How Marketo works

The marketing automation features that Marketo offers rely on two main data sources. The first is Salesforce activity and fields, so you can coordinate emails with sales team activity. That means that in order to get accurate sales data into Marketo, you have to create a tight integration with your implementation of Salesforce. This takes a lot of time (and patience) and many companies typically hire outside Salesforce/Marketo consultants and experts to do this instrumentation for them.

The second data source that needs to be passing data into Marketo in real or near real time is the actions leads take, or don’t take, on your website. You can collect this website activity by installing a Marketo Javascript library on your site. You’ll also need to fire relevant event data when people take important actions on your site, in real time. This means you’ll need to establish an ETL pipeline some other method of continuous data upload into Marketo from your site(s).

There’s a third optional data source that might be valuable if your business collects leads offline or in various systems that need to be pulled together. That’s the ability to load leads and details about those leads into Marketo via its API. Enabling this functionality takes quite a bit more work. You’ll need to plan the right data, learn the Marketo API, and load the data on a regular basis, either through a chron job or ETL pipeline you’ve built.