Tips for newbie implementing and managing Marketo for the first time

Oh there are so many things, and this is such a good question to be asking. 

To keep it short, the number one thing I would say is naming conventions. Decide on your naming conventions and get them on LOCK - make sure they're followed consistently and don't be lax on it. There's tons of stuff in community about naming convention structure (defs including a few rants from me), but this would seriously be my number one.

That and be very very selective about custom fields. Don't go creating them left right and centre

Grace is totally right - having a strong set of naming conventions goes a long way to make sure your instance is kept tidy and searchable.

The other thing I would add to that is documentation. We run a process where every program within Marketo has a corresponding brief that outlines stakeholders, intent and goals, visualisations, description, and changelog for us to refer to.

It can be a pain to keep on top, but it has saved us a lot of time trying to work out what happened to a program 2 months/years ago when something goes wrong.

Design a folder structure in Marketing activities that make full use of tokens. Tokenise as much as you can and anything that might change (e.g. your cname, your registered office address, your company phone number, your favourite football team - you get the idea...)

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

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 

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.

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. 

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

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!

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  

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