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Author: Eric Keller

5 Marketing Ops Tasks That AI Can Do for You

Posted on by Eric Keller

Marketing Operations specialists are drowning in repetitive tasks.

Managing lead databases and setting up campaigns takes countless hours of manual work – not to mention the constant stream of requests from stakeholders.

And while these tasks are critical, they take away from strategic initiatives that can transform their organization’s marketing performance.

This is where AI Agents are changing the game.

Unlike traditional automation, AI Agents can understand context, make their own decisions, and execute complex, multi-step tasks that are normally reserved for humans.

At Revenue Pulse, we’ve built “Otto”: your AI teammate for Marketing Operations.

Otto seamlessly integrates with your Marketo instance, and lives in the apps you already use; you can chat with it in Slack and even tag it in Asana (or other ticketing systems), just like you would with any other teammate.

Otto is constantly learning new skills too. And while it would be impossible to go through every single thing Otto can do right now, we’re excited to showcase 5 tasks that most MOPs pros would be more than happy to delegate.

Let’s jump right in!

1. Merge duplicates in Marketo

In Slack, ask Otto to find a specific lead. Otto will search your Marketo instance for that lead and display any duplicates. Tell Otto to merge the records, and it will perform the merge for you automatically. You can then switch to Marketo to confirm there is now a single record for that lead. If needed, you can repeat the same steps for other leads without leaving Slack. 

2. Create webinar programs in Marketo (from Asana)

In Asana, simply comment “Otto, work on this” on a webinar creation ticket. Otto will then create a webinar program in Marketo from your template. It’ll place the program in the correct folder, leave Smart Campaigns deactivated, and fill the required tokens. You can see the program start to appear in Marketo as the build completes. Otto then posts a brief summary of what it created, so you know exactly what changed!

3. Send test emails

Once your webinar program is created, you can also ask Otto to send a sample of the follow-up email so you can review the exact content and formatting. After you confirm it looks right, tell Otto to activate the Smart Campaigns for attendees and no-shows. Otto turns those campaigns on and lets you know when everything is ready.

4. Create Salesforce campaigns that sync with Marketo programs

This time, let’s head back to Slack. When you ask Otto to create a program, it’ll build it in Marketo and update tokens. But it doesn’t end there. Otto will also create a matching Salesforce campaign with the required campaign member statuses. The statuses in Salesforce match the ones in Marketo, so both systems are aligned.

5. Import lists to Marketo

Send Otto a lead file (such as a CSV) and tell it which static list to import to. Otto will find the list, run the import, and report back with the results—including how many leads were processed and any failures that occurred. Just refresh your Marketo list to see the leads appear!

These are just a few examples of the time-consuming and repetitive MOPs tasks that Otto can take off your plate! And we’re developing new features and capabilities for Otto every day. Follow us here to be the first to know when new skills become available.

If you want to learn more about how Otto can help your team, book a personalized walk-through here.

Meet Otto: An RP AI Service Solution [Webinar]

Posted on by Eric Keller

We’re incredibly excited for you to meet Otto – our new service solution that’s going to change Marketing and Campaign Ops forever.

Join Joseph Peters, Darrell Alfonso, Lucas Gonçalves, and Andy Caron in the webinar above to see Otto in action!

Click the button below to book your personalized walk-through of Otto today.

Meet Otto

Which Is the Best AI for Email Copywriting? [May 2025]

Posted on by Eric Keller

Over the past few months, major LLMs like Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and ChatGPT-4.5 have significantly improved in writing quality.

But with so many options available, which AI is the best for email copywriting?

To find out, we conducted an experiment that evaluated how different LLMs and AI-powered writing assistants produce marketing email copy. Click the button below to view the report (and the results!):

View Report

Note: This report was published on Tuesday, May 13th, 2025. Any new models or AI advancements after this date are not included in our testing!

Can AI Create More Jobs Than It Replaces?

Posted on by Eric Keller

Many marketers and professionals across industries share an understandable fear:

AI could soon make their roles obsolete.

Headlines over the past year regularly warn us that sophisticated AI models could replace numerous jobs.

But is that the full story? Not necessarily.

There’s a compelling line of thought that AI and automation might do precisely the opposite in many scenarios: When certain processes become more efficient, demand skyrockets. And this leads to more headcount, not less.

So, instead of shrinking teams, AI can enable businesses to achieve more, which necessitates larger teams to handle increased workloads.

You don’t have to take our word for it either. Here’s a real-world scenario we experienced that showcases this idea in action ⬇️

(Note: We are discussing these ideas with a short- to mid-term timeframe in mind. AI advancements are moving so quickly that it’s impossible to predict how things will look even 5 years from now.)

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Efficiency Gains Can
Create More Jobs

One of our clients (whose name we won’t disclose) had a team of 2 full-time campaign operations specialists who were overwhelmed by requests.

Each campaign took several hours, even days, of manual effort to complete. They had to clone programs, update emails, sync campaigns with Salesforce, and so on.

So, we came in and implemented a sophisticated ticketing system with robust automation that streamlined the entire process. The result was that the time to launch campaigns dropped dramatically.

The improvement was so pronounced that we all expected the team to do the same work with even fewer people.

Instead, the opposite happened.

With barriers removed and launch timelines shortened, the ease and speed of launching campaigns led to a massive surge in overall campaign volume. It quickly became too much for only two people to handle.

To keep up with demand, team headcount tripled from 2 to 6.

Greater efficiency led to more work, and ultimately, more people on the team.
 

Why Did This Happen?

It’s true that technology enables us to “do more with less.” But it doesn’t stop there. In reality, making something easier or faster often means people will do a lot more of it.

There’s a classic economic principle for this called Jevons’ Paradox. Put simply, it observes that increasing efficiency doesn’t always decrease consumption; in many cases, it increases it. This paradox originates from William Stanley Jevons. In the 19th century, when the use of coal became more efficient, Jevons noticed that coal consumption went up instead of down.

Think of AI and automation like expanding a highway. Initially, you might add lanes to ease congestion, with the expectation that there will be less crowded roads. But as traffic flows more freely, more drivers decide to use that route. Now the added lanes are starting to fill up. Before you know it, 2 lanes become 6 lanes (just as headcount tripled from 2 to 6 in our previous example).

The efficiency provided initially reduced traffic, but over the longer term, it increased demand.
 

AI as an Amplifier

This is where AI gets particularly exciting. It is the ultimate “efficiency gain” tool right now. LLMs (Large Language Models) and reasoning models from big players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are rapidly improving, unlocking all sorts of new use cases and opportunities for amplified efficiency.

Broadly speaking, it’s helping knowledge workers across industries create content faster, generate data insights, streamline operational tasks, and more. At RP, we are constantly trying to push the envelope to integrate AI in safe and exciting ways.

And with Jevons’ Paradox in mind, AI becomes an amplifier that creates demand for more headcount, not a straight replacement for existing workers.

This has some major implications for those in leadership positions as well. A company that implements AI and robust automation, intending to reduce headcount, must strategically prepare for the possibility that the opposite could happen; more headcount could be needed due to increased demand.

Ultimately, successful AI implementation involves anticipating shifts in team structure, workload management, and workforce allocation. Businesses must become adept at not just deploying technology but also managing the growth and scalability that these innovations naturally encourage.

(If you’re looking for a starting point and a roadmap of what that AI implementation could look like for your company, check out our free AI Assessment Tool.)

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While the fear that AI might render certain roles obsolete is understandable, we want to highlight the importance of staying optimistic and adaptable.

Things are changing very quickly, but it’s not all doom and gloom! AI has the potential to reshape jobs, unlock new pathways and possibilities, and create unprecedented demand.

If you have any questions about how your company can boost marketing operations efficiency using AI and automation, you can book a free 30-minute chat with us here.

The Most Important Marketo Updates from Adobe Summit 2025

Posted on by Eric Keller

At Summit 2025, Adobe announced a wave of exciting updates to Marketo Engage.

Many of these features have been generating quite a bit of buzz over the last few weeks, especially the ones that lean on AI to expedite email creation and design work.

As a result, several other new updates have taken a back seat, but we want to shine a light on those too. They’re valuable improvements that Marketing Ops folks will love.

While we won’t be listing every single Marketo update that was announced, here’s a recap of the most hyped & the most overlooked ones!

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The Most Hyped Marketo Updates from Summit 2025

Let’s start with the updates that we’ve seen talked about the most, largely because they integrate AI enhancements in new and exciting ways.

Revamped Email Designer: Marketo’s new email design experience is here. It will include a Gen AI content assistant to help write copy and generate images, support for Handlebars scripting for advanced personalization (stay tuned for our guide on that soon!), plus granular permissions over Gen AI tools to ensure compliance. Marketers can also set up brand themes/kits to enforce their style guides and take advantage of content approval workflows to streamline the review process.

Image to HTML Conversion: Continuing with the email content theme, one of the coolest new updates is the ability for you to upload an image and have Marketo convert it into an HTML email. This really opens the floodgates for email creation. Whether you know how to code or not, you can now take a designed image of an email and instantly turn it into an editable template. Go from design to send faster than ever.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Connector: Marketo now offers a native connector to AEM Assets, allowing you to embed images and files from AEM with a live asset link – when you change an asset, it auto-updates in all your Marketo emails and pages.

Adobe Express in Marketo: Adobe Express is also now embedded inside Marketo’s email editor. There will be full enterprise features like complete image editing capabilities and basic features like quick cropping and background removal.

Interactive Webinars with AI: Marketo’s Interactive Webinar platform is getting a bunch of AI-powered enhancements, including a new Gen AI assistant that helps webinar hosts manage live events. There will also be Simulive automation (pre-scheduled webinars can start/stop on its own) and automatic blog generation from your webinar recording

Dynamic Chat: Marketo’s chatbot also got some great enhancements. It now integrates with Demandbase, and chat interactions can directly update lead profiles in Marketo in real time. There’s also new conversion scoring, meaning you can score and trigger campaigns from chatbot engagement.

Adobe’s New AI Agents: We won’t go into much detail here, as we just published an entire article on this topic, but the big theme of Summit this year was Agentic AI. In Marketo, the notable one is the Marketo Journey Builder agent, an AI co-pilot that helps you design and optimize lead journeys.

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The Most Overlooked Marketo Updates from Summit 2025

Now let’s move on to some of the newly announced Marketo features that didn’t get as much fanfare. These are super impactful updates that Marketing Ops pros will love.

Salesforce CRM Sync: The Marketo Salesforce CRM is getting a complete overhaul. The new sync should be faster and more reliable, with fewer sync errors and delays. It can also handle larger datasets – a big win for enterprise-level revenue teams.

Revamped Analytics and Reporting: The Marketo Engage BI Analytics interface is also getting a refresh. It’ll come with a modern UI and snappier performance. You’ll see faster report generation and advanced visualization (like more interactive charts), making it easier to share data-driven insights.

Data-Related Updates

A handful of the recently announced Marketo updates are extremely useful data features that we wanted to group:

  1. Picklist Management for CRM – Admins will be able to define and manage acceptable picklist values for fields syncing from CRM, preventing mismatches and keeping data clean.
  2. Global Tokens – You will be able to create tokens at the global (or workspace) level that can be reused across multiple programs.
  3. Trigger Tokens – Tokens will be available for every Marketo Trigger. Added flexibility means fewer workarounds for real-time triggered campaigns.
  4. Enhanced Duplicate Filters – Marketo improved its duplicate detection, allowing more custom fields (including CRM IDs) to be used in identifying dupes.

Litmus & SpamAssassin Integrations: Lastly, Marketo Engage now natively integrates with Litmus (for email previews) and SpamAssassin (for spam scoring). You can run email rendering tests across clients/devices via Litmus right from Marketo, and check your email’s spam score through SpamAssassin before sending.

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And there you have it! Adobe definitely packed a lot of great stuff into the Marketo roadmap this year.

If you want a comprehensive overview of all the new features that were announced at Summit 2025, you can refer to the “Marketo Engage Roadmap: The Future of Marketing Automation” session available on Adobe’s official Summit website.

And if you have any questions about upcoming Marketo features, book a free call with one of our experts here!

What are AI Agents and Why Should Marketers Care?

Posted on by Eric Keller

A few weeks ago, Adobe announced a series of new AI-powered “agents” at Summit 2025.

These agents will be designed to assist marketers and streamline tasks within their existing workflows, covering a wide range of use cases within Adobe’s tools.

The Marketo Journey Builder, one of the newly announced agents, is particularly interesting to us. We’ll take a closer look at it below, but as the name suggests, it’s intended to help marketers build and optimize campaign journeys with much greater efficiency.

If the concept of an “AI agent” is new to you, don’t worry. In this article, we’re going to explore:

  • What AI agents are (and why you should care)
  • Adobe’s new AI agents
  • Other great AI agents available for use right now

Let’s get right into it!

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What Are AI Agents (and Why Do They Matter)?

Essentially, an AI agent is a specialized assistant that can independently carry out preprogrammed multi-step tasks or workflows on a user’s behalf. They actively execute these tasks, make decisions with predefined goals, and can even interact with other software and tools.

In order to understand where we’re at with AI agents (and where we’re headed), let’s break down AI agent progression into 3 tiers ⬇️

1. Basic Assistants

These are the early assistants we’re all used to, like Alexa, Siri, and so on. These assistants are largely reactive, meaning they can answer questions, set reminders, play your music, or turn on your lights when asked. They’re useful (some more than others) but they operate within very fixed parameters and only respond to direct commands. They don’t carry out multi-step goals.

2. Workflow Agents

This is where we’re at right now. These are things like Agent.ai, OpenAI’s Operator, Adobe’s upcoming agents, and more (we’ll go into more detail on all of these below). This current generation of agents is far more capable than the basic assistants. They can handle complex, multi-step tasks by interacting with other software on your behalf, even going as far as controlling an entire web browser.

There are more general AI agents like OpenAI’s Operator that can perform a wide variety of tasks, as well as platforms like Agent.ai that host more specialized agents dedicated to niche use cases related to marketing, sales, etc.

It’s important to remember that the agents we have today aren’t fully autonomous (yet). They still work under human-defined goals and execute a sequence of programmed actions.

3. Fully Autonomous Agents

Which brings us to the future of AI agents. While we don’t know how long it will take to get there, eventually we may see fully autonomous agents that can tackle high-level objectives with almost no oversight. Ideally, we ask them to do something, and they figure out the sub-tasks and decisions along the way by themselves. The current iterations of autonomous agents are hit-or-miss and often require a lot of course correction. But we’re headed towards a future of fully autonomous “digital co-workers”.

So, why do AI Agents matter for marketers?

In a nutshell, these tools have the potential to massively increase efficiency and scale. Instead of just answering a question in a chat window, an AI agent may handle the entire process.

For example, they may be able to find leads in a CRM, email them a tailored intro, and schedule follow-ups. And on a smaller scale, they can significantly streamline day-to-day work by automating repetitive tasks entirely, such as segmenting audiences, personalizing campaigns, or analyzing journey performance.

Ultimately, it comes down to freeing up time so marketers can put more emphasis on creative, strategic activities that AI can’t replicate. AI agents help us do our best work, faster.

 

Adobe’s New AI Agents

As we mentioned earlier, the big theme of Adobe Summit 2025 was “Agentic AI” (check out our full recap of Summit here if you couldn’t attend!). In total, 10 new AI agents were unveiled at the conference. They’re each designed for specific workflows and are integrated into the Adobe Experience Cloud.

The agents at launch include:

  • Account qualification agent
  • Audience agent
  • Content production agent
  • Data insights agent
  • Data engineering agent
  • Experimentation agent
  • Journey agent
  • Product advisor agent
  • Site optimization agent
  • Workflow optimization agents

With more on the way soon.

And part of this launch was the introduction of the “Agent Orchestrator” in Adobe’s Experience Platform, which allows users to build and manage AI agents all in one place.

One particular highlight for us (along with many other Marketo users) was the Marketo Journey Builder Agent. Essentially, it is the aforementioned Journey agent embedded into Marketo Engage. It offers a new visual journey builder canvas for designing lead-nurturing campaigns with an AI agent working behind the scenes as a co-pilot.

In practice, this means the agent can suggest the next best touchpoints, identify if certain leads are “dropping off” at a stage of the journey, and even suggest a re-engagement path. Overall, it’s promising smarter campaigns with less effort. Newer marketers can lean on the agent’s recommendations to create effective campaigns, while more experienced marketers can iterate and refine campaigns faster than ever (by letting the agent automate tasks such as pulling performance reports or doing a segment analysis).

It’s like having a marketing strategist and automation expert rolled into one – and they live inside your Marketo instance!

 

Other AI Agents You Can Try Today

If you want to explore more AI agents, here are three platforms making waves that cover a wide variety of use cases:

Manus – A fully autonomous general-purpose AI agent. You can give Manus a goal or task, and it’ll attempt to handle all the steps to achieve it across web research, content creation, data analysis, and so on. Manus boasts that it “bridges minds and actions” by not just thinking, but delivering results. It’s like a personal executive assistant that never sleeps, though it’s a relatively new product, so expect ongoing improvements.

Agent.ai – Created by Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, Agent.ai is a platform where users can find and “hire” AI agents for repetitive and time-consuming work, and build their own agents for custom use cases. Through their Agent Network, marketers have access to hundreds of AI agents for tasks like company research and conversion rate optimization. With the Agent Builder, users can create custom workflows that combine existing agents, major AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.), YouTube, X, and HubSpot features to create new agents for unique use cases.

OpenAI Operator – Announced as a research preview in early 2025, Operator is essentially ChatGPT with the ability to take actions on the web. It uses a built-in browser to click, scroll, and input data on websites.​ For example, you can ask Operator to “Log into our Zendesk account, filter support tickets from the past 30 days for Product X, download the data, and summarize the top three customer frustrations mentioned in the tickets.” It will complete this multi-step task by navigating real tools online. Right now (as of April 2025), Operator is available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the U.S. as OpenAI gathers feedback.

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For marketers, AI agents like these offer a path to greater scalability and efficiency. We’re moving beyond using AI predominantly for insights or content creation, towards AI that takes action and executes complex, multi-step tasks to free up more time for higher-value work.

It’s an exciting time to be in marketing ops, as we continue to experiment with (and benefit from) these digital helpers that are reshaping our processes.

If you have any questions about AI agents or want to chat about optimizing your marketing and sales operations, reach out to us here!

AI Assessment Tool with Lucas Gonçalves

Posted on by Eric Keller

Where do companies actually start when it comes to “integrating AI?”

There is constant discussion about how AI is a game-changer. But successfully adopting AI on a company-wide scale requires careful planning, assessing, pivoting, and more.

And doing all this requires time that most organizations don’t have.

This is why we created a fully automated AI Assessment tool.

It’s pretty straightforward. Just complete a short questionnaire, and our AI Assessment tool will automatically generate a personalized report that details:

  • Where your company currently stands regarding AI adoption readiness
  • A customized roadmap your company can follow for successful AI integration.

To shed some more light on how our AI Assessment tool works and why it’s essential for businesses right now, we sat down with RP’s Director of AI & Automation, Lucas Gonçalves.

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For those who may not know Lucas, he is a Marketo Champion with a strong background in computational mathematics and several years of experience working with AI and machine learning. When ChatGPT 3.5 launched in November 2022, Lucas led RP’s initiative to explore various AI use cases in Marketing Operations. Over the past few years, he’s presented at multiple MUG events, Adobe Summit, and several RP webinars.

Today, Lucas continues to pioneer practical ways that marketers can benefit from AI — with RP’s AI Assessment tool being the latest example.
 

Why is RP’s AI Assessment tool important?

Lucas: In Marketing Operations, we are continuously discussing AI use cases and how AI can boost productivity and efficiency. But these are use cases that benefit individual tasks (ie. using AI in Marketo to optimize email send times, perform email sentiment analysis, and more).

There hasn’t been a structured approach that companies can use to understand the steps they should take to achieve wider-scale AI adoption. Until now!

This AI Assessment report is the perfect starting point that will add structure and clarity to the AI adoption journey. It will help leadership teams get engaged and excited, offering a strategic-fit framework that highlights the stepping stones needed to reach their AI goals.
 

What is RP’s AI Assessment tool?

Lucas: At its core, the AI Assessment tool is built on a set of questions that have been carefully designed to help generate a report on where your company is on its AI adoption journey.

The tool uses an AI adoption framework we created that consists of 4 levels:

  • Level 1: No Adoption – Individuals are using AI on their own without company approval, support, or assistance. In many cases, employees are breaking company policy by using AI.
  • Level 2: Individual Adoption – The company supports the use of ChatGPT or other LLMs on an individual level for daily tasks, but no company-wide integration exists.
  • Level 3: Organizational Adoption – The company has deeper, customized AI integrations that are tailored to their needs and processes.
  • Level 4: Overall Adoption – The company has reached a point where several custom AI integrations are in place with minimal issues.

The generated AI Assessment report will tell you which level your company is at (in our experience, most are between levels 1 and 2 right now). But it’s not just an evaluation of your current situation. It will also give your company 3 to 5 things to focus on, with a personalized road map on how to advance adoption.
 

Is the AI Assessment report generated by AI?

Lucas: The report itself is “AI-augmented”. While AI does build most of it, human eyes are making sure the end result is useful. And to be clear, the report you receive isn’t raw AI responses that you’d get from going to ChatGPT. We are using AI models and agents that are carefully trained on RP’s perspective, with guard rails in place to make sure the information you receive is accurate, relevant, and practical.
 

How is the AI Assessment report structured?

Lucas: The report will start with an executive summary followed by a brief introduction section. Then, it will cover 5 main areas of focus, divided into 3 “foundations for AI” and 2 types of “gains” as outlined below.

3 Foundations for AI:

  1. Team and Skills: Are team members comfortable with AI? Trained to use AI?
  2. Data: Is your data clean, structured, and ready to be fed into AI systems?
  3. Strategy: How can AI connect multiple areas such as Marketing, IT, Sales, etc?

2 Gains from AI:

  1. Customer Experience Gains: Better, more relevant copy, more optimized landing pages, better outreach timing, etc.
  2. Operational Efficiency Gains: Shorter time to launch new campaigns, reduced administrative overhead for projects, etc.

 
Where (and when) is the AI Assessment tool available?

Lucas: It is available right now for free here!

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We’re incredibly excited for you to give our new AI Assessment tool a try.

And if you have any questions or comments for Lucas and the rest of our team, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Get: How to Secure Budget for Your Team in 2025

Posted on by Eric Keller

Teams across industries are finalizing their 2025 budget proposals.

But how can they get their requests approved?

Lauren McCormack (Vice President, Revenue Pulse) and Brooke Bartos (Director of Marketing Operations & Analytics, InvoiceCloud) have the answers.

Last week, they hosted a practical session on creating compelling budget requests so your marketing team can get the resources it needs for the year ahead.

It features 5 actionable tips for justifying your budget, including a Business Case Template you can view and download here.

Watch the FULL recording above!

7 Tips For Getting Your Budget Approved

Posted on by Eric Keller

This is an important time of year.

We’re in a crucial planning season as teams across industries finalize their budget proposals.

And the question that many marketers have on their mind is:

How can I ensure these budget requests are approved by leadership?

Especially when marketing budgets continue to shrink year-over-year.

Which is why we’ve put together 7 practical tips for creating a budget proposal that leadership can rally behind.

Let’s get into it.

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1. Identify Business Goals

Start by zooming out. Look at the broader business objectives that your company is trying to achieve. Whether you’re looking to enhance brand visibility, capture new customer segments, or support a major product launch, these high-level objectives serve as your guiding lights or “north stars.”

Every line in your budget should trace back to these fundamental goals, demonstrating to leadership that your proposed spending aligns with organizational priorities.
 

2. Understand Your Industry

With business goals in mind, take a closer look at market trends and competitor activities. Understanding your industry lets you emulate proven successful strategies, as well as identify opportunities your competitors have missed.

For example, should you invest in a heavily saturated channel? Or should you explore new channels that no one in your space has leveraged? Maybe there is a case to be made for both. A well-researched competitive analysis can help justify either approach.
 

3. Understand Your Target Audience

You can have the greatest campaign ever with strong branding and impactful copy. But if it’s not being put in front of the right people, it won’t produce the results you’re hoping for.

So if you haven’t already, start by developing data-driven Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) – we actually conducted an experiment on using ChatGPT to define your true ICP.

From there, identify leads in your database that match these profiles. Then, craft messaging that speaks directly to their needs, pain points, and decision-making authority.

And remember that audience targeting is an iterative process. Monitor your response rates, test different messaging approaches, and be ready to adapt based on results. Your budget allocation should reflect this commitment to continuous refinement (ie. Instead of allocating all your digital advertising spend upfront, space it out to reflect different phases of testing and optimization month-to-month.)

Note: It’s not enough to just have well-defined ICPs and good messaging; it’s equally important to keep your database up-to-date and free of duplicates. Dirty data will cause all sorts of other problems such as lost revenue and productivity, data privacy violation risks, and unreliable decision-making. Here’s how to create a data hygiene plan that works.
 

4. Determine the Right Marketing Channels

Knowing your audience is only half the battle. You need to meet them where they are. Is it most effective to reach them through social media platforms, SEO strategies, email marketing, TV and print advertising, or all of them?

Evaluate your options and allocate budget across channels that reflect both audience behavior and channel performance data.

But don’t spread yourself too thin either; It’s better to excel on a few key platforms than to maintain a mediocre presence everywhere.
 

5. Learn From Past Performance

Nothing builds credibility like proven success. Review your previous campaigns thoroughly and see what worked and what didn’t. Doing this allows you to learn from previous mistakes, recreate proven strategies, and build on past wins as you expand your scope.

When you’re presenting your budget to leadership, highlight those specific examples where strong ROI was delivered. These examples act as valuable proof of concept, showing that you can be trusted with resources.
 

6. Project Results (Especially Revenue Growth)

Building on your historical analysis from the previous tip, take things one step further by creating detailed projections for future campaigns. Leadership will have more confidence in your vision when you support it with reliable projections backed by good data.

Projected revenue growth is especially important here. Highlighting how your proposed initiatives will directly contribute to increased revenue is a language your CFO (and the entire leadership team) will understand.

It’s also a good idea to develop a system of transparency and accountability through regular check-ins – maybe in the form of a continuously updating model that leadership can monitor throughout the year, for example. This kind of thing will help maintain trust and is generally good practice.
 

7. Focus on the Opportunity

At the end of the day, leadership can overlook cost if the ROI makes sense. This is why it’s important to focus on the opportunity that your budget creates.

When you’re communicating with leadership, focus on the high-level vision. Paint a picture of the potential benefits while showing how your plan aligns with broader organizational goals.

And keep it simple! Overly technical details might lose them. Instead, emphasize value and outcomes.

Because when they trust your vision, they’re far more likely to invest in your plan.

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As we’ve mentioned, marketing budgets are shrinking – which makes compelling budget proposals vital to the success of your team and your company.

In order to get buy-in, you need a convincing narrative backed by solid data. Use these tips to help you create a budget proposal that presents a clear vision for growth that leadership can confidently get behind.

And if you want to dive deeper into this topic, don’t miss our upcoming presentation called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Get: How to Secure Budget for Your Team in 2025”.

Learn more and save your spot here!

How to Revert Data Changes with the Marketo API

Posted on by Eric Keller

This is one of every marketer’s worst nightmares 👻:

Your plate is full and you barely have time to finish your tasks for the day, when your Marketing Manager asks you to upload a list to Marketo ASAP.

You get it done quickly, but your SDR says the leads have the wrong information!

The list is full of bad formatting and incorrect entries.

It’s a disaster. Some leads have already existed in your database for years and now have the wrong job titles, others have come from different sources, etc.

Fortunately, Marketo’s API has a solution – a “time machine” of sorts that allows us to revert data changes.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to roll back your data using the API.

Let’s get into it!

(This guide is for Marketo users and assumes a basic understanding of the Marketo API. If you want to learn more, check out our API webinar and an extensive API course by Tyron Pretorius.)

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Note: Whenever we use the Marketo APIs, remember to obtain a Marketo API access token before anything else. This will be required to communicate with the API.

Step 1. Extract data value change activities.

First, we need to identify the recent data changes that occurred when we uploaded the faulty list. 

Using the Marketo API, we can pull a log of data value change activities. This will give us both the old values and the new (incorrect) values, allowing us to update lead fields with the original old values via the API in later steps. 

Start by acquiring the “paging token” using this code snippet:

 url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/v1/activities/pagingtoken.json"
token=get_access_token()
params={'access_token': token,
        'sinceDatetime':sinceDate}
response=requests.get(url=url,params=params)
data=response.json()
nextPageToken=data['nextPageToken']

 
Next, use this code snippet to extract data value change activities:

url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/v1/activities.json"
params={'access_token': token,
        'nextPageToken': nextPageToken,
        'activityTypeIds':[13],
        'listId': listID}
response=requests.get(url=url,params=params)
data=response.json()
print(data)
act=data['result']
while data['moreResult']==True:
    nextPageToken=data['nextPageToken']
    token=get_access_token()
    params={'access_token': token,
                'nextPageToken': nextPageToken,
                'activityTypeIds':[13],
                'listId': listID}
    response=requests.get(url=url,params=params)
    data=response.json()
    print(data)
    act=act+(data['result'])

 

Step 2. Isolate the old values from the list import.

Now that we have the activity log, we can pinpoint the old values that were replaced by the faulty list and extract them.

Use this code snippet to do this:

df=pd.json_normalize(act)
df=df[df['primaryAttributeValue']==field]
df=df.sort_values('activityDate')
df=df.reset_index()
df=df.drop(columns=['index'])
df1=pd.json_normalize(df['attributes'])
i=4
while i<len(df1.columns):
    df1=df1.drop(columns=[i])
    i=i+1
df1.columns=['New_Value','Old_Value','Reason','Source','Other']
df1.New_Value=pd.json_normalize(df1.New_Value)['value']
df1.Old_Value=pd.json_normalize(df1.Old_Value)['value']
df1.Reason=pd.json_normalize(df1.Reason)['value']
df1.Source=pd.json_normalize(df1.Source)['value']
df=pd.merge(df,df1,left_index=True, right_index=True)
df=df.drop(columns=['attributes'])
df=df.drop_duplicates(subset='leadId', keep="first")

 

Step 3. Update Marketo fields with the old (original) values.

We can now restore the old values to our leads using the Marketo API. This process requires a specific API call to update each lead’s information back to its original state.

Use this code snippet to get you started:

ids=df[df.columns.to_list()[2]].to_list()
camposval=df['Old_Value'].to_list()
for i in range(len(camposval)):
    if camposval[i] == None:
        camposval[i] = 'NULL'
STEP=300
a=math.ceil(len(ids)/STEP)
i=0
while i < a: 
    tempids=ids[i*STEP:(i+1)*STEP]
    tempcamposval=camposval[i*STEP:(i+1)*STEP]
    params={'action': 'updateOnly',
            'lookupField': 'id',
            'input':[]}
    j=0
    while j<len(tempids):
        lead={'id':tempids[j],
              fieldRest:tempcamposval[j]}
        params['input'].append(lead)
        j=j+1
    token=get_access_token()
    url="https://"+MUNCHKIN+".mktorest.com/rest/v1/leads.json?access_token="+token
    headers={'content-type': 'application/json'}
    i=i+1
    response=requests.post(url=url,data=json.dumps(params), headers=headers)
    print(response.json()['result'])

 
Now, when we look at our Marketo instance, all the lead values should be reverted back to what they were before the faulty list was uploaded – crisis averted!

pink line

With a deep understanding of the Marketo API, we can find efficient solutions like this to problems that would normally require countless hours of manual cleanup.

So, next time you mistakenly upload a bad list, don’t panic!

Use this guide as a framework to quickly and efficiently reverse those changes, ensuring your SDRs have the most accurate lead information possible.

If you need help with this guide or have any other questions about the Marketo API, you can book a chat with us here.