Overview
So, you’ve taken the leap and decided to implement Marketo Engage – a powerful tool that can revolutionize your marketing efforts. A Marketo Engage Implementation may sound complicated at first, especially if you are new to the tool. But don’t worry, there are plenty of resources available to help you along the way.
As you get your plan in place, it’s important to do your due diligence with discovery. Our Marketo Engage Implementation Kit will give you a good idea of what’s to come. Including 6 carefully curated resources – from checklists to technical guides to project workbooks – that walk you through the many considerations and configurations of a Marketo implementation.
Organizing Your Implementation Project
Before you dive into the technical aspects, it’s crucial to start with a solid project plan. By breaking down the process into manageable milestones, you can stay focused and prevent any important details from slipping through the cracks.
At Etumos, we break down our Marketo Implementation project plan into 5 key milestones:
- Discovery and Planning – Including provisioning Marketo, requirements gathering, building your project plan, kickoff meetings, and more
- General Set-up and Configuration – Including technical setup, admin configuration, channel and tag configuration, and more
- Integration and Sync – Including CRM integration setup, Launchpoint partner configuration, and any custom integrations
- Marketing Builds – Including lead intake programs, engagement programs, operational programs, and more
- Go Live – Including activating programs, pushing forms live, troubleshooting, documentation, and more
Configuring Like a Pro
Marketo technical setup may not be the most exciting piece of the puzzle, but it’s a necessary building block for your implementation success. The technical portion of set up includes setting up authorized support contacts, landing page and email CNAMEs, whitelisting Marketo servers, website tracking and SSL setup including verifying SPF & DKIM configuration.
Admin configuration is up next with a focus on the instance security, timezone, campaign/communication limits, user roles & permissions, and channels & tags. Marketo makes administration and governance simple with user roles and permissions and it’s recommended to maintain documentation to track this for your team. If you’re interested in exploring additional options, you can see if custom user roles would align to your business needs.
Some might say that channels and tags are the essential ingredient to your marketing campaigns since they help track channel engagement and campaign ROI. It is crucial to set up channels and tags properly from the outset as they enable reporting on lead creation, lead velocity, opportunity influence, and dollars won, and are the foundation for more advanced reporting such as multi-touch attribution and business intelligence.
Following the build out of your channels, you can also begin to build out your requirements for program templates, to identify the forms and program templates you will need to get started with marketing in Marketo.
Get Your Data Flowing
Most businesses use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform such as Salesforce (SFDC) to manage interactions and understand their relationship with their prospects and customers. Using the native integration services between the CRM and Marketo is a key milestone in marketing ops maturity to establish a single customer profile and provide a relevant, personalized experience for prospects or customers. The Marketo Engage-SFDC sync offers native integration between these two systems, is fully bi-directional for Marketo Engage person records, and establishes the connection best during the Marketo Engage initial setup and implementation which is why it’s key during this stage in the process.
Prioritizing Phase 2 Projects
As you get comfortable with the basics, it’s time to level up your Marketo implementation. You should begin to determine the projects that should take center stage during phase 2. We recommend prioritizing a privacy compliance program as soon as possible to ensure you are adhering to global data privacy regulations. It’s also important to implement a centralized data standardization program to keep your data clean in your new instance. By focusing on these top-priority tasks, you can start leveraging the full potential of Marketo Engage sooner rather than later.
Have a question? Let’s talk! Contact us if you need help tackling your Marketo Engage implementation!
