Tips for newbie implementing and managing Marketo for the first time

[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!

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.