Don’t throw away money on your Marketo implementation

October 10, 2016  |  
By Caitlin Poliska
  |  Technology
October 10, 2016
By Caitlin Poliska

When you purchase Marketo you ignite a chain reaction that can push you through the Revenue Marketing Journey™ to win a you a seat at the revenue table, or conversely you just wasted money on an expensive tool that pushes out emails. Which side of that purchase do you want to be on?

Marketo, the platform, in and of itself is extremely user friendly, but if your team does not set it up properly before “turning it on,” you will find yourself struggling to show the return. You may soon feel the addition to your technology stack is not entirely helpful.

There are a few things you should do before you implement Marketo, and then a few more that need to be done during the implementation process.

First let’s talk about what you need to do before your Marketo implementation:

Look for the bigger picture.

Often times I see companies pilot their Marketo in one area of the business, with the intention to roll it out to all at a later date. With this decision, organizations often look only at the right now and don’t accommodate scale. While you can’t always predict the future of your business, you need to address the goals of the company to ensure your Marketo instance is scalable.

Consider your lead management process.

Do you have a defined lead management process? This one always gets me. Marketo is much more robust than an email-only system. One of the key benefits of having it is the ability to automate processes such as lead management, but that means having a defined lead management process.

Document your current process.

This important to ensure your process will work with Marketo. Don’t try to automate a process that is broken or poorly planned. Documentation should be thorough enough so any outside person could look at your documentation and know what to do. Lack of detail will surely hurt, and will leave you with one expensive email system.

Define your personas.

This one is harder for many organizations to define, but proper segmentation and targeting within Marketo relies on this component. With your personas in place, you can immediately see where your data meets your targets. This process can help you see whether you have the right people in your database to market to or not.

Related:

Plan the CRM sync.

Before you connect Marketo to everything else (because it does integrate with almost anything), plan how you want the systems to work together and determine what data should be passed to and from one another. Is the data in one system “dirty”? Evaluate what you are putting in.

From a more tactical standpoint – here are a few things to keep in mind when you implement Marketo to help the process.

  1. Communicate thoroughly and consistently with IT
  2. Determine a landing page CNAME that will reflect your brand – and don’t overlook your email branded link
  3. Set up SPF and DKIM for your domain to ensure the best possible deliverability
  4. Whitelist the Marketo testing IP addresses so you can properly test emails in the future
  5. Don’t make every user an admin
  6. Don’t over think it

Want more? Make sure to read these myths of marketing automation!

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