Integrating Marketo with WordPress

In a series of posts, we’ll be delving deeper into some of the suggestions we made in our most recent free ebook – Supercharge Your WordPress site. For this blog post, we’re going to look at how easy it is to integrate marketing automation solution Marketo with WordPress.

What is Marketo?

Marketo describes itself as a marketing automation tool, focused on Account Based Marketing techniques, however that focus would be doing it a disservice as it an extremely comprehensive piece of software. Marketo can guide marketing automation from start to finish, with features such as allowing you to score leads based on their activity to determine how ready a prospect is to buy. By unlocking such efficiencies by automating previously monotonous tasks, Marketo promises to increase your ROI from Sales & Marketing teams.

Why would you want to integrate Marketo with your WordPress site?

Campaign management, inbound marketing, lead management, social marketing, event management, instant CRM integration, sales dashboards, marketing ROI reporting/analytics, social media synchronisation, reporting and revenue management… at some point we have to stop talking about features.

Whatever size business you are in, if you are a marketer, looking to analyse, optimise and improve upon where your campaigns are going wrong, and where they’re going right, then you are going to be wanting to use a tool like Marketo (or HubSpot or Pardot) to integrate with your WordPress website, and turn it into a truly powerful platform that sits at the heart of your marketing.

What should I consider when integrating Marketo and Pardot?

One thing straight off the bat that you need to consider with integrating Marketo, is that unlike many of the other options you might have, Marketo has not built their own Plugin for WordPress.

Don’t let that deter you, however, as the integration is still pretty straightforward. Third party integrations have been built by external developers, some of which require a paid license.

Marketo has a landing page which outlines all the different possible WordPress integrations here. There are rather a lot of possible third parties to work with, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Integrating the third party apps themselves will be relatively straightforward, though we would advise that you consult with your agency partner to get this right, based on the extent of the integration you need.

In reality, as long as you have the Marketo tracking code in the header of your site, you can begin to use the software in a basic sense by embedding things such as forms into your WordPress site. Just make sure you’ve worked with a digital agency that has integrated with marketing automation products with WordPress before, to ensure they build your WordPress website with this in mind and to make it easy to manage for your marketing team.

Conclusion

Marketo is a beast of a marketing automation tool. If you can budget for the cost of somewhere in the thousands of USD per month depending on size, then it is definitely one of the more feature packed marketing automation tools and fairly easy to integrate with WordPress.