Planning to use Marketo Guided Templates? Here are the next steps.

Last week I published a post on ‘Everything you need to know about Guided Templates in Marketo’, where I talked about different pros and cons of the new guided templates. Marketo is becoming increasingly effective as a platform to publish new landing pages on the website. However, to drive traffic from SEO, we have to do more than just adding meta-tags and keywords. With updates in its search engine algorithm, Google has already started penalizing non-responsive websites. If you want to make sure you don’t lose any rankings, you have to make the CHANGE,and this change has to be done sooner rather than later.

Here are some next steps that you need to plan for migration:

1. Let’s get on to the difficult part first. First, you need to make a list of all the landing page templates that you have in your design studio. Now in an excel sheet, include the name, Marketo link, number of LPs using it, whether they are responsive or not, and their last modified date.

1. Now separate out the templates that you want to convert to the guided templates. This might need a discussion with your other Marketo account users. This may take some lengthy email exchanges, but it’s worth it as this is critical.By now, you also need to track the usage of the landing pages that are already responsive (built using the freeform editor). It’s noteworthy that migration to the guided templates would make editing easier for non-technical users, who preferred using non-responsive LPs, since they were easy to edit. At this point, though Marketo has not said anything about removing support for freeform editor, I expect that to happen after some time.
2. Once you have the list finalized, identify the list of elements that you may want to add in the guided templates. A major limitation with guided templates is the flexibility to add elements when editing the landing page. Unlike free-form editor, you cannot drag-and-drop any element on the landing page. However, a smart way to do this is building a single template with all the required elements.For example, I created a webinar landing page template with all the possible elements in the code. These elements may not be used by me, but someone else from my Marketing team might be interested in using them. In that case, they won’t need a separate guided template. With this approach, if I decide not to use some elements when building my LP, I can simply turn them off.
3. Whiteboard a layout that accommodates all the possible elements you want to consider. You need to keep in mind how the layout would change when viewed on a tablet or a mobile phone.

1. Finalize the design and get a developer to build this for you. If you have someone in-house with strong Bootstrap and HTML skills, you can ask them for coding. Else, you can outsource this to an agency with strong Marketo coding skills.
2. The last step would be User Acceptance Testing across multiple browsers and devices. Also, you need to get complete understanding from your developer about the different elements that have been added in the template code and how you can update them.

As a Marketo user, I am really excited to use the new guided templates. If you need any help in migrating your existing templates or building new ones, feel free to drop a line at [email protected]

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