get to benefit from the new AEM Asset Integration. However, Sky users get an additional benefit: basic image editing. Sky users can take advantage of AEM's native image editing tools directly within Marketo. The capabilities of these tools are limited but do stretch to basic image enhancement, cropping and text editing. In other words, they're powerful enough to allow the creation of an email banner from an image template stored in AEM. That's actually a big advantage for Marketo Sky over the classic UI.

Microsoft Integration

There are two other integration enhancements in the new release, both relating to products owned by Adobe's best buddies at Microsoft. Firstly, there is an enhancement to the Dynamics integration. The "Sync Person to Microsoft Flow" step now works in real-time. This may sound like a big deal, but it's really not. The integration has always been close enough to real-time that in most circumstances it's indistinguishable. In fact, most Marketo users are unaware that it's not an immediate sync. Leads and contacts are synced every 5 minutes in both directions. The same is true for Salesforce. The difference lies with the integration flow steps in Smart Campaigns. There are more of them in the Salesforce sync, and they work immediately, bypassing the 5 minute schedule. Now, the Sync to Dynamics flow step functions in the same way. Still no sign of the missing activity or campaign integration steps for Dynamics users though.

The other Microsoft integration getting attention is the LinkedIn one. LinkedIn have put a lot of effort into enhancing their native Lead Gen Forms since their launch a few years ago. Marketo haven't always been particularly quick at adding the additional capabilities into the LaunchPoint connector that pulls in leads from LinkedIn forms. We are only now getting the ability to add hidden fields and consent fields to the integration, as well as the ability to pull in test leads. Some of these features are newer than others, but hidden fields were introduced to LinkedIn forms a long time ago and have important use cases related to lead sources and campaign attribution among other things.

Account Discovery

There is an interesting new beta in the Account Profiling add-on for the ABM module. The Account Discovery feature adds potential new target accounts that fit your ideal customer profile to Marketo, creating new account records for these companies. Alongside these new account records are the relevant profile fields and intent information needed to segment them properly. Account Discovery uses lookalike matching to identify companies that are a good match using the Mintigo powered AI model that underlies Marketo Account Profiling. The current capabilities handle identifying the best accounts currently in your database, the new features are used to identify accounts that don't already exist in either your lead or account database.

This is hardly a unique capability. Predictive data tools and ABM platforms have been able to do the same thing for some time. It's not been seen in the contact-centric world of marketing automation though. Marketo have long intended to turn their platform into a true ABM solution, with the ability to build, segment and target account audiences even when there are no contacts in the Marketo database. This gives Marketo a significant advantage over their direct competitors. Although at the time of writing these Marketo ABM tools still fall short of a dedicated platform such as Engagio or Demandbase. They lack some of the flexibility and automation options of the leading ABM platforms.

Sales Insight

Developers will be interested in the new Email Template Dependencies API, which returns a list of emails created from a specific template. This information is already visible through the UI, but not programmatically. Enterprise customers will be pleased to hear of enhancements to cross-instance navigation. The existing instance switcher menu works but is very basic and not many people know about it. If you have multiple Marketo Instances, ask Support to link them together and unify the logins. There are restrictions on this capability, though depending on how you sign-in to Marketo.

Finally, Sales Insight gets a UI refresh and is now being made available in the Salesforce 1 mobile app. It will also integrate with the new Salesforce Lightning Bulk Actions feature, allowing Sales users to add multiple leads or contacts to a Marketo campaign. Additionally, this opens up the possibility of sending Sales Insight email templates to up to 200 recipients in bulk through Marketo's Salesforce plugin. It is well worth making Sales aware of these changes.

These are not the only updates coming this month. There are enhancements to Bizible too For full details of what's in the current release, view the release notes on Marketo Docs.