6 Content Marketing Hacks

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Marketo Secret Menu

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Hacks Super-Ch arge

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Content

Marketing

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Foreword Marketo is a powerful marketing automation platform that enables email marketing, lead scoring, account based marketing, lead nurturing, segmented advertising, and analytics. Marketo provides great visibility into leads, campaigns, and their connection with sales pipeline. But Marketo is missing (and simply doesn’t understand) one fundamental unit of modern marketing that’s likely very important to you: content.

Being an engineer by trade, a content marketer by passion, and the CEO of a content marketing software company that uses Marketo, I found myself in a unique position to not only uncover the loopholes and gaps Marketo presents for content marketers, but also to help solve them.

This guide details a few of the ways you, your marketing operations, and web development counterparts can hack together some really cool experiences that prevent lead loss, or offer new ways to capture leads from content you haven’t even thought of yet. We’ve implemented many of these hacks at Curata after considering alternatives we felt either would’ve taken too long to implement, cost too much, or still left something to be desired. Seeing the impact these hacks had for us, I was inspired to share them, and so, “Marketo ‘Secret Menu’ - 6 Hacks to Super-Charge Marketo for Content Marketing” was born!

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Although this guide will help you discover new ways to capture and convert more leads, it still doesn’t close the gap Marketo leaves for content marketers when it comes to measuring content’s impact on revenue. Questions like “What was the ROI of that blog post we hired that really expensive thought-leader to write?” Or “Man, getting picked-up on TechCrunch takes so much work. Is it worth it?” Or “Do whitepapers, webinars or blog posts work best for moving leads to a sa`les-ready stage?” We call this Content Intelligence, and we believe every content team should have the answers to these types of questions at their fingertips. It’s the reason we created the Curata Content Marketing Platform (CMP). So once you’ve checked out our secret hacks in this guide, come on over to curata.com to see how easy it can be to get answers to questions like these—and more—that I know are burning deep inside of you.

Enjoy & happy hacking

Pawan ,

Pawan Deshpande Curata Founder & CEO

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Preventing Google (and other search engines) from Stealing Your Leads

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Social Sharing & Beyond: Enforcing Forms for All

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Free The Content ...but Still Track the Lead

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DIY Blog Pop-Ups

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To Adblock or Not to Adblock.

That is the question.

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Content Binging: Next Best Content Recommendations

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Going Beyond Marketo

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How to Use this Guide This guide provides actionable tips to increase lead generation through content marketing by potentially thousands of leads per year with just a few Marketo hacks. These hacks aren’t fluffy high-level strategies or impractical tips on how you could conceptually improve the results of your content marketing. Instead there are actual ideas you can implement today, detailed down to the settings to change in Marketo and the source code to use on your web properties.

Keep in mind these are hacks and they are technical, so use this guide with caution.

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Don’t do it alone.

Many of the hacks in this guide require at least three different people to implement them properly: the content marketer to guide the process, marketing operations to tweak Marketo settings, and a web developer to modify code on your website or blog. Unless you are proficient with content marketing, Marketo, and advanced HTML coding, don’t do this alone.

Copy that floppy.

Test, test, test.

Always backup your website and

Many of these hacks have been

blog code, so you can revert your

implemented and tested in our

code should these hacks not work as

own Marketo instance and website.

desired.

They’ve been generalized so they should work for any other company as well, but every company is different, and differing settings or website code could interfere with these hacks. Worse yet, these hacks could interfere with your Marketo instance or website. So whatever you do, test not only that the hack works, but that existing functionality continues to work as well.

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Hack 1 #

Prevent Google & Other Search Engines

From StealingYour Leads!

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Are you losing hundreds of leads?

Most organizations using Marketo landing pages with gated content hosted on Marketo are losing hundreds, if not thousands of leads per year. How? By visitors simply circumventing forms and directly downloading assets.

All too often a visitor searching Google for an asset can directly access the asset (such as a PDF eBook) without providing their contact information.

Let’s look at a simple real-world example from a company called LionBridge.

As a visitor, I’ve heard great things about Marketo’s new eBook, "Definitive Guide to Global Email Campaign Optimization."

So I type the following query into Google:

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The first link goes to a landing page for the eBook which has a form with required fields for my first name, last name, email, company, industry, and country.

There’s no reason to fill out those fields though, when I can take the easy route and click on the second search engine result direct to the PDF. And just like that, LionBridge lost a lead capture opportunity without ever knowing it.

Marketo has been aware of this loophole for years but has taken no steps to fix it. In fact, Marketo had this same problem with their own marketing assets for quite some time. Since then they have implemented a workaround for their own site, but not for their customers. We’ll walk through how to implement this workaround so you can end this circumvention today. Ž

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How to get your leads back.

Visitors are able to bypass forms when search engines have directly indexed your assets (likely because someone linked to them in a blog post or shared them on social media).

HERE’S THE FIX: Move your assets off Marketo’s servers.

Move all your gated assets such as PDFs and recorded webinars off Marketo onto your corporate website server because Marketo lacks the functionality to tell search engines not to index your content when they host it. If your landing pages are hosted by Marketo, you do not need to move the landing pages, just the assets.

How do you know if your assets are on Marketo’s servers? The URL to your assets will be on a special subdomain separate from your corporate site, such as info.mycompany.com or ww1.mycompany.com.

Move your assets to a folder on your corporate domain such as mycompany.com/assets/

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Update all references to new asset location Once you’ve moved your assets, don’t forget to update all links to these assets from your emails in Marketo and corresponding thank you pages.

Tell search engines not to index your gated assets Next you need to tell search engines not to index your content. To do so, add a directive in your robots.txt file on your corporate domain disallowing all crawling of the assets folder.

For example, if your assets are stored in mycompany.com/ assets/, then add the following line to mycompany.com/ robots.txt:

User-agent: * Disallow: /assets/

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Hack 2 #

Free the Content ... but

Still Track the Lead.

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THE RISE & CHALLENGES OF UNGATED CONTENT Marketo is great at tracking consumption of content gated behind a lead capture form. But in recent years there has been a big push to share content more freely.

Publishing ungated content undoubtedly increases marketing content exposure and rates of consumption, but at the cost of being able to track and measure which leads consumed that content. As a result, the sales team (which is presumably using Marketo Sales Insight within the CRM) is unable to understand which ungated content has been consumed, making it nearly

HOW TO TRACK UNGATED ASSET CONSUMPTION Below is an easy hack to get Marketo to record the consumption of ungated assets in PDF format such as eBooks, case studies, and whitepapers.

Simply insert this code on every page of your corporate website. It sends Marketo a signal every time a visitor clicks on a link ending with ".pdf," causing Marketo to record it as a web page visit.

Note that this code relies on the jQuery library. Most websites have jQuery on them already, but check with your IT department to ensure this is the case before installing. ÂŽ

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Consumption of Ungated Assets Once you’ve installed the code you can then flag the web page visit event for each ungated asset URL as an "Interesting Moment" in Marketo. Instructions on how to do so can be found here.

Specifically, you’ll need to create a new campaign called “Opened PDF.” Then add a Smart List with a filter as follows:

Next in the Flow, create an Interesting Moment.

SIDE NOTE:

Marketo does record click events, but they can’t be used for Interesting Moments because the trigger token is not supported for this activity type.

Scoring Leads based on Ungated Content Consumption.

Similarly, you can create another Smart Campaign with the same Smart List, but a Flow that increments the lead score whenever a lead opens a PDF.

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Hack 3 #

To

Adblock or Not to Adblock That is the Question.

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The Rise of Ad Blockers & Privacy Extensions An increasing portion of website visitors use adblocking or privacy extensions in their web browsers. There are two main reasons to use an adblocker: 1. To speed up page load times. Most sites have several, if not dozens of analytics and tracking scripts, and in some cases, ad widgets that can severely slow down web page load times.

By using an adblocker, you can drastically decrease web page load time by loading only the content you want.

2. For privacy. Most analytics trackers—including Google Analytics, and most online advertising networks rely heavily on cookies to track what you do across web pages, browsing sessions, and even different websites. Many visitors use adblockers to prevent these trackers from using cookies to track them.

How do adblockers work?

Adblockers work by removing HTML code from pages loaded in a web browser that would normally display advertisements, and in many cases, other code that drops cookies and measures analytics.

Popular adblockers include AdBlock and Ghostery.

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Why this matters to you It’s estimated that more than one in four Internet users block ads.

This number is expected to grow in the next year to nearly one in three users, according to eMarketer. Unfortunately, this means one fourth of visitors are likely blocking out Marketo code on many of your pages, creating challenges for both marketer and visitor.

Inability to track what they are doing. If a visitor is blocking Marketo code on your site, you cannot track what they are clicking on or doing. Marketo relies on this data to operate intelligently. Without it your sales team is oblivious to which parts of your site visitors are most engaged with, your lead scoring algorithms cannot qualify them based on their web activity, and most importantly you, as a content marketer, are blind to the content they’ve consumed.

A poor user experience. Blocking Marketo code from your site often leads to a poor user experience. Pages and formatting may appear mangled, or even worse, parts of your site may appear to be missing.

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As an example, here’s an eBook landing page from Curata’s site as it appears with an adblocker enabled. Every month we used to receive emails from a few confused visitors (presumably using adblockers) complaining they couldn’t download the eBook because they couldn’t find the form to fill out. And those are just the folks who cared enough to go to our contact page, find our email address, and let us know of their experience. Just imagine how many leads we may have lost for visitors who didn’t see a form there, and then just left our site altogether!

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Improve User Experience: Block the Adblockers One way to discourage visitors from using adblockers is to hide all your site content until they disable them. Using the method below, visitors using adblockers see the following black screen on your site on every page. The only way to disable this screen to see your site is by disabling their adblocker and reloading the page.

Why this matters to you All you need to do to implement this is insert this code on every page on your site with a Marketo Munchkin tracker on it.

The advantage to this approach is that it forces every visitor to disable their adblocker, thereby ensuring a consistent user experience, and more importantly, ensuring you can track their website activity on any page on your site.

The downside to this approach is that it could increase your site bounce rate, particular for brand new visitors, who many not want to disable their adblocker for just your site. ÂŽ

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Advanced Hack:

Forcing Adblock Visitors to Disable Adblock on Landing Pages Only An alternative to this approach is to warn users about using an adblocker only when it hinders their user experience.

As mentioned, adblockers can cause Marketo forms not to display on a landing page. This can be confusing for a visitor who doesn’t realize their adblocker is doing this or know where to find the form they expect to see on a page.

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Why this matters to you The code to implement this is here. You may want to modify the warning text for your audience.

The advantage of this approach is that it gives the visitor an option as to whether they disable their adblocker or not, rather than forcing them to do so to see any content on your site, resulting in a lower bounce rate. However, the disadvantage is that some visitors won’t disable their adblocker, thereby causing serious gaps in their website activity, artificially lower lead scores, and lead intelligence holes.

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Hack 4 #

DIY Blog Pop-Ups ®

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One of the most effective ways to grow a blog following is to collect subscription information from readers interested in receiving email updates or newsletters when the blog is updated. Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute says "60% of our daily email subscribers" are generated through a blog pop-up.

Disadvantages of Using non-Marketo Integrated Pop-ups While pop-ups prompting visitors to subscribe to a blog are increasingly commonplace, they are typically not implemented in an integrated way with Marketo; instead using WordPress plugins such as Pippity. Doing so causes many downstream headaches, such as: Not contributing to lead generation.

A non-Marketo integrated pop-up will store leads in a separate silo, in a spreadsheet, its own database, or perhaps emails you every time someone subscribes. It’s then a tedious, never-ending processes to manually copy that lead information into Marketo to centralize all your lead data in your marketing automation platform.

Not tied to lead scoring.

If you implement a pop-up without Marketo integration you cannot increase the lead score when a subscriber fills out the blog subscription form. Submitting contact information is a pivotal event early in the customer journey, and should ideally be incorporated into the scoring formula. ÂŽ

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Doesn’t take advantage of progressive profiling and auto-fill.

If a lead has filled out a form containing their email address for an eBook on your resources page, the blog pop-up should not ask them for their email address again.

Instead the form should pre-fill the email address field to decrease abandonment rates and increase conversion rates. Better yet, it should ask them for another piece of useful demographic information (such as their title)

Lost lead intelligence.

A Marketo form in the pop-up records the subscription form submission, thereby providing additional intelligence to your sales development team as they call into those leads. Without this integration they are blind

Poor Mobile Experience.

In today’s mobile world, you might assume any third party pop-up you choose is mobile responsive, but we all know what happens when you assume something…

Marketo Forms 2.0 are built to provide a user friendly experience on any device, right out of the box.

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What about SumoMe?

SumoMe is a popular out-of-the-box blog widget that helps increase subscribers and is integrated with Marketo.

Unfortunately, it’s doesn’t get you 100% of the benefits of the method we suggest below. A few downsides of using SumoMe with Marketo integration enabled are: Often blocked by adblockers. Popular adblockers such as Ghostery block SumoMe, preventing the pop-up from ever showing up.

Doesn’t use a native Marketo form. The SumoMe Marketo integration uses SumoMe’s forms and simply sends the entered lead information into Marketo. While this cuts down on having to copy lead information from the subscriber form into Marketo, it does not give you progressive profiling, auto-filing, lead intelligence, or lead scoring capabilities.

SumoMe is aesthetically pleasing and easy to set up, but because of the above limitations, we recommend the method below—which is free! ®

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IMPLEMENTING A MARKETO-INTEGRATED BLOG SUBSCRIBER POP-UP. There are four one-time steps to setting up an integrated blog subscriber pop-up. Some do get a little technical, so we’ll walk you through them one step at a time.

CREATE A FORM IN MARKETO The first step is to create a Forms 2.0 form in Marketo to be used in the blog subscription pop-up. You should require an email address at minimum,

and consider adding first name and last name fields, but

avoid making the form too onerous for visitors. Consider enabling form auto-fill to prepopulate the form for existing known leads.

INSTALLING AND CUSTOMIZING THE POPUP Next design the actual pop-up using HTML with the Marketo Form 2.0 code embedded in the form. We’ve provided sample code below to make this easy, but consider customizing this further with your web designer.

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Installation instructions can be found here.

Here’s what our pop-up looks like:

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Hack 5 #

Social Sharing & Beyond:

Enforcing Forms for All

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Earlier we covered some tricks to disable gated assets from being indexed by search engines, in order to prevent visitors from directly accessing them without first filling in a form. But that’s often not enough. Access through search engines is just one way you can lose leads: there are often many other ways around forms.

For example, someone could fill out a form to access a whitepaper, receive the link to the whitepaper, and like it so much they share the direct link to the whitepaper PDF over social media. In such cases, typically your only options are to politely ask the person to swap the link with one to the form for the whitepaper, or move the PDF location entirely, which could have other repercussions.

Instead, we’ll show you a foolproof way to ensure every visitor fills the form out first before accessing the asset.

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HOW IT WORKS How to prevent visitors from directly accessing an asset is shown below. When visitors attempt to access the PDF asset, the code checks for the existence of a cookie set for visitors who completed the form for the PDF asset. With this cookie they can view the PDF. Everyone else is redirected to the landing page to fill out the form.

To implement this, find the technical instructions here.

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Hack 6 #

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Content Binging: Next Best Content Recommendations

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GETTING YOUR VISITORS TO BINGE ON CONTENT Our recommended approach offers the best of the above options, with the added bonus of dramatically boosting lead scores to increase the number of qualified leads sent to sales. This works by encouraging visitors to “binge” on content.

Gated Form

Thank You Page with Recommendations.

Email with Link to Content

GETTING YOUR VISITORS TO BINGE ON CONTENT

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User fills out a form for a gated piece of content.

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User is taken to a thank you page notifying that they will be emailed a link to the content asset.

If the user has not entered a valid email address, they will not receive an email to the asset, so they must return to step one and refill the form with valid contact information.

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The thank you page also contains recommendations to other related content the user may want to consume.

DIY Blog Pop-Ups ÂŽ

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BEST PRACTICES Don’t recommend the content they just downloaded. Do this by storing what they last downloaded in a cookie and then displaying different content; randomizing the content they see from a wide enough selection; or having two groups of content from which you present suggestions.

Recommend other gated content. If you recommend a blog post and the visitor goes there, this moves them back higher in the funnel,increasing the chances they click offsite, effectively ending the binging cycle.

Link to the form for each recommended piece of content.

Don’t link recommended content directly to the content asset. Link to the form. While it may be annoying for the user, it lets you collect more information through progressive profiling, and incrementally improve the user’s lead score as they complete the form. To make this less annoying, hide completed lead fields, and/or enable form auto-population.

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Make it seem smart. Amazon’s product recommendation algorithms make both smart and ridiculous suggestions.

But consumers are often forgiving because Amazon provides a simple, credible justification: “People who bought this, also purchased…” Similarly, you can make your recommendations more intelligent by prefixing it with, “People who read this, also enjoyed…”

Don’t recommend the same thing every time. Implement a random shuffle of suggested content. Otherwise it’s as if Netflix is recommending the same shows over and over again—ones you’ve already watched.

Implement progressive profiling. Each time someone visits another gated content asset, you have the opportunity to capture more lead information. Over a single binge run, you may be surprised by how complete a lead profile you can assemble.

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ADVANTAGES OF THIS APPROACH

A few reasons why content-binging works so well: Increased lead scores. As leads consume more content on your site within a single session, their lead scores typically increase significantly, resulting in more qualified leads that can be passed to sales.

More educated buyers. With the increased content consumption from bingeing, a prospect becomes far more educated than from consuming a single piece of content.

Because of their binging, they are more likely to not only have a more educated conversation with sales, but because their lead score is boosted, that conversation will likely happen sooner too—shortening the sales cycle.

More lead intelligence. Not only does a lead get more intelligent through your content, but if you’ve implemen ted progressive profiling, you get a more comprehensive idea of who that lead is.

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What's Next: Going Beyond Marketo for Content Marketing Analytics There’s no arguing that marketing automation has helped transform B2B marketers access to data, providing insights and intelligence that were nearly inaccessible five to ten years ago. However, the haydays of marketing automation development and adoption primarily preceded the rise of content marketing as a focal strategy for B2B customer acquisition, leaving much to be desired for the content marketing team.

Specifically, Marketo’s lead journey really only begins from form complete onwards. Why is this a challenge? Many analyst firms have cited that the majority—perhaps 80%—of a prospective buyer’s decision-making process happens before they ever fill out a form, or speak to a sales person. We know intuitively and through countless studies and surveys that content — press releases, customer reviews, social media interactions, websites, blog posts, and on and on — influence the buying decision well before a “lead” shows up in Marketo. How can the content team make informed decisions if content consumed prior to hitting the submit button is disregarded? This creates significant content blind spots, yet the majority of budgets are invested here.

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These are exactly the same struggles that gave way to the rise of marketing automation and are now driving content marketers to demand technology that is content— not lead — centric, that helps to eliminate content blind spots, clearly ties content to revenue and improves the accuracy of their strategic planning. This is the problem that Curata’s Content Marketing Platform (CMP) has set out to solve. If you’d like to see the true value of your content marketing efforts, schedule a personalized demo.

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