Marketo experts share tips for successful MAP implementations

Implementing a marketing automation platform (MAP) like Adobe Marketo Engage requires a clear vision by the organization and alignment among its teams. Here are some key areas where a MAP implementation can be made or broken.

Make sure marketing and sales teams are connected

The most crucial part of implementing a MAP is ensuring alignment across all the stakeholders in the business who will use the new technology. It’s essential to connect sales and marketing because the MAP shares many functions across these teams.

“It helps our customers to attract new potential buyers, engage them and keep them engaged throughout the buying process, connect into the sales organization and help them to prioritize that demand for sales in the form of leads, accounts and intelligence, based on how they’re interacting with marketing — and then be able to measure the impact of marketing,” said Brian Glover, senior director of product marketing at Adobe. “[This helps] make sense of the pipeline [marketing] is driving and the revenue it’s driving, and connect that back to marketing channels, content and touchpoints so you know programs to feed and those to back off of.”

The key to successful implementation and adoption is thinking first about all the processes the new technology will cover and who, in those specific use cases, will be using the platform.

“If you think about marketing automation and the workflow, who else needs to be involved?” asked Sunil Menon, senior director of product marketing at Adobe. “If it touches the ecommerce team, for instance, and they’re involved in what the experience needs to be and what content needs to be sent to your customers, that requires a level of coordination between [ecommerce, experience and marketing] teams.”

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Project plan and kickoff

Bring all of the stakeholders together by establishing a project plan and having a proper kickoff.

“The first step is having a project plan,” said Amanda Giacobassi, senior director, marketing operations solutions at MERGE and contributor to MarTech. “Identify every milestone (or workstream) required to deliver your project. Think about dependencies between them and what steps are needed to get started on each workstream. This will allow you to start ordering the components of your project. List all risks that you can think of. It’s better to have shared awareness of them, even if they’re unlikely.”

Giacobassi added, “If you have a hard deadline or target completion date, work backward from the end date. I recommend 1.5 times or two times the duration you expect for each component of your implementation. There are usually unexpected delays or challenges in any large project, and you’ll be in better shape if you build in time for unexpected needs.”

Once this plan is in motion, Giacobassi recommends an all-hands-on-deck meeting at least weekly, with everybody sharing updates on progress and blockers. Additionally, these updates can be shared over email or Slack. It’s better to “over-communicate” than to have stakeholders miss out on specific project updates.

“Kickoffs are necessary to establish roles and responsibilities, scope of work, timeline considerations, and to initiate working groups,” said Giacobassi. “Kickoffs should include the key business sponsor of the project, the project manager, project leads for each workstream in the project, and any other key members required to deliver the work.”

Have your data in order ahead of implementation

“If you want to be able to have a precise targeted approach with your marketing, you need to have all the underlying data with your customer,” said Glover, adding that marketing needs the data specific to marketing purposes. In industries like healthcare and financial services, regulations prohibit certain uses of and access to data. What’s most important is that marketing has data relevant to reach the right customers in their campaigns.

“Bringing together the customer data and having the flexibility to bring in other data that’s important for segmentation, targeting and personalization, would be number one,” said Glover.

Having the data connected will help marketing and sales once the implementation is done. Both teams will better understand the full customer journey and marketing’s impact on business outcomes.

“Once [a customer] is a sales opportunity, I don’t want to send them marketing emails, unless it gets to a certain opportunity status,” said Glover. “Also, that data coming back is what feeds into the attribution report funnels.”

The marketing automation program driven by Marketo Engage will depend on the customer data sitting in the organization’s CRM. In addition to that, businesses should also think about other valuable data specific to their industry that will inform their marketing and help build segments.

“Whichever industry the Marketo customer is in, typically they have data related to their offerings that they want to bring in so they can do that segmentation and personalization,” Glover explained.

“Beyond the deep connectivity to the CRM, Marketo Engage has other connectors and deep connectivity with lots of other sources of data that will not only help make decisions with the automation but also enrich the view of the contact or customer,” said Menon.

Establish a roadmap for marketing technology

Marketers are familiar with hearing about a vendor’s roadmap of new and available solutions. Businesses should also have their own roadmap of what technology they’re using and what functions they expect to launch. And of course, these two roadmaps — for the business and the vendor — need to be aligned.

“We do have a digital marketing maturity model that we do — an assessment of customers and where they are in that journey so we can not only recommend the right solution for what they need today but what is their roadmap,” said Glover.

“One of the things that can go wrong is having a successful implementation and then finding that your next step or vision of where you’re going isn’t aligned with your vendor’s offerings,” he said.

After the official kickoff, businesses should have the first use cases for the new technology mapped out. These use cases should be tied to clearly defined results so that leadership can see the impact of the MAP. For instance, if one use case is for acquiring new customers, everybody should agree on the metric that proves the success for the new platform, such as qualified sales leads.

“Implementations are never ‘set-it-and-forget-it,’” said Giacobassi. “Think about marketing technologies as solutions that go through release cycles. Your teams should have a development roadmap of how you would like to use the tool.”

She added: “Your implementation might be a MVP (minimally viable product), with future functionality planned in the coming quarters. It is appropriate to right-size your implementation to the available time you have for completing the work. System administrators should be forward-thinking in how they would like to use these tools now versus in the coming months and years. A three-to-five-year roadmap is appropriate for all major martech investments.”