Tips for newbie implementing and managing Marketo for the first time

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!

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!

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,

I think there are a lot of helpful comments in here. My anecdotal experience to add is that dateTime stamps and documentation are everything. For example, we have a field thats called "Last Engagement Date" that we timestamp when someone opens an email, visits a web page, fills out a form, etc. (any engagement) so that you can make sure you're emailing and reaching out to an engaged audience. You can timestamp things that you want to see historical snapshots of, like when you passed over a certain record as a "qualified lead". 

Time stamps would probably be phase 2 or 3 of your Marketo instance roll out, but the earlier you do it the earlier you have data!

James

Everything in here is great to get started. Something I invested (time) in when setting up a brand new instance was to make sure that my lead lifecycle processes were global/holistic and documented. What does that mean, exactly? When a net new lead enters your database for the first time, there should be a VERY consistent set of actions that happens, in a pretty particular order (acquisition, attribution, scoring, enrichment, product interest, sync to crm, etc). Having ONE program setup for this on EVERY lead will cut down any investigations you need to do, and answer EVERYONE's question "What happens when a lead is created?". If you document that, build it out from the onset, it solves a lot of problems.

Set user access rules early! 

So many companies open up administrator access (or something else strange you wouldn't find at a more developed department) to everyone because the team is small and they trust each other. Then the company grows and gives the same level of access to everyone and suddenly you have an entire group of people all doing things they probably shouldn't. 

It's hard to roll back those rules later on than it is to start out strong with best practices.

We are a rare organization that integrates with Salesforce, yet doesn't use leads. I wish I had known that Marketo needs to sync with leads and that I need to create a flow that auto-converts leads to contacts before we started asking ourselves why about 500 contacts from Marketo are missing in Salesforce.

There is a lot of information available on community and also most of the important points are shared by members. One can always rely on community to find the answers of all the doubts. For a newbie I would like to recommend that one should also understand the SPF and DKIM concepts and how it effects the deliverability and what is required from the IT team within the organization. Also, another important point to consider is whitelisting of Marketo servers, IT team can certainly help here.

1) Get familiar with your Marketo tool, try and explore all the icons Resource for Newbies: Glossary of Icons 

2) Get started with Marketo Quick Wins, Getting Started - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation 

3) Refer Product docs and Marketo community to get all of your answers solved. 

4) Refer product docs to lear how Marketo and CRM functions.

Hope this helps to speed up your Marketo learnings.

Thanks!

Priyank

Hi @Lisa Forson‌! I'm about 3 years in to setting up our Marketo instance and CRM (NetSuite) integration from scratch and I still read through the comments on posts like yours because there's always something new to learn from the Community. I wish I had asked for advice from other Marketo users when I first started because everything mentioned in the comments to your post are things I wish I had done from the get-go.

My implementation was a rushed due to a 3 month deadline I had to switch from Pardot to Marketo. In that time I had to learn how Marketo worked, figure out how to connect Marketo to our NetSuite CRM via Vertify, re-create everything in Marketo that previously existed in Pardot (web forms, autoresponders, email campaigns, etc) and add additional forms for two more of our brands. 

I don't know if my experience was unique but if I were to do it all again, I would have told my managers that 3 months is not enough time to do everything they had asked of me and expect it to be quality work. In the end it all got done, but I'm still going back and making "fixes" to the things that were rushed and not thought through. So, my advice is to make sure you take the time to learn the basics of Marketo and set your instance up correctly now so you don't have to go back and redo everything later. I would also recommend that you find someone - either a consultant that specializes in Marketo, or someone at your company who has experience using Marketo - that you can learn from or go to with questions as you're setting things up. The Community is also a great resource, which it looks like you've already discovered, and so are MUG groups!

PS - The Marketo Jumpstart and Marketo Success emails that @Meghana Rao‌ linked to above were not available when I started using Marketo, but I've received several of those emails and they are very helpful!