The Marketo API, not just for developers
Are these three letters the key to unlocking ultimate productivity?
Read Time: About 5 Minutes
Marketing Ops pros have all sorts of options when it comes to automation. There are tool-specific functions, like Salesforce Flows, out of the box integrations utilizing Oauth, and even low code/no code tools.
If you come from a non-technical background, one option that may seem a bit elusive, or even challenging, is utilizing the API (Application Programming Interface), which is standard functionality offered by almost every platform and point solution these days.
While the idea of learning the technical skills needed to be able to access and use an API may seem intimidating, the payoff may be worth it. Tyron Pretorius (sometimes better known as the Workflow Pro) is a Marketing Operations Manager at Telnyx.
As he ramped up in his role, he realized that in the Marketo API he had access to a powerful tool that gave him the ability to connect the dots and achieve peak productivity, freeing up his time for highly impactful work.
Key to productivity
The sneaky useful thing about APIs, the Marketo API included, is that almost anything you can do in the user interface can also be done with the API. The API offers additional benefits:
The ability to automate the action
The ability to complete the action at scale (on multiple records)
The ability to schedule the action
With the right knowledge and context, the API becomes your own personal little productivity machine. You can take repetitive steps, processes that you do on a daily basis, and have them done for you automatically. You can begin to add logic or triggers around these actions to make them more intelligent and useful in a variety of use cases.
With an engineering background, Tyron realized this early on. As the sole employee responsible for Marketo at his company, he knew utilizing the API had the power to get him out of busy work and to free up his time for more impactful projects.
As he began to get more familiar with the API, his automation portfolio has expanded, now including things like:
Lead scoring and segmentation
Database Management (Merging Leads)
Marketo <> ChatGPT integration
Building email templates
Dynamic Email Content
Cloning Marketo Programs
and quite a bit more.
Do you need to be technical to use the API?
Due to the fact that the API isn’t something you can easily access via a pretty point-and-click interface, you might assume that you need a significant amount of technical knowledge in order to benefit from the capabilities it provides.
Coming into his role without a formal Marketing or operations background (like many other Marketing Ops folks), Tyron had the benefit of some computer coding classes in his university education. That foundation enabled him to realize the value that the API could provide, and he was able to fill in the rest with online resources.
Even if you don’t have designs on eventually becoming a full-time programmer, Tyron believes there’s a benefit to understanding basic programming concepts . This can come in the form of a variety of free or low-cost online courses.
He says, “If you don't end up using the programming language itself, even the logic it teaches you when it comes to conditional logic or for loops, you can use the exact same thing in Zapier if you're building a workflow or in Marketo.”
He adds, “At least taking that course will only strengthen your logic and problem solving skills, but then it can unlock so much when it comes to automation.”
With a few basic programming courses under your belt, you can leverage the Marketo API documentation to start understanding what data and actions are available to you. Diving into the documentation Tyron has provided around Marketo and Marketing Operations-specific use cases (linked in detail below) can help you get comfortable with the process of accessing the API and utilizing the response in ways that are actionable in your daily professional life.
Pro Tip: It’s becoming well documented that ChatGPT has started to emerge as an amazing tool to learn coding concepts, validate or explain existing code, or even write code for you.
Tyron explains, “And then after taking an initial Python course a few years ago, I now just use Chat GPT, which is very powerful for any sort of code actually, if you just give it a problem statement.”
He continues, “I asked it before I wanted it to parse information. So I gave it an example of the text and I said, I want to parse these two bits, and it gave me the Python code to do it. So now ChatGPT makes it even easier than ever to start programming using code.
How do you know if you should use the API to automate a task or workflow?
Tyron has been using ‘time to complete the task X task repetitions’ approach as a way to measure if the time needed to setup an automation via the API is worth it. “Is it worth the initial investment? Now you try and scope it, I'd say, okay, it'll take me 10 or 20 hours, but then it'll potentially save me 30 minutes a week…for perpetuity”, he says.
However, not everything is a great fit for automation. Tyron continues, “But there were times definitely where I tried to automate certain things, like email creation and just because I'm stubborn, I spent a lot of time working on it and it turned out to be very inflexible. It would break quite easily and then we just wouldn't end up using it.
So I've definitely been guilty of trying to automate things that probably shouldn't have been automated and it just would've been easier to just do it the manual way.”
A great way to start is to identify a task you do frequently, or something that takes a long time to do. A great example is merging records, which is a very tedious and time-consuming task in Marketo. Tyron confirms, “I think in general, just if it will save you time in the long run and it's something you see yourself doing for the foreseeable future, it will almost always pay off.”
Sharing the wealth
Over the last year or two, Tyron has become an increasingly visible member of the Marketing Operations community. If you feel like you don’t know your APIs from your KPIs, he has you covered - he’s providing a veritable goldmine of knowledge with extremely detailed walkthroughs for a lot of pain points that Marketing Ops teams run into every day.
He’s done a tremendous job of taking out the painful parts of learning to automate for popular Marketo use cases. Be sure to connect with him in any (all!) of the ways below:
The Workflow Pro website (be sure to get the newsletter as well)
Content covered in Show Me MO Models: Discovering the Power of Marketo and AI - recent presentation at a Marketo User Group
Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity in the written format.