Editing HTML for Marketo Landing Pages is complicated

Instead of taking the time now to provide all the background information and catching up to where we are today, this post covers where we are today and as I find the time, I'll go back and catch up on other details that people might be interested in.  We decided to go with Marketo and in we're in the process of an implementation pilot that started at the beginning of November.

For the past few days, I've been trying to figure out how to change the "Submit" button on a landing page.  I want to change the color to a custom color and I want to change the words to "Download Now."  It's turning out to be very complicated and I still haven't figured out how to do it.

Marketo Landing pages consist of three parts.  The Form: which are all the fields that you want to capture.  The Landing Page Template: which consists of background formatting,  And the Landing Page itself.  So you have to create and edit those three components separately to build a Landing Page.

Well, you can edit the HTML in a LP template, but it's not easy to edit the HTML in a Landing Page.  And the Submit button is behavior is built using Javascript.  For someone like me with no HTML skills, simply trying to go through the HTML and trying to make some minor edits is not working.  I still haven't figured out how to do it.

So the bottom line, Marketo forms can be easy to use if you stay within their pre-set templates, but when you want to do something even a little more customized with a landing page, it becomes a lot more complicated and starts requiring someone who understands javascript.

Update 12/6:

After talking with our Marketo implementation consultant, I understand how to change the submit button.  It takes these specific steps listed below.  What the takeaway is that you can customize the submit button, but it's not straightforward.  All of the instructions below are very specific to Marketo and you can see that they only make sense once you familiarize yourself with the Marketo user interface.  I see this as an example, where the ease of use of Marketo is only slightly better than Eloqua.

• To change the label on the Submit button on a landing page, you have to do that in the Marketo Form.  Edit the Submit button label to change it to something else like Download Now.
• To change the color of the button you have to create a new background image for the button and change the link in either the Landing Page Template or the Landing Page itself.  The difference being that a pre-defined Landing Page Template will have button defined in the template.  If you start with a blank landing page template, the submit button has to be created in the Landing Page as a custom HTML box.
• The background image for the submit button has a very specific design layout.  It's not easy to change the color.  You need to open the background image in Photoshop and create a layer matching the background image with your desired color.
• Here's a link to a Marketo Knowledgebase Article that describes this:  http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000KysICAS