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

[JD_Nelson]

For me it's all about streamlining. Starting fresh is the best time to make sure you have as many programs using as few processes as possible. Streamline your lifecycle processes to stamp people so you don't have every net new lead through a program going through 4 different flow steps that you can do globally.

Also, that goes for sub-processes as well. If you have a contact us process, manage each location/url through a different smart campaign, but manage the data through one singular, global process. Now if you ever have to change something globally, it should be simple and confident in effectiveness.

[Amy_Goldfine]

Document everything! Especially key processes like your lead lifecycle. Also it's a great idea to create a field library to document what important fields do and which system is setting the values.

[Rob_Cummerson]

Hi Lisa, 

Welcome to the community. What I will say is every organisation is different and you have to make it work for you which I am sure you will do. Some of the things to consider 

1) Make sure you align it with your CRM and the way your business works. The relationship should be seamless and which platform is the master

2) Define your lead life cycle process and be clear on the rules. Where does marketing hand over to sales and what should sales be doing to progress

3) Naming conventions - an absolute must for usage and reporting

4) Define user roles Admin & general usage 

5) How will your data be managed - partitions, work spaces and what rules do you want around each 

6) Document everything, it can be a nightmare but it is worth it. I used Vidyard to record short videos which worked really well

7) Define your super users and supporters early 

😎 Define standard approaches to how you use campaigns and build some master templates out

9) Consider other tech in your organisation and how you can integrate it 

Good luck and feel free to reach out if you need any help 

[Cayce_Armstrong]

Hi Lisa Forson‌! I'm about 3 years in to setting up our Marketo instance and CRM (NetSuite) integration from scratch and I still read through the comments on posts like yours because there's always something new to learn from the Community. I wish I had asked for advice from other Marketo users when I first started because everything mentioned in the comments to your post are things I wish I had done from the get-go.

My implementation was a rushed due to a 3 month deadline I had to switch from Pardot to Marketo. In that time I had to learn how Marketo worked, figure out how to connect Marketo to our NetSuite CRM via Vertify, re-create everything in Marketo that previously existed in Pardot (web forms, autoresponders, email campaigns, etc) and add additional forms for two more of our brands. 

I don't know if my experience was unique but if I were to do it all again, I would have told my managers that 3 months is not enough time to do everything they had asked of me and expect it to be quality work. In the end it all got done, but I'm still going back and making "fixes" to the things that were rushed and not thought through. So, my advice is to make sure you take the time to learn the basics of Marketo and set your instance up correctly now so you don't have to go back and redo everything later. I would also recommend that you find someone - either a consultant that specializes in Marketo, or someone at your company who has experience using Marketo - that you can learn from or go to with questions as you're setting things up. The Community is also a great resource, which it looks like you've already discovered, and so are MUG groups!

PS - The Marketo Jumpstart and Marketo Success emails that Meghana Rao‌ linked to above were not available when I started using Marketo, but I've received several of those emails and they are very helpful!

[Priyank_Joshi3]

1) Get familiar with your Marketo tool, try and explore all the icons Resource for Newbies: Glossary of Icons 

2) Get started with Marketo Quick Wins, Getting Started - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation 

3) Refer Product docs and Marketo community to get all of your answers solved. 

4) Refer product docs to lear how Marketo and CRM functions.

Hope this helps to speed up your Marketo learnings.

Thanks!

Priyank

[Abhishek_Chand2]

There is a lot of information available on community and also most of the important points are shared by members. One can always rely on community to find the answers of all the doubts. For a newbie I would like to recommend that one should also understand the SPF and DKIM concepts and how it effects the deliverability and what is required from the IT team within the organization. Also, another important point to consider is whitelisting of Marketo servers, IT team can certainly help here.

[Daria_Stepanova]

We are a rare organization that integrates with Salesforce, yet doesn't use leads. I wish I had known that Marketo needs to sync with leads and that I need to create a flow that auto-converts leads to contacts before we started asking ourselves why about 500 contacts from Marketo are missing in Salesforce.

[ChristinaZuniga]

Set user access rules early! 

So many companies open up administrator access (or something else strange you wouldn't find at a more developed department) to everyone because the team is small and they trust each other. Then the company grows and gives the same level of access to everyone and suddenly you have an entire group of people all doing things they probably shouldn't. 

It's hard to roll back those rules later on than it is to start out strong with best practices.

[Carrie_Chandle1]

Was going to add this! Take a hard look at access - it's easier to start with more restrictive access then open it up later as users learn the platform than to start in the wild wild west.

[JD_Nelson]

Everything in here is great to get started. Something I invested (time) in when setting up a brand new instance was to make sure that my lead lifecycle processes were global/holistic and documented. What does that mean, exactly? When a net new lead enters your database for the first time, there should be a VERY consistent set of actions that happens, in a pretty particular order (acquisition, attribution, scoring, enrichment, product interest, sync to crm, etc). Having ONE program setup for this on EVERY lead will cut down any investigations you need to do, and answer EVERYONE's question "What happens when a lead is created?". If you document that, build it out from the onset, it solves a lot of problems.

[Yan_Hristov]

I couldn't agree more. The biggest "improvement" I have made so far for my team is taking a step back, looking at the lead lifecycle, and then restructuring Marketo around it. Do that and all the functionalities, automation, templates, tokens, naming conventions, etc will fall into place!

[James_Leedom1]

Hi Lisa,

I think there are a lot of helpful comments in here. My anecdotal experience to add is that dateTime stamps and documentation are everything. For example, we have a field thats called "Last Engagement Date" that we timestamp when someone opens an email, visits a web page, fills out a form, etc. (any engagement) so that you can make sure you're emailing and reaching out to an engaged audience. You can timestamp things that you want to see historical snapshots of, like when you passed over a certain record as a "qualified lead". 

Time stamps would probably be phase 2 or 3 of your Marketo instance roll out, but the earlier you do it the earlier you have data!

James

[Arvin_Poole]

James, thanks for sharing this an awesome tip on dateTime stamps.

[Ray_Bennett]

Hi Lisa,

Welcome to the community. I'm fairly new myself and I can assure you it's a great platform and the community is very helpful. 

One thing to look out for is to ensure you have secure links and landing pages in your instance. This is important because the last thing you want is to have a deadline to send an email or launch a landing page and find errors. We had to get this separately so I'm not sure if it's included in your package, I would double-check. 

Make sure to make use of folders. Once you get going projects will quickly expand and it will be a hassle to organize later. 

I know my organization responds well to PP decks so I have created a template that I can quickly populate with metrics to send to them. 

I also suggest building out educational materials and a roadmap. It may seem soon but if this is a new effort you will find yourself educating many departments on marketing automation. Along with this make sure you have a plan to move from ad hoc emails to marketing automation. I say that because from my experience some organizations can be tempted to solely use Marketo for batch emails. While that is a piece of what Marketo can do it will be hard to get to significant goals doing just that. 

I hope this helps.

[Allison_Isett5]

Hi @Lisa Forson, 

I totally agree with everything outlined in the comments above. I would also recommend building 1 global program that automates database hygiene. @Jeff Coveney in the Boston User group wrote a great blog post on this: Get Your Data Clean: Gold Nugget Data | Boston Marketo User Group. Happy Marketo-ing!

[Will_Harmon2]

Hey Lisa Forson‌! Last year I asked some of our advocates what were some of the most important Marketo tips for new/onboarding Marketo users. I think the advice that has already been offered up in this thread will definitely steer you in the right direction, but I wanted to share that blog with you to serve as a checklist of sorts once you and your team are up and running!

/blogs/employee_blog/2018/06/01/top-10-tips-for-new-marketo-users 

Hope there are some useful best practices in here for you!

[Meghana_Rao1]

If you're interested, Lisa Forson‌, my team (Marketo Customer Marketing Adoption) has put together a program, Marketo Jumpstart, that sends weekly emails to send some helpful content over to users through their implementation. We also have the Marketo Success program to help users cover the basics of the Marketo solution's core features, which is probably a little less of what you're looking for, but might be helpful for other people on your team who are less familiar with Marketo Engage! 
Sign Up for Marketo Jumpstart  

Sign Up for Marketo Success  

[Meghana_Rao1]

Here's an example of one of our pieces of content on starting your documentation: https://nation.marketo.com/community/product_and_support/blog/2019/01/09/marketo-governance-and-docu... 

[Lisa_Forson]

Many thanks for all your fantastic responses! Interesting to see there's some reoccurring themes.....all good stuff for me to be aware of. Really appreciate your time, thank you!

[Liam_Darmody]

Following! 

I'm in the same boat as Lisa.

Our company has just created our first batch of email templates with corresponding smartlists, streams, flows, engagement programs, etc. and are going to be working on warming up our new IP in the next few weeks. We're a start-up with about 120 people and so things like "proper naming conventions that are on LOCK," structure, process documentation, etc., can aren't exactly abundant. I've configured enough internal tools to know that it's always best to measure twice/cut once, so I'm trying to do that with Marketo as well, but it's completely new to me (i've worked with Pardot, Eloqua, etc.) & i'm not a certified admin, so your best practices for low hanging fruit that lays a solid foundation is greatly appreciated! 

LD