Making the most of Marketo with UI extensions and Lambda functions

Marketo is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can be utilized extensively by various arms of a full-blown marketing department, but it has a steep learning curve and some features can seem tricky to implement. Marketo forms use inline styles and have a plain default design, which requires customization to align with the brand's own branding. To overcome this challenge, Contentful used UI extensions to create a workaround that removed conflicting styles from Marketo forms and styled them using SASS @extend with their own form design's styles. A UI extension was built in Contentful to address the tedious process of manually embedding forms on each page, offering authors a dropdown menu to select the desired form. However, there was a hurdle to overcome due to Marketo's CORS restrictions, which required building a Lambda function hosted on Netlify to perform server-side API calls. The UI extension can be used by installing it from Contentful's Extensions section and configuring its settings with the Lambda function URL endpoint.