Tips for newbie implementing and managing Marketo for the first time

[Lisa_Forson]

Hi all,

Our company is in the process of implementing Marketo, which is our first ever venture into the marketing automation world. We are still in the middle of setting up our instance and going through onboarding.

I have some experience in being an end-user of automation platforms at other organisations, but I'm brand new into an admin role and all the things that need to be done in order to get Marketo up and running.  And I'm feeling slightly nervous about the responsibility and ensuring its success! 

So my question is - thinking back to when you or your company first got started with Marketo, do you have any tips or advice to share? Things you wish you'd known? Things I need to watch out for?

Is there any documentation available which lists some of the ongoing 'housekeeping' activities which I should be thinking about? This is definitely one area which I'm unsure about.

Thank you so much in advance!

Lisa

[Lisa_Forson]

Hey Liam! Sounds like you're a few months ahead of where we are here, hope it's all gone well so far? 

I take it you decided to use your own dedicated IP address then, as opposed to using Marketo's shared IP addresses? Was that a complicated process to get set up?  We are going down a similar path I think....

[Liam_Darmody]

Great question that I actually don't know the answer to. I know that we are going to be working with the Marketo Deliverability team to warm the IP, but whether it's our own dedicated vs. Marketo's shared is a question I'll need to ask them so that I know. 

As for how it's gone thus far, I'd say pretty well! A member of our team had a friend from a prior job that does Marketo consulting on the side and he built us a modular dynamic template that's a copy of what we have been sending and it's made a WORLD of difference in building the templates. Have y'all done that? 

[Natalie_Kremer]

I totally agree with all of the above - folder structures, naming conventions and documentation are key!y 

I would also encourage you to think through what your most standard campaigns will look like and create a series of Program Templates to use as a starting point. There are so many little things you should do as a part of each Program and having Program Templates can make sure you have the right assets, Program Status Smart Campaigns and anything else that is repeatable. It'll also save you and your team so much time by not having to start everything from scratch. 

[Pamela_Lynn1]

Be strategic on creating anything custom. Think about scalability in the future. 

Couple things that were already mentioned are super important to me:

• Naming convention (this will help you scale, organize and report!)
• Folder structure
• Documentation
• Limited customization (you're not staying at a company forever, make sure someone else can continue to admin this system in the future)

When in doubt, it's worth the money to invest on good implementation help. Don't save on that, the tech debt you end up with in the future is more expensive to fix.

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Hey Lisa,

I wrote an article on this (well not exactly this topic, but many of the points apply) for the community last year. 

Hope it helps  

https://nation.marketo.com/community/champion/blog/2018/06/08/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-marketo-admi... 

[Nadia_Milani]

Love this question. I'm a Marketo admin at a large enterprise company. Previously, I had experience implementing Hubspot at a start-up/small company, which was a very different experience due to platform (right?) and size of database. We implemented Marketo almost a year ago. I would say the following things are really important, relative to large enterprise B2B business with legacy data infrastructure : 

- IT resourcing. I think it's important to engage IT with detailed requirements, if you have an IT team. i.e. Marketo is much more than just initial CRM sync. If it's possible to get a dedicated resource, that you can engage throughout Marketo launch, the faster you will scale.

- Become besties with your CRM admin, if you have one. The data that you input into Marketo will be relative to the sync and the fields you allow to flow in. Lot of the fields are useless (depends a bit on your CRM, instance, and how clean your CRM is). Blocking the field data not required, will improve sync and potential errors. It's best to go through exercise of identifying which fields you need with implementation, vs. post sync. Also, if your CRM contact database is large and not updated - pushing  all data into Marketo can get your contact #s much higher than anticipated (not favorable). I agree with previous comment about custom fields. The business may ask for this field and that field, but be choosy. 

- Lock down naming conventions/taxonomy for folders, emails, UTM codes. If there are multiple Marketo users, make sure everyone follows them. It will help for reporting purposes and campaign management. 

- Marketo for some organizations can be an investment. Showing early wins i.e. more revenue, better engagement through nurture campaigns (i.e. CTR, Opens), more traffic to site - helps C-suite understand value. This might mean you have to partner with your insights team if you use i.e. Adobe, to generate deep insights on your campaigns. 

- Build your team. Depending on how many campaigns you're deploying, you may need to hire more resources i.e. you do emails, find an automation specialist who just manages sync optimization, engagement programs, landing pages. Depends on what your team needs to output - but having one person do everything may not be possible. Marketo is not just an email platform. 

- If your data infrastructure is complex and operationally your business is matrix-y - I highly recommend a implementation and/or optimization partner to hit the ground running. It will really help you get the most of the platform and help onboard your team. 

- The design studio in Marketo is good, but not amazing. If you or someone on your team has the opportunity to learn how to code in Marketo (HTML) - all the better. It will help you create better, customer friendly templates. 

Happy to connect with more tips. Feel free to message. 

Nadia

[Lisa_Forson]

This is amazing, thank you so much Nadia!

[Liam_Darmody]

This was an awesome response - thanks for putting so much thought into it. 

[Nadia_Milani]

Thanks @liamdarmody!  

[Jay_Jiang]

Design a folder structure in Marketing activities that make full use of tokens. Tokenise as much as you can and anything that might change (e.g. your cname, your registered office address, your company phone number, your favourite football team - you get the idea...)

[Amy_Goldfine]

Oooh yes, look up Universal Tokens, they're great.      

[Josh_Pickles]

Grace is totally right - having a strong set of naming conventions goes a long way to make sure your instance is kept tidy and searchable.

The other thing I would add to that is documentation. We run a process where every program within Marketo has a corresponding brief that outlines stakeholders, intent and goals, visualisations, description, and changelog for us to refer to.

It can be a pain to keep on top, but it has saved us a lot of time trying to work out what happened to a program 2 months/years ago when something goes wrong.

[Amy_Goldfine]

Yes, document, document, document. We also have a "changelog" where you have to log every time you change an operational program or database smart list, including why you made the change.  Saved me quite a few times.

[Lisa_Forson]

Hi Josh - thanks for the great response! I already had it in mind to create a campaign library of sorts, which gives people in the business somewhere to refer to if they want to know who we were targeting, what the email looks like etc. So that's more external facing. But what you do with your documentation is a great idea, especially the change log. Really helps to keep a bit of an audit trail. Thanks so much!

[Josh_Pickles]

It's been especially useful for those who are new to the business and are trying to figure out the history behind campaigns and programs that exist within Marketo and it's meant we're not asking as many unnecessary questions in an attempt to understand how something operates. The changelog is the most useful part for me picking up projects I've not been involved in from the beginning.

[Lisa_Forson]

That's great, such a good idea! Thanks!

[Liam_Darmody]

Your documentation sounds great and like something that I would want to implement. Do you happen to have a template that you'd be able to share? 

[Josh_Pickles]

I don't have a version that I am able to share, but I can certainly summarise some of sections.

Campaign Info

• Summary, measurables etc

Significant Dates

• Changes & updates

Campaign Detail

• List details, suppression lists, dynamic content requirements etc

Meeting Notes

[Grace_Brebner3]

Oh there are so many things, and this is such a good question to be asking. 

To keep it short, the number one thing I would say is naming conventions. Decide on your naming conventions and get them on LOCK - make sure they're followed consistently and don't be lax on it. There's tons of stuff in community about naming convention structure (defs including a few rants from me), but this would seriously be my number one.

That and be very very selective about custom fields. Don't go creating them left right and centre

[Chris_Willis1]

I completely agree on naming conventions for a couple of reasons.

• They enable you to develop cleaner reporting and find your programs and assets more easily.  
• When you create your lead management process, having naming conventions around your forms will be critical to isolate only those forms that fast track people as MQLs.
• If you have multiple products/divisions in your org, this is the way to differentiate your programs for scoring and qualification purposes.  

Other things I would mention:

• Lock down your program templates (the campaign library) and train your marketing users to work from pre-built program templates vs. customizing their Marketo programs.  Consistency is your friend.  
• Limit the number of forms you use, use a naming convention, and be sure that all of them live in the Design Studio.  Forms in Marketing Activities can become a huge headache.  
• Make sure that the Marketo Form ID is included in your form naming convention.  If you have any Marketo forms embedded in external websites, this will be a big timesaver. 
• Embed all of your marketing activities into a nested folder structure and use Folder Tokens to standardize company-level metadata used in all of your programs (copyright year, address, company name, etc.), and then bake these tokens into your email and landing page templates.  If you need to make changes to anything that is org-wide, this will save you a ton of time. 

There are lots of great ideas on this thread.  I hope I was able to also help.  Good luck with your implementation  

[Liam_Darmody]

Great insight. Why is selectivity about custom fields so important in your opinion? I'll look elsewhere in the community as you suggested, but wanted to know your thoughts. 

LD