Tips for newbie implementing and managing Marketo for the first time

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.

Hi @lisa-12 Forson, 

I totally agree with everything outlined in the comments above. I would also recommend building 1 global program that automates database hygiene. @67925 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!

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!

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  

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!

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

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. 

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.

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-administrator-resources-included 

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