Make a Marketo Form Submission in the background

This post originally appears on the Marketo Developers Blog

When your organization has many different platforms for hosting web content and customer data it becomes fairly common to need parallel submissions from a form so that the resulting data can be gathered in separate platforms. There are several strategies to do this, but the best one is often the simplest: Using the Forms 2 API to submit a hidden Marketo form. This will work with any new Marketo Form, but ideally you should create an empty form for this, which has no fields:

This will ensure that the form doesn’t load any more data than necessary, since we don’t need to render anything. Now just grab the embed code from your form and add it to the body of your desired page, making a small modification. You embed code includes a form element like this:

<form id="mktoForm_1068"></form>

You’ll want to add ‘style=”display:none”‘ to the element so it is not visible, like this:

<form id="mktoForm_1068" style="display:none"></form>

Once the form is embedded and hidden, the code to submit the form is really quite simple:

var myForm = MktoForms2.allForms()[0]; 
myForm.addHiddenFields({ 
     //These are the values which will be submitted to Marketo 
     "Email":"test@example.com", 
     "FirstName":"John", 
     "LastName":"Doe" }); 
myForm.submit();

Forms submitted this way will behave exactly like if the lead had filled out and submitted a visible form. Triggering the submission will vary between implementations since each one will have a different action to prompt it, but you can make it occur on basically any action. The important part is setting your fields and values correctly. Be sure to use the SOAP API name of your fields which you can find with Export Field Names to esnure correct submission of values.