Doing marketing for multiple companies in one marketo instance.

[Anonymous]

Hi, does anyone out there use marketo to do marketing for multiple companies that are sort of under one umbrella? We are pondering starting to do this for companies underneath us. We currently do design and branding for them but any marketing we just do through external vendors. How would you recommend doing this so that it's legal that they are opting into the emails for that specific company only etc.? My mind is spinning with how to begin. Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

HI Katie,

I would start creating landing page domains and branding domains for each of your customers, which will required that each if your customers add some entries in their DNS.

Second, creating specific opt-in per company is not that difficult, you will need a series of fields (one for each of the brands) to be added to each form and potentially opt-in programs if you need to manage double opt-in.

I would formalize all these steps in a roll out guide where you will have to list all the items that have to put in place when you add a new subsidiaires / brands.

You could also consider using partitions and workspaces to separate the databases and limit the risks, though. But this option needs to be implemented with care if you need to share some of the persons in the DB between multiple subsidiaries.

The very hard point with opt-in is to enforce it when launching the campaigns, at least until this idea is implemented. This will require some thorough discipline around your users, so training and documentation will be important

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thanks Greg. So, most of these sub-companies already have websites set up. The complicated part is that these aren't technically companies that are underneath us, they just contract with us if that makes sense. So would i have to work with each of these companies individually to get their domain activated in our instance?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Yes, you will, as they will have to:

• Add some lines in their DNS for LP domains and email branding and deliverability
• Add munchkin code to their web sites.

You can do without these steps, but you will be unable to track web page visits and your email deliverability will be very bad.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Okay, thank yoU! That's what i figured. I think we will start down that course

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Pls mark it as answered

-Greg

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Just want to toss in here that one of the most important parts is how your CRM is setup.

One CRM or multiple, how the database is segmented - that will play a major role in the build.

[Anonymous]

Hi Darrell, Thanks for chiming in. Can you elaborate on this. We have dynamics for crm. we sync everything between marketo and ms dynamics. I'll try to keep it short to explain the business, basically our business is a middle man between insurance carriers and insurance agents. So our clients are insurance agents and we try to get them to write their business through us. The difference between us and most companies is that we have tons of other companies just like us that contract under us as well, so it's these companies that we market for because at the end of the day their agents write business through them, and then that company submits the business through us. SO, currently all of the agents under a current sub company are marked by which sub company they write business under in a field in the crm, so i don't think i have to worry about the leads coming in through our crm when marketing for one of the wholesalers as long as the lead tasks (emails) are sent to that company instead of our sales staff in house. Does that make sense. We also have a "recruiting to" field because our sales staff already recruits for these sub companies. We just haven't made the jump to do their marketing for them, all we currently do in marketo is market our company. Do you think there's something I should worry about that im forgetting? I figured if a lead came in for marketing for one of the sub companies, i would just add them to a static list in marketo and that would be the list I eventually market to for that company? And if they want to market to their current agents I would just pull off of the primary wholesaler field we already have. Does that make sense?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Katie,

the good news is that with dynamics, you do not have any implicit sync, so you will not risk pushing these leads to MSD it you do not want to.

So the only thing you need to worry about is, if you push the leads in MSD, how are you going to identify in MSD to which of the sub-companies the lead belongs.

-Greg

[Darrell_Alfons2]

MSD is outside of my scope, so I'm glad Greg is here to share his expertise.

From your description I think it will be fine.

So with my earlier use case, we had different companies with different products that may or may not complement each other.

So I had to use product interest fields, subscription fields for segmentation, and multiple lead scores based on product.

But for yours I can see much of it aligning nicely so there are probably layers of complexity you don't need to introduce. Just my opinion though.