Planning For Marketo
In Part One of ‘Planning For Marketo: The Discovery Process’, we posed three sets of hard-hitting questions to ask of your organization in order to plan for resource expenditure to hit the ground running with your new Adobe Marketo instance.
Whether you’re a member of Marketing, Sales, or IT, planning ahead for a new Marketo implementation begins by putting together the minds of all three teams. Typically, it can take months between the time of purchasing Marketo and performing all the necessary steps to prepare for it, all while using a variety of enterprise resources.
So, here are three more critical sets of discovery questions regarding preparation for your Marketo configuration.
Are you familiar with your own high-level enterprise data infrastructure?
Let’s be frank, understanding enterprise data infrastructure is always complex, no matter your role.
Knowing how it all comes together to serve a marketing automation platform, most times, is half of the battle. Planning to address this aspect of data challenges brings about collaboration to diagnose what is apples-to-apples, data-wise, and what is not.
Understanding what data is coming from where will allow you to plan for building webhooks, creating custom fields or custom objects, and testing if an unconventional record key identifier is needed. The more that you take time to configure your data correctly, the more powerful your instance will be.
Do you anticipate your Marketo instance needing to address common data privacy concerns?
Data privacy is especially important if sensitive information should be included, or more importantly, excluded from your new instance. Are any of the following are important to your data?
- Database encryption
- Extended data retention
- Encrypted authentication
- Financial transaction
- HIPAA compliance
One caveat is that Marketo is able to manage some encryption types but not others, meaning that an external database integration may be necessary. Keeping highly sensitive information like financials and health data separate from marketing data can be a scenario to plan for. Will there be concerns about preserving your data for seven years? Will you need to protect personally identifiable information?
If these apply to your organization, plan on taking the steps to protect your customers, leads, or any other types of sensitive data that you should take responsibility for.
Does your organization have experienced Marketo users? If so, how skilled are they?
Many times, organizations can plan for the actual implementation of Marketo, but not account for the level at which their users can apply the technology. The mastery of Marketo can take many years to accomplish. Some find it easier to build those skills within their ranks. Others choose to hire those with Adobe Marketo Expert Certifications.
Either way, it takes many weeks to fully learn how to use Marketo, and hundreds more to become an expert. Even the best configured Marketo instances are only as strong as their user level. Think about conducting training sessions for your user base in congruency with implementing your instance, as to hit the ground running when IP warming concludes.
With all these questions in mind, you and your organization will be able to begin to map out what tasks will need resources, which ones won’t, and how to plan out your path.
Best of luck in hitting the ground running with your new Marketo instance. If your organization needs support with any of the processes detailed above, or something much more complicated, reach out to the Perficient team.
In case you missed Part 1 of ‘Planning For Marketo: The Discovery Process’, click here.
