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CareerMarketing AutomationMCE Study & Prep (Adobe Certified Expert – Marketo Engage Business Practitioner)

Marketo Certified Expert Study Guide Part 3: Targeting & Personalization

By April 23, 2018April 15th, 2021No Comments

MCE progress bar: 60%

Marketo has a powerful set of targeting and personalization tools that can help standardize processes and make critical alignment attainable for every campaign you launch.

Targeting and personalization consists of:

  • Tokens
  • Segments
  • Dynamic Content
  • Script tokens
  • Lead tokens
  • And many more features with countless ways to standardize your Marketo instance

Targeting & Personalization

Understand how inherited tokens work

Tokens are hierarchical. Inherited tokens reside in a parent folder or program. Programs and folders existing within the parent folder or program inherit all the tokens of their parent. When looking at the Tokens tab of a program or folder, inherited tokens are located underneath a separate “Inherited Tokens” heading.

You can overwrite tokens inherited from a parent program/folder at the child program/folder level. Like inherited tokens, overwritten tokens are located underneath a separate “Overwritten Tokens” heading in the Tokens tab.

How it works:

  • Let’s say folder A contains tokens {{my.Token-1}} and {{my.Token-2}} in my tokens section
  • If Program B is a child of Folder A, then Program B will have tokens marked as inherited.
  • If Program B contains an Email Program C, the email program will also inherit token 1 and 2. Anything that is contained in Folder A will inherit the two tokens

Know the types of tokens and where you can use them

There are eight different types of tokens

Check out the Marketo product documents for a better breakdown of the 8 token types.

  • Calendar File
  • Date
  • Email Script
  • Number
  • Rich Text
  • Score
  • SFDC Campaign
  • Text

Know how to set up a data management campaign to standardize country

If a lead enters Marketo with a specific data value that you want to change (e.g. United States of America to United States), run them through a smart campaign to standardize their country value. In addition, you can switch your country field on forms to a drop-down of preset values. This goes a long way to standardize values coming into your Marketo instance organically.

You can do this with job titles, languages, industry, and other elements that you wish to standardize as well.

Understand whether you set up visibility rules on state or on country when you want to display state only if country is US/Australia

This is possible through the Visibility settings in the form editor.

There are rules that can be placed in form fields that only show if the correct value is selected.

Given a scenario about an email with tokens, identify correct and incorrect use of tokens

You can use tokens to standardize coding values in templates and emails. The most common tokens that would be used in emails are text, calendar, data, and rich text. Spend time looking at the different tokens and what they are used for.

Identify the purpose of default values in tokens

Default values are values you specify for lead tokens when the lead token returns empty. Lead tokens reference fields attached to a lead record. If the lead record doesn’t have a value for that particular field, it returns blank. Default values are useful in maintaining user experience even when a value isn’t present.

Example: Say you are writing a salutation in an email and want to call the lead’s first name. Without a default value, it would look something like this: “Hello, {{lead.First Name}}.” The challenge is, if the lead’s first name field is not populated, the resulting email will look like this: “Hello, .” By adding the default value like so, {{lead.First Name:default=friend}}, you would instead get “Hello, friend.” as the result for any lead who has an empty first name field.

Identify the difference between using segmentation or multiple smart lists

The simple answer to this question is this:

Smart lists can’t create dynamic content. Segmentations can.

A lead can only qualify for one segment per segmentation. Multiple smart lists can contain the same lead.

Identify the requirements for using dynamic content

A segmentation must be set up in order to use dynamic functionality on landing pages and in emails.

Segmentations are set up in the ‘database’ section of Marketo.

This is one of the more advanced features in Marketo, and it can be incredibly powerful if used efficiently.




Solomon Solution

At Solomon, we believe every lead, contact, and opportunity is more than a transaction – they’re relationships that need to be nurtured far beyond a single campaign or transaction. We are an engagement design firm that focuses upon the real motivators for strong customer engagement and we deliver actionable solutions and company-wide marketing strategies. Solomon Solution uses innovative products and expert consulting services to transform your customer engagement journey – from initial spark to advocacy.