7 Tips for Migrating to Marketo Marketing Automation

Marketing automation helps organize, streamline, and monitor all the routine marketing tasks. However, an efficient marketing automation platform also helps your marketing team close more deals. 

Whether you are migrating from a homegrown database or a beginner-level marketing platform, moving to a more robust marketing automation platform (Marketo, for instance) seems like the way to go when you want to strengthen your marketing efforts. 

But how do you ensure a smooth transition from your existing platform to Marketo? 

Here’s all you need to check on your task list to ensure a smooth and error-free Marketo migration.

Tips for Migrating to Marketo

1. Setting Benchmarks and Objectives

Switching to a new tool should bring improvements that are measurable to your organization. It’s important to benchmark the current performance of your company including sales cycle, marketable leads, opportunities created or closed, and the recent leads that have interacted with your brand.

After setting up the benchmarks, create a list of goals for the next six to 12 months. This list may include marketing qualified leads (MQLs), active leads, and any gathered opportunities. 

Setting up benchmarks and objectives will enable your managers to evaluate the viability of the new platform and its impact on the business you have created. 

2. Identifying the Differences

While your team is already accustomed to processing leads, run reports, and gather data, some of this information comes directly from vendor-specific fields. 

These can be the fields that are unique to the tool and may not be available without some additional work. For instance, Pardot and HubSpot have the capability to fetch Google Analytics fields, while other platforms lack this feature.

Hence, it is important to audit your field list in your current tool and evaluate which fields will remain. This will help you differentiate between the data you no longer need, and the data points you will need to replicate with a new system. 

3. Understanding Tech Integrations

Various business organizations use a plethora of third-party software to run their daily operations. When migrating to Marketo marketing platform, it’s important you consider its impact on your CRM strategy.

And how will the new platform integrate with the rest of your stack?

Marketo is a robust automation tool that easily integrates with various add-on tools as compared to other marketing platforms. For instance, Marketo provides native integration to webinar tools like WebEx and ON24, and data quality tools like RingLead. 

4. Evaluate the Complexities

Marketo or any other high-end marketing automation tool requires efficient implementation that ensures seamless integration between different systems within the organization. 

This is where you may need an implementation partner. They will not only aid you in migrating to Marketo or any other platform but also ensure that e operation within the stipulated time frame. 

As an integral component of migration, it’s imperative to check the type of settings and configurations required by your CRM in the new platform and what are the new features that can improve your performance.

To ensure that you don’t lose data from many fields, it’s important to map all the fields in your CRM and create an effective strategy to replicate this data in the new platform. While you can’t overwrite any proprietary fields, it’s important to test and migrate to new fields wherever required. 

5. Create a Flexible Timeline

In an ideal scenario, your Marketo migration should be completed in the stipulated time frame. However, there could be delays and uncalled interruptions in the migration process that can extend the timeline.

It’s important not to rush to complete the migration project that can result in sloppy work or create situations that have shortcomings in the future.

By working with your team to document each task and related dependencies, you can allocate sufficient time for data migration, troubleshooting, and testing. This will ensure efficient data migration which is both future-proof and productive. 

6. Collaboration, Communication, and Documentation

Documenting every technological change or modification during the migration process is pivotal for future use. If the information is only made available to a few individuals, it can be consequential in case they leave your organization.

For becoming future-proof, make sure to gather key members of each team and build an information base before implementing any new marketing automation tool.

Mutual coordination and collaboration are also essential between members for troubleshooting any impending issues during the migration. 

7. Use Migration as a Window to Become Better

Migrating to Marketo automation platform gives you a great opportunity to organize, optimize, and streamline your sales processes and inject energy into your marketing efforts. 

In addition to this regime, you also need to introspect to find answers to these questions:

• Apart from technology, what are the other pain points in your current platform?
• How can you enhance your marketing, sales, and customer engagement processes?
• Which new tools can you get from migrating to the new automation platform? And how does it help your current processes?

Read More: Things To Consider When Migrating From HubSpot Into Marketo

Wrapping Up

Marketo has immense power and potential when it comes to streamlining your business. However, the reality of every business organization is that we don’t have unlimited time and resources, which pushes us to devise strategies that can help us derive real value within a short time frame, budget, and resources. 

Companies need to move steadily making the most of the advantages offered by the Marketo system. By adopting a systematic approach to your marketing efforts, you can easily optimize your performance and build a strong edge over your competitors. To know more about Marketo migration and learn about the amazing benefits of an automation platform, connect with our marketing experts or write to us now at info@growthnatives.com.