How To Build A Responsive Landing Page With Marketo

Landing pages are the vehicle that drives conversions forward, and, thanks to the Marketo CRM suite, they’re easier than ever to build. If you’re not familiar with it, Marketo is the CRM platform recently acquired by Adobe. Their focus is on hosted landing pages (and emails) to make the process of building a funnel easier and quicker than ever.

Marketo templates are a great way to get your landing page to market. Their suite offers two types of landing page: free-form and guided. Free-form pages can be customized in full, and allow you to drag and drop elements directly within the interface. Guided landing pages are fully predefined formats where only a few elements like text and images can be changed.

In this article, we’ll see how to build a responsive landing page with Marketo. You’ll learn about the fundamentals of a great landing page, how free-form and guided templates can help you, and why Marketo is such a good option for managing landing pages. You’ll also learn about tracking people with Marketo’s CRM suite after they’ve signed up to the page!

The Fundamentals of a Great (Responsive) Landing Page

Before we jump directly into Marketo, we have to understand why landing pages are so crucial to any digital marketing strategy. Essentially, landing pages are a passive sales pitch; they’re trying to sell you something, even if that something doesn’t cost any money. All landing pages are set up in a way that forces the user to scroll, read the text, and enter a piece of personal contact information. This is what we refer to as lead generation.

Building a landing page from scratch takes time. If you want to build these professionally, you need a web designer/graphic designer, stylistic guidelines and a web developer skilled in building HTML and CSS for Marketo. And that will only tackle the design/dev side of things. If you don’t invest in a good copywriter, nobody can guarantee that your landing page will convert well.

In order to become a success, a landing page needs the following:

1. A target audience. Just like anything else in marketing, landing pages are built with a specific person in mind; one that wants to take action to alleviate a pain point.
2. Something to “sell.” What are you trying to sell to this person? What do they want so badly that they need to put in their contact information? This is the key of a good landing page, even if “selling” simply means signing up to a newsletter.
3. Great copywriting. You can’t skimp on this. Many marketers make the mistake of skimping on the copywriting side of things, but it’s a recipe for failure. Without proper writing, people will feel absolutely nothing going through your landing page.
4. A responsive design. Once you have your text ready, a responsive design is in order. And not just any responsive design; your landing page needs to be pretty and on-par with the high standards that everybody is used to nowadays!
5. Promotional efforts. The copy is great, the design is superb, the page is published… And nobody is landing on it. That’s because landing pages aren’t treated the same way standard online content is; they need a promotional campaign!

If you can get these five points down to perfection, you’ve built yourself a direct gateway to success. However, the costs of this process are often prohibitive, requiring multiple people to work on a single page. Most businesses cannot afford to do that and — therefore — they use CRM software like Marketo to get things done faster and more efficiently.

The Difference Between Free-form and Guided Landing Pages

If you’ve ever used Powerpoint, you know what you’re getting yourself into. Essentially, a Marketo landing page is built on top of a template that can be reused multiple times. Sure, templates won’t make you a designer overnight, but they’ll ensure that your designs remain consistent throughout your website and other channels, which is very important.

What Are Free-Form Landing Pages?

Free-form, responsive landing pages on Marketo are white canvases built on top of pre-made templates for your website. What you can do with these is virtually infinite because they allow you to customize every single aspect of the design. However, it’s worth noting that free-form do require some previous HTML and CSS knowledge, as well as knowledge of specific rules and variables required by Marketo. If you don’t want to think or touch anything related to code, these might not be your preferred choice.

What Are Guided Landing Pages?

Guided landing pages are the simpler version of free-form pages. Unlike free-form landing pages, guided landing pages come fully prepared and are 100% responsive out of the box. The only thing you have to do is provide the correct copy and images — and that’s it! Of course, this is great news for new companies who struggle to implement a fully-fledged marketing solution, but it’s also not the best in the long-term. Templates vary from one another and they’re inconsistent.

How To Build Your Marketo Landing Page

In this section, we’re going to show you how you can create and customize your own responsive Marketo landing page. Let’s create one of these starting from a template. Here is a video from Marketo themselves so that you can follow through, step-by-step:

1. Select the marketing activities tab.
2. Choose the program you want to work on.
3. Find new » local asset in the dropdown menu up top.
4. Select the landing page option.
5. Give the page a name, a URL, and a description.
6. Choose the template among the ones offered.
7. Click on edit draft to start customizing the landing page.
8. Add text, images, colour, and other elements like buttons.

You can further customize your Marketo landing pages by using so-called tokens. These are values that are automatically entered with your contact’s information stored on Marketo. The power of a CRM is that you can build entire experiences that are customized for specific people at large scale. That’s why tokens are a powerful option for building trust.

These are the main things to know about creating your own landing page on Marketo. You can, however, add meta data and all other information as well. This will show a specific description on search engines, and whether you want them to index your page at all. After all, most landing pages are kept secret because of their high value proposal.

Why Use Marketo for Your Responsive Landing Pages

Marketo hosts landing pages on your behalf, so that you don’t have to work so hard in order to write, design, develop, and promote. The only things you’ll need are great copy, a few images, and some spare time to dedicate on Marketo’s editor. Promotional efforts should become easier once you have the foundations of your landing page laid out.

At DarwinApps, we especially like Marketo because it allows us to show clients how they can build their own landing pages when they don’t have enough assets to continuously produce them at a custom level. Here are a few reasons why we recommend Marketo:

• Templates are well-made. We’ve tested quite a few of Marketo’s templates over the years and can say that they’re well-made from a design standpoint. The fact that you don’t have to do anything in order for them to work perfectly on any screen is a blessing.
• Building a professional-looking landing page takes less than a day. No, seriously. You can spend half a day on Marketo and come out with a great-looking landing page that doesn’t cost you half of your marketing budget.
• The CRM keeps track of your landing pages. This keeps things organized and easy to find. When you have all your marketing assets laid out in a list like the one provided by Marketo, you can sort and move things however you like.
• You can check back on performance and receive alerts. Get all performance analytics directly from within the platform. No more switching around between a billion different configurations just to know whether people converted or not.
• No need to host the pages on your site. This doesn’t slow down your site, and it eliminates the need of a web developer in some cases. You simply create your landing page and post it as soon as you’re ready to promote it.

The benefits don’t end there, but we believe these are the main reasons why you should give the platform a try (and we’re not sponsored to say this!). If you wish to learn more about other facets of digital marketing instead, or if you want to add something to this article, feel free to drop a comment down below and we’ll reply as soon as possible.

Want to design professional landing pages instead? We at DarwinApps love creating them from scratch, and we can keep their design consistent with your guidelines. Want to learn more? Check out how we work. All original assets are provided to you without the costs of a dedicated internal team. You concept the incredible, we build the impossible.