Case Study: Automation Using API’s
A quick solution with a long-lasting impact
Challenge
Microsoft’s global marketing team needed to create hundreds of folders and thousands of tokens in Marketo. This mundane, yet critical work required a significant time investment from marketers, time that the client’s leadership wanted to optimize for revenue focused innovation.
Solution
Solomon’s team of experts evaluated the current process and identified an opportunity to entirely automate the creation of those hundreds of folders and tokens. With a deep understanding of the Marketo platform, Solomon leveraged the Marketo API along with custom Python code to deliver a lightweight script.
Outcome
The solution delivered by our team reduced the time required for this process from 5 days to 30 seconds. Ultimately, this saved hundreds of hours. More importantly, this optimization improved marketers’ job satisfaction by allowing them to focus on innovation and marketing strategy, rather than tedious tasks.
Marketing automation allows businesses to save time and money, measure and optimize marketing investments, and grow revenue faster.
– Marketo, an Adobe Company
Challenge
Microsoft’s global marketing teams was faced with the task of having to create new folders for each new fiscal year. Tokens needed to be created within each of the folders, which equated to thousands of tokens. The primary requirement was that the team needed a solution within a week, while Microsoft’s engineering team also had special requirements based on internal procedures that had to be met.
Solution
Solomon took the challenge and utilized Python with Marketo’s API in order to create a script that created folders in a hierarchical order, as well as the necessary tokens within each folder. This solution was rapidly developed and tested and ultimately meet the requirements set in place from both the marketing and engineering team. Some of the items that were included in the script were logging successful/failed runs, logging old token values if a token already existed, and limiting the amount of API calls that can happen in a specific time period.
Outcome
The script was successful and reduced the build time from a 5 day process down to 30 seconds. Not only did this have the value of vastly reducing the time to complete this mundane, yet critical work, but it decreased opportunity for human error. Through this, Solomon removed barriers to job satisfaction for the team that was responsible for this work. The new automated process freed up their time to dedicate to more impactful efforts.
