Building a Marketo Integration

This guide demonstrates how to sync data from your app to your customer’s Marketo accounts. For demonstration purposes, we’ll build a workflow that creates a new lead in our user’s Marketo list using lead data from our app. You can use the concepts covered in this tutorial in other applications as well.

​

Prerequisites

1. Connect your Marketo application to Paragon.

2. Add your Marketo app credentials to activate your integration.

​

1. Build your workflow

​

Step 1.1: Create a new Marketo workflow

It’s important that you give your workflows a descriptive name to provide the best experience for your user.

​

Step 1.2: Create an App Event

Since we want to pass lead data from our application to our customer’s Marketo account, we’ll use the App Event trigger. Select the trigger step from the Workflow Editor, then click “App Event”.

Select Choose an App Event > Create new App Event, then add the following parameters:

• Event Name - the name of your App Event. (e.g. Lead Created)
• Event Schema - example JSON Object that will be sent from your app. JSON objects are written in key/value pairs. Keys must be strings, and values must be a valid JSON data type (string, number, object, array, boolean or null)

You can use the sample App Event Schema below to jumpstart your progress:

{
    "first_name": "Bowie",
    "last_name": "Foo",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "company": "Paragon",
    "title": "Chief Dog Officer"
}

​

Step 1.3: Add a Marketo step

Add a Marketo step to your workflow and use the dropdown menu to select Create or Update Lead as the action. You can input the fields from your App Event by typing two left curly braces {{ to bring up the dynamic variable menu.

Step 1.4: Create a User Setting

Since we want our user to select which list in Marketo we should add new leads to, we will add a User Settingto our workflow.

To add Workflow User Setting to Marketo, follow these steps:

1. Click Customize Connect Portal in the Overview page to open the Connect Portal Editor.

2. Click the Configuration tab in the right sidebar.

3. Click on the workflow you’d like to add User Settings to.

4. Under User Settings in the right sidebar, click + Add Settings.

5. Enter a name for the field and choose the List field type from the dropdown menu.

6. Click the Save button to add it to your Connect Portal.

​

Step 1.5: Add the lead to a list

Navigate back to your workflow once you have added the User Setting. Add another Marketo step to your workflow and use the dropdown menu to select Add Leads to Listas the action. You can input the fields from your App Event by typing two left curly braces {{ to bring up the dynamic variable menu.

​

Step 1.6: Deploy your workflow

Now that your workflow is all set up, deploy your workflow by clicking the “Deploy” button in the top-right of your screen.

​

2. Generate a Paragon Signing Key

To generate a Signing Key, go to Settings > Signing Keys in your Paragon dashboard. You should store this key in an environment secrets file.

For security reasons, we don’t store your Private Key and cannot show it to you again, so we recommend you download the key and store it someplace secure.

​

3. Install the Paragon SDK

The Paragon SDK gives you access to the Paragon global, which you can access as paragon.

You can install the Paragon SDK with npm:

npm install @useparagon/connect

The SDK can be imported in your client-side JavaScript files as a module:

import { paragon } from '@useparagon/connect';

​

4. Authenticate your user

Next, you’ll need a library in your target language to sign JWTs with RS256. You can find one in your language at https://jwt.io/.

If your application is a fully client-rendered single-page app, you may have to create and use an additional API endpoint to retrieve a signed JWT (or reuse an existing endpoint that handles authentication or user info).

​

Step 4.1: Sign a Paragon User Token

The Paragon User Token is a signed JWT that minimally must include the sub, iat, and exp claims:

{
	// Uniquely identifying key for a user
	"sub": "the-user-id",

	// Issue timestamp, should be the current time
	"iat": 1608600116

	// Expiry timestamp for token, such as 1 hour from time of signature (iat)
	"exp": 1608603716
}

​

Step 4.2: Call paragon.authenticate()

You’ll call paragon.authenticate in your view with a JWT signed by your backend using the library chosen in Step 4.1. This JWT is the Paragon user token.

.authenticate should be called at the beginning of your application’s lifecycle in all cases. This is to make sure that the userToken is always as fresh as possible, with respect to your user’s existing session on your own site. You may reference Installing the Connect SDK for a detailed explanation on how to use .authenticate.

paragon.authenticate(
	// You can find your project ID in the Overview tab of any Integration
	"38b1f170-0c43-4eae-9a04-ab85325d99f7",

	// See Setup for how to encode your user token
	"eyJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.ey..."
);

​

5. Connect to your integration

Now that you’ve authenticated your user, you can call paragon.connect() to bring up the Paragon Connect Portal.

paragon.connect("marketo");

​

6. Send an App Event

Lastly, we’ll send an App Event whenever a lead is created in your app. App Events can be sent from your application using the Paragon SDK or REST API. In both cases, you must pass two parameters:

• name - the event name defined in your App Event
• payload - the event payload that should match the event schema defined in your App Event

See the code examples below for how to send App Events using the Paragon SDK or API.

var eventName = "Lead Created";
var eventPayload = {
    "first_name": "Bowie",
    "last_name": "Foo",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "company": "Paragon",
    "title": "Chief Dog Officer"
};

// Trigger the "Lead Created" App Event
paragon.event(eventName, eventPayload)

When sending live events from your application, Paragon will not validate that your event payload matches the defined event schema.

Great work! We just built a Marketo integration that adds new leads from your app to lists in our customers’ Marketo accounts.