Our Client
Our client, a prominent player in the advertising industry, harnesses the power of Marketo and excels in digital marketing, leveraging innovative strategies to reach and engage their target audience effectively.
Project Overview
This collaboration with the client was rooted in the aspiration to overcome the limitations of Marketo—an essential tool in the client's marketing arsenal. Marketo's inability to automatically deduplicate leads presented a notable challenge. Eager to streamline their operations, the client sought an automated solution tailored to their specific rules. Morébec's role was to craft a system that efficiently deduplicated leads, populated custom fields with email domain data, and introduced secure email hashing. The culmination of this effort was the creation of the "Marketo Service Manager" (MSM).
Within the Marketo Service Manager, key concepts play a crucial role in shaping our innovative solution. A "Service Instance" embodies the essence of dedicated workflows: such as deduplication, email hashing, and email domain detection. These distinct workflows are tailored to individual Marketo instances, operating on designated lists — smart or static.
Each execution of a "Service Instance" represents a discrete run, preserving comprehensive logs to facilitate monitoring and debugging.
In line with dynamic project requirements, "Service Instance Groups" combine related instances. These groups are strategically structured to accommodate specific customer needs or project scopes, fostering efficient management and execution oversight.
Key Features
The Marketo Service Manager emerged as a testament to Morébec's technical know-how and solution-oriented approach, showcasing the following pivotal features:
Service Instance Groups
Designed to facilitate organization and oversight, Service Instance Groups empowers users to group related "Service Instances" together. This grouping concept allows our client to streamlined administration and scalability on a per customer or project basis.
Service Instances
A Service Instance encapsulates specialized workflows like deduplication, email hashing, and email domain detection. Engineered to harmonize with individual Marketo instances, this feature ensures the application of tailored rules. Whether orchestrating the intricate process of data deduplication or fortifying data security through email hashing, each Service Instance functions as a versatile conduit for refining marketing data of a Marketo installation.
Service Instance Execution
Service Instance Executions represent a single run of a Service Instance. By maintaining comprehensive logs detailing the execution process, they empower our client with insights into the outcome, success rates, and potential issues, granting them the ability to swiftly identify and address any anomalies.
The tool also allows our client to start, stop and reschedule executions using an intuitive interface.
Designed for Big Data
Employing cutting-edge technologies and architecture, the solution ensures that every lead is efficiently processed, analyzed, and acted upon, all while maintaining an impressive level of operational fluidity. The integration of advanced resiliency mechanisms guarantees the robust handling of Marketo's occasional API downtimes and usage constraints, further solidifying the solution's capacity to conquer the challenges posed by colossal lead number
First iteration
Our journey on this project started with a careful requirements analysis, to identify the best way to leverage Marketo's API to achieve the client's goals.
Collaborating closely with the client, we implemented our first iteration as a simple script that would perform the deduplication using Marketo's API, on a regular schedule. This lightweight approach showcased promising results and aligned with the client's objectives, timeline and budget.
However, as the project progressed and served an increasing number of Marketo installations, we faced our first challenge: The volume of leads on some of the new instances managed by our client were magnitudes larger than the those previously served by the tool.
In some cases, we faced deduplication runs that latest for several hours to several days, conflicting with the most common scheduling scenarios.
Recognizing the need for a strategic shift, we embarked on the next phase of our journey.
Second iteration: Optimizing for scale
In response to the scalability challenges posed by our findings, we undertook a strategic pivot.
We leveraged Marketo's bulk extract API, which enabled us to export the entire list of leads as one operation. This marked a paradigm shift, as it empowered us to conduct deduplication within our own systems. This seemingly straightforward yet pivotal move not only solved our scaling problem, but also paved the way for the execution of additional workflows in the future, using the same data.
During this phase we also strengthened the solution by incorporating robust resiliency mechanisms to navigate Marketo's occasional API downtimes and usage limitations effectively.
Third iteration: Introducing the Marketo Service Manager
As demand for the tool increased, the client was in search of an enhanced solution that granted them autonomy.
In the previous iterations, configuring the tool for new Marketo instances required intricate, manual operations on the client's virtual machines.
Seeking a simpler approach, the client prompted the exploration of an improved solution. Could a system be devised that empowered them to independently provision and deprovision services, modify schedules, and adjust Marketo installation credentials with ease?
Our answer materialized in the form of the "Marketo Service Manager." An evolution that promoted the script-based setup to a full system now featuring an intuitive frontend interface and a reliable scheduling component. This new system also introduced two additional services alongside deduplication: Email hashing and email address domain detection.
Furthermore, the deduplication process underwent enhancements to accommodate additional business rules that catered to Salesforce's API through Marketo.
Conclusion
Morébec's collaboration with our client stands as a testament to our unwavering commitment to crafting innovative solutions.
From the inception of addressing Marketo's limitations to the inception of the robust "Marketo Service Manager," our journey reflects adaptability, technical prowess, and a relentless pursuit of helping our client achieve their goals, no matter the challenges encountered along the road.
With the Marketo Service Manager's capabilities and its ability to accommodate evolving workflows, Morébec continues to empower our client's marketing endeavors with efficiency and autonomy.