What is the advantage of using Marketo Landing pages over WordPress?

I hope to have a neutral opinion as Marketo and Wordpress 3.9.1 user.

The exact strategy depends on who is maintaining Marketo and who is maintaining Wordpress.

There are clear advantages of retaining full control of your landing pages if the agency is responsible for Wordpress. That would give you flexibility to create and change quickly.

The alternative approach is perfectly valid if you design and approve the forms, giving the agency the JavaScript to embed on Wordpress. The design could evolve dynamically while you would rely on stability and preditability of data coming through Marketo forms.

Hi Patrick,

I would support the wish of your Agency, who wants to create landing pages within Wordpress and use Forms 2.0 for data collection on those pages.
Using Wordpress, some of the benefits include:

• Managing responsive landing pages within Marketo requires effort and is not WYSIWYG. You can not control them using WYSIWYG editor and you will have to rely on an experienced Marketo developer to manage them. Managing responsive in WP is very easy for you.
• Integrations with 3rd party applications are much more easy, when you have landing pages in Wordpress. Especially when you are building complex pages like email preference centres, using non-Marketo LPs are cost effective and functional.
• One main reason, why many Marketers preferred using Marketo LPs was content targeting. We recently solved this challenge. We have a Wordpress Plugin for Marketo, which allows you to pick any field value from Marketo within Wordpress and add conditional text blocks. You can see it's Features and Use Cases.  

Let me know if you need more details. Drop me a line at alok@grazitti.com

Hi Alok, thanks for the insight. We don't need content targetting (yet) but if we ever do I will check out the links you sent.

Hi Patrick, another potential reason to use Wordpress instead of Marketo is that if you ever were to shift off of Marketo, then you'd still have all of your pages. Granted you'd lose the form, but it's easier to replace a form than to recreate entire pages.

And just a note, I'd never want to shift off of Marketo but in the past I had to shift from Hubspot to Marketo and it was a ton of work to recreate all of our pages. ;)

We have a Wordpress site with Munchkins for tracking. So, if we build a landing page in Wordpress vs Marketo, do we get the same tracking data either way, as long as our forms are built in Marketo? 

There are some very slight differences, such as the ability to prefill forms, or use progressive profiling, but choosing to use your existing CMS instead of Marketo landing page functionality is very valid.

Thanks Kenny. If we were to build our forms in Marketo Forms 2.0 and embed them on our website, I assume we'd be able to prefill forms and use progressive profiling, right? Or am I mistaken?

David